But since the lights went out I’ve never been the same

[venta]

Yesterday I had one of those moments where I realise I have a very specific opinion on something - but no real justification for it, and no clear idea where I got it from.

So, you, my dear self-selecting sample of guinea pigs, have the opportunity to prove me right. Or wrong. But I'm not going to tell you which is which. I'd hate to bias my otherwise-scientific survey.

I'm asking here about portable mp3 players (or mp3-a-likes). If you use your computer to play mp3s at you at home, or have some form of mp3 monster in the car, that's not what I meant.

[Poll #442057]

Comments

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure why you think that your "principles of DRM" are principles of DRM

Because of what DRM is - namely a rights description language coupled with semantics for media software to enforce the restrictions expressed using the language, and some kind of encryption to obfuscate the content so that non-compliant software has to work its ass off to get a look-in. I'm fairly confident that's the industry-standard definition.

Displaying the license of a piece of software as a click-through thing was standard practice before DRM

However, it wasn't standard practice for movie or audio clips, and the license was not encoded using a semantic markup which user agents could understand and implement - it is solely up to the user to work out for himself whether or not he is abiding by the terms of the license, which is ridiculous when you consider that most such licenses are (a) very wordy and (b) almost identical.

It is a principle of DRM because the licensing restrictions are precisely the information conveyed by the rights language. Whether a particular agent actually displays them is of course a slightly different matter.

Having terms and conditions on mp3 download sites still happens

Those TaC statements aren't associated with the content, they're associated with the site. This means that they don't travel with the content, an issue which has become a serious drawback in the last few years now that file sharing is a significant reality. DRM typically associates the rights (or means of acquiring them) with the content in some kind of container.

There are various ways of providing metadata with content (such as a URL field in an mp3 or Ogg Vorbis file)

That doesn't provide a very rich rights-description markup, and there are 0 media players which will check the specified URL and, if it indicates that the content may not be played without permission, ask the user whether they wish to buy that permission. There is of course the "copyright" bit in mp3, which again is not a terribly rich language, which is generally ignored, and which if it wasn't trivially ignorable would in fact be DRM (of a very rudimentary kind).

There are projects like Creative Commons to encourage common types of fair use without DRM.

Creative Commons really isn't very useful for people who want to make money by selling content, because the most restrictive license it offers still allows licensees to redistribute the entire thing with no royalty payments. If you believe that people should not be permitted to make money by charging royalties for the use of IP, then that's a perfectly respectable belief to hold, but to assert that a solution based on that belief can solve current IP issues is very optimistic indeed.

Ultimately, CC is not about "fair use" in the current legal definition of the term, it defines a new set of things and asserts axiomatically that these are the things which CC will consider to be fair. It then does so.

DRM does a similar thing, where the content provider defines what is fair use, and permits that through granted rights. The allowed rights are typically more restrictive than the current legal definition of "fair use", which is why current use of DRM is more evil than CC, but that is not an essential property of a rights-restricted object. The principle is that the content provider gets to say what they are prepared to allow, and the user must abide by that in order to stay within the system. As you point out, this principle is also present in CC, so it is not unique to DRM, but it certainly is one of the primary motivations of DRM. What would be nice would be a rights language in which well-known kinds of fair use were easily expressed and protected. This is a function of who it is that gets to defined the language, provider or consumer.