hey all! A good day to y'all!
You know when I read the email subscription, I myself almost flipped off my chair when I read "communism"! hahaha ... what was I thinking ... must be too tired!
I agree with many of the points made. Pirates in some sense, do give free publicity to the bands, or software makers. I mean, I secretly (ok, maybe not so secretly, now that its on a public forum!) believe that DOS and Win95 (and subsequent MS products) became so widespread partly due to piracy. While marketing folks are cracking their head to figure out how to market, sell to and educate consumers to use their new products, pirates dish out the software at a fraction, almost like giving out door-gift freebies at college orientation day! When its free, it seems ppl just try it out! This partly explains how viruses manage to sneak around through social-engineering, but that's a different thread for a different time.
So, yes, piracy has that effect of providing a "free" "service" to the original content maker *and* the official distribution channels. The question is there is no choice here. The original maker and the channels have literally no say in it. Whether they ultimately benefit from it or not, is to a large extent not the question. The question is, you have no say about it. What if someone sneaks up to you and takes a photo of you, and post up your picture on millions of personals sites, with factual information about you. And consequently, you get free publicity and many admirers? Sure, some folks will be balled over and pretty smug about it. But what if you are married and do not need the extra *free* attention. Well, too bad. You didn't get a choice at that.
Assuming we stick with the "Rights" part to DRM and not "Restrictions", we have to consider this. It probably cuts two ways. The rights to use the content by the user, and the rights to the content by the original content maker and/or the official distribution channel. If consumers only wants all the rights of consumer, and no rights to the latter, then its unreasonable. Likewise the reverse.
Along this line, it would be fair to say that current DRM schemes slants towards content makers/distro as it assumes that the user will cheat. This is kinda against the "innocent until proven guilty" thingie. And to be frank, I dislike it as well. However, in all fairness, I think allowing total freedom in copying, swings the balance to the user, leaving the content maker/distro with no say as to whether they want the *free publicity* given by pirates. These to me are two extremes.
I feel that DRM should protect both parties from pirates, whose purpose I believe are less honorable than offering a voice to freedom and providing free publicity. Real pirates are just out to make a quick buck.
Is today's DRM doing that? Not quite. Its restricting consumers from using the content in lawful ways. But I like to separate a certain implementation of DRM which is flawed (today's DRM) vs the idea of DRM itself. Let's not throw the Intellectual Rights baby out the window just because the current DRM nanny is lousy.
