Copy protection doesn't protect the customer, nor does digital rights management help manage their rights. They are not benefits for the customer, only negatives.

When my bank charges me a fee, they call it a fee, not a bonus, though it's the latter from their point of view.

Well... they call it overdraft protection, which is when they loan you money for a fee to cover a purchase that exceeds your balance.

In practice, instead of getting "Declined" and using a credit card instead, you end up paying $35 in order to borrow $1.

It does protect the customer though, at the very least it means their money was well spent and other people can't violate that social contract by taking what they want for free.

Personally, I don't feel any social contract is violated if someone else gets for free music that I paid money for.

Furthermore, it seems neither do many of the artists - most of them make their music available for free through e.g. YouTube.

And even if such a social contract existed, I suspect I would feel more harmed by the inability to format-shift the music I bought, than by someone else listening to the music without paying.

It is rare for two passengers on an airplane to pay the same rate even for the same seat and service class. Does this violate any social contract in your opinion? Obviously, the money was not wall spent by one of them.

Well no it doesn't, but that's generally because they had rewards with the airline or bought it in a deal somewhere. Both are legal ways to reduce the money you pay for things. As is streaming music these days. And I should emphasize I'm not against being able to crack DRM and I think it would be really bad to make uncrackable DRM. In my opinion DRM is not supposed to stop the people who would crack it anyways, it's the people who would try it just for the hell of it if it were easy. It's like why you put a lock on your house: it's not because it makes it impenetrable to burglars, it's because it keeps out 99% of the assholes who would just walk in if there was no door.

I still fail to see how I am better served because someone else cannot copy some music without a rights holder permission.

> Copy protection protects CDs from being copied

For 99.999% of the users, it restricts the user from copying the CD. And actually, the CD itself doesn't really care if it's copied, so the cd itself is not "protected" in any way. It provides some minimal protection to the rights owner from unauthorized copies (which are usually, but not necessarily illegal - c.f fair use).

Now, which terminology is more appropriate - that which describes the situation for essentially everyone involved (e.g. a billion people) or the rights holder (essentially less than 10 "people" if you count corporations as people)?

> Digital rights management manages the rights of the IP owner. These are just as valid.

Again, they are valid from the narrow point of view of 0.001% of the population, but INVALID and IRRELEVANT from the point of view of the rest.

"Copy Restriction" and "Digital Restriction Management" are factual and actually neutral. It is what these systems do. Whether this is good or bad depends on your point of view.

Similarly, it wasn't mentioned here, but stallman likes to refer to "Intellectual Property" as "Imaginary Property", which is also factual. I have yet to adopt this one, but I will only really accept "Intellectual Property" as property when it is taxed like property.

I have mixed feelings about RMS's use of language, but I think you exactly illustrate beagle3's point. Perhaps they are just as valid, but if the contrasting term is just as valid and more in tune with your views, then you might object to the dominant term.

> Copy protection protects CDs from being copied.

The contention is of course with the word "protection." It implies that copying is a bad thing and that preventing copying is protection. It's a loaded word, even if in general use. Replacing with "restriction" challenges this this notion with a word loaded in the opposite direction.

> Digital rights management manages the rights of the IP owner.

The assumption here is that the restrictions on use are in fact "rights of the IP owner." There is no a priori reason that there should be. In fact IP rights are a part of law and public policy. That doesn't necessarily mean they should be; obviously Stallman and beagle3 disagree.

It's not that there's a problem with the real terms, it's that stallman's alternative terms better highlight the actual nature of the things he describes. Those phrases are quick substitutions with the potential to make someone think more about the topic. Simply getting people to think about a topic is important for a social movement.

If someone in 1984 had started coining alternative terms the way stallman does, the amount of thoughtcrimes would skyrocket.

In a recent past, what is now commonly referred to as "ip" or "intellectual property" used to be described more accurately as intellectual rights.

Sorry, could not resist.