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Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Yes... it's doublespeak. Used to obscure the meaning of your words.
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No, it was intended to show that the aims are contradictory.
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Let's be a bit clearer: DRM is designed to allow certain kinds of use of content, while restricting others. In the case of e-books, DRM is most often used to tie the content to a specific device, to prevent copying and dissemination of bootleg copies to other devices.
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I'm well aware of what DRM is meant to do, I'm just saying it doesn't work.
The base problem with DRM is that it's either ineffective since having access to the content also means being able to break the DRM, or it's massively intrusive by requiring a complete, end-to-end secure connection on
your computer controlled by
many other people (all of the content owners).
Even the latter is not enough, people will be able to break or bypass it, if by no other means than the analogue hole. Check out
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bkrpr/3403655734/ (originally from
http://bkrpr.org/blog/?p=46). Yes, that's a camera being used to photograph an ebook on a bookreader in a manner suitable for OCR. Can you imagine a DRM system that could stop that? Or that maybe it'll become illegal to bring a camera into the presence of a media viewer?
Even though it may be difficult, it only has to be broken once by someone with the right skills or obsession and then it can be placed on the darknet and used by people without the technical skills to break it themselves.
Bear in mind I have no objection to artists being paid, indeed one of my earlier posts was asking you what you thought about a fixed fee for access to your works. I'm simply stating that naive technical restrictions are not the solution and legal ones are even worse.