I’ve got a new article up about the recording industry’s short-sighted strategy to online music downloads. I point out that digital rights management technologies don’t prevent piracy, but they do treat their customers like criminals and give people like Steve Jobs control over their customers.
I think it would be great if it became conventional wisdom that DRM technology is the perpetual motion machine of the 21st century. DRM is fundamentally contrary to the way computers work, because there’s no such thing as an uncopyable bit. You can write software to obfuscate your data, thus making copying more cumbersome, but that just makes cracking it more time-consuming, not fundamentally more difficult. Every few years, technology companies promise a new generation of copy-protection that will actually work. And each generation, they fail miserably.
The sooner the folks at the RIAA and MPAA realize that, the sooner they’ll stop hassling their paying consumers with arbitrary and pointless restrictions that penalize their customers while doing nothing to stop pirates.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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