Another major company has joined Microsoft in discovering that it doesn't really want to keep running servers for a DRM format which has outlived its usefulness. Yahoo! is closing its music store, so it's turning the DRM servers off, leaving customers who want to move their music around in the lurch.
Microsoft quickly changed its mind after a backlash; Yahoo! have decided to refund its customers instead. Good for them, and hopefully they will learn the lesson that DRM schemes are broken by design. They do absolutely nothing but stop people from using the product.
These two companies have had to backtrack, but what of other, smaller companies? What happens when you don't even realize the servers have gone until far too late? I have a computer at home that is ten years old; it's still working fine. If I had bought music from a company ten years ago and it stopped providing service, I might not find out until I replace the computer!
What's the real problem? The DMCA prevents people from distributing the tools to fix such outages. Most such schemes are cracked quickly, because you can't distribute the players without giving people ways to break the encryption. Even putting it in your own sealed hardware doesn't help against determined customers, as Microsoft have found out. So the only thing that stops customers fixing it themselves is the law.
If we are to keep this DMCA, it needs to be rebalanced towards consumers: any time a copyright protection scheme fails to be maintained with at least the accessibility it had when selling the original materials, it should become legal to make and distribute software to bridge that gap. Turn your servers off, and full cracking software becomes instantly legal. Run them unreliably (at your end), and software that makes the materials accessible for at least the length of the outage becomes legal. No way to make them available without completely unprotecting them? Well, that's the limitation of the technology you chose.
The point of copyright is to increase the amount of material that is available for people to buy and use. DRM breaks that, and does it in long-term and ridiculous ways. I hope that the companies that make it eventually get the consumer message.
In the meantime, yet another reason to vote with your wallet.
Friday, August 01, 2008
Sacrilege!
So PZ has had his fun with a wafer, and hopefully everyone's over it by now. Including me. Having said before that I hoped he would make people think, I was mostly disappointed by the actual stunt. Tossing it in the bin with a nail through it? So what?
Adding a page of "The God Delusion" to the pile was a nice touch, though. I imagine someone out there has made the argument that this shows he thinks of "The God Delusion" as a sacred text and Richard Dawkins as a prophet; to that person I say "I am laughing at you".
I think the much more interesting piece of the post was the discussion of the history of cracker desecration. I did not realize that this had been an actual charge levelled at Jews in the past - and that people had been exiled or even killed for it! That's a disgrace, and it shows just how far civilization has come since then. Although I must say that it doesn't lower my opinion of the Catholic Church's history at all, which speaks volumes for my current view of it.
The odd thing is that despite my low opinion of Catholicism as an institution; and despite thinking that the institution's faults are well-grounded in Christianity's history and sacred texts... I still think that a good Christian should be as horrified as I am by this, and on purely theological grounds, rather than mere common humanity.
The Christianity that I was raised on is a non-violent religion, one that turns the other cheek, and seeks to persuade by example and moral suasion rather than by force. The Christians themselves may fight to defend themselves and their country, but this is seen as a necessary evil to preserve life, not a positive virtue (as distinct from courage in the fight itself).
I have long thought that the punishment for sacrilege and blasphemy should be reserved to God himself; he is the one offended, and if He doesn't see fit to send lightning bolts or a rain of frogs, who am I to go further? Anyone attempting to impose their own punishment should be seen as faithless and a usurper.
So if PZ is struck by lightning in the next little while, you can draw your own conclusions. Or, contrariwise, if he's not.
Adding a page of "The God Delusion" to the pile was a nice touch, though. I imagine someone out there has made the argument that this shows he thinks of "The God Delusion" as a sacred text and Richard Dawkins as a prophet; to that person I say "I am laughing at you".
I think the much more interesting piece of the post was the discussion of the history of cracker desecration. I did not realize that this had been an actual charge levelled at Jews in the past - and that people had been exiled or even killed for it! That's a disgrace, and it shows just how far civilization has come since then. Although I must say that it doesn't lower my opinion of the Catholic Church's history at all, which speaks volumes for my current view of it.
The odd thing is that despite my low opinion of Catholicism as an institution; and despite thinking that the institution's faults are well-grounded in Christianity's history and sacred texts... I still think that a good Christian should be as horrified as I am by this, and on purely theological grounds, rather than mere common humanity.
The Christianity that I was raised on is a non-violent religion, one that turns the other cheek, and seeks to persuade by example and moral suasion rather than by force. The Christians themselves may fight to defend themselves and their country, but this is seen as a necessary evil to preserve life, not a positive virtue (as distinct from courage in the fight itself).
I have long thought that the punishment for sacrilege and blasphemy should be reserved to God himself; he is the one offended, and if He doesn't see fit to send lightning bolts or a rain of frogs, who am I to go further? Anyone attempting to impose their own punishment should be seen as faithless and a usurper.
So if PZ is struck by lightning in the next little while, you can draw your own conclusions. Or, contrariwise, if he's not.
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