Not to mention it won’t work. If they read it nothing is stopping them from simply telling someone else, drm or not. This technology will not prevent anyone from simply handing over their phone - and your messages - to someone else.
It's entirely reasonable to create a system designed to allow people to share things once, and indicate to others that they don't want it spread any further. It's reasonable to design software which attempts to honor such requests by introducing friction, making it 95% effective despite knowing that 5% of people will be able/willing to work around it.
Most people are "path of least resistance" and are too lazy to work around something like this, which is exactly the point. Pretty much every person using such a system is aware that the recipient could just take a picture of the phone with a camera.
Perfect is the enemy of the good.
Is it reasonable that someone give you a gift and you cannot sell it or give it to anyone else?
It's completely reasonable for someone to give you a letter or photo of a personal nature and ask you not to share it (or simply expect you to understand that it's not to be shared). In the physical realm, the honor system comes into effect. In the digital realm, there's nothing wrong with adding an imperfect layer of accountability/protection to greatly reduce the chance that it becomes shared.
The same expectations and honor system you described can be upheld in the “digital realm”. The only difference is that people have the arrogance to try to force things upon “digital” users because they can.
And also, I never said the gift was physical in nature.
I think it also comes down to wanting to own the "distribution" chain.
Example scenario (made up, so might have flawed reasoning): If I have an official following on Telegram where I post my art, and there's a fan/knock-off Twitter account reposting my art without my permission. I don't have many ways of stopping them. I could send a DMCA notice, but that's slow and doesn't prevent someone from reopening their knock-off distribution channels. DRM creates friction for most people that they won't even bother thinking about setting up a sidestepping distribution channel that fragments my audience.
Also to add (edit): being perfect isn't the point. I mean, most habits or ways we do things _every day_ aren't even close to optimal; much less perfect. If we threw out everything that's not perfect, we'd be left with nothing.
Ultimately if you feel like you’re being wronged DMCA should be used and not a programmatic approach simply because a program has no notion of who was right to begin with.
So in your example you say “my art”, but what if it were not? Should you not be able to post “your art?”
I believe people should handle people issues and computers handle, well, the other stuff.
Grandma gifts you a photo of her and her partner. Do you believe that you shouldn’t be able to show your own family their ancestors picture?
It’s obviously not reasonable. She could explicitly ask, but ultimately the choice is yours.
Which is a contrived example that conveniently sidesteps the two most relevant factors: the personal/intimate nature of the communication and the consequences of sharing it against the person’s will during a timeframe in which it would have an effect on the person's life.
Yeah, and because I am a good friend, I will not share those photos with anyone, especially if they ask me not to. :)
And people are terrible friends and will take the time/effort to bypass any measures necessary to share the photo.
The feature is designed to address the "somewhat bad" case, not to be perfect.
Exactly. They will pretty much bypass this one as well.
Reducing the chance of something that you didn't want shared from being shared by a factor of X% is better than nothing. Try to step out of black-and-white thinking for a minute. Just because something is not perfect doesn't mean it's useless.
Yes, your example of trying to prevent someone moderately bad from sharing something personal to you which you don't want shared is reasonable. The trouble is, you can use the same mechanism for much less reasonable and more nefarious, corporate things.
So the end result is that we're not to have moderately nice things, lest they be used as a weapon against user freedom by a mega-corporation.
If I say "Alice told me this", there is no proof that it actually happened; Alice can deny it. If I forward the message or show you a screenshot, then the case that the communication happened is significantly stronger. (Of course screenshots can be doctored, but that's another problem)
That's mostly what this is about - reducing the chances for accidental or willful disclosure to third parties.
How is it another problem? If the method purports to be able to strengthen claims of veracity, but immediately after you demonstrate it to be vulnerable to spoofing, then it offered nothing in the first place. It's exactly the same problem.
And it is about sharing - that’s how communication works, no?
While I an certain the current state of affairs of having DRM and personal privacy is unstable in the face of even the tech we had 10 years ago, we still have a strong personal need for control over our information and our works.
The EU, where I live, absolutely does have legal protections for personal privacy and personal information collection, hence GDPR and all the cookie popups[0].
And even if the law was silent, that wouldn’t itself be evidence of a lack of need, as people died from lack of workplace health and safety regulations well before there were laws about that.
And while IP assignments are an interesting suggestion to raise, I counter that I have also seen a forum of users who didn’t read the T&C and suddenly realised $corporation had the eternal right to reproduce whatever they wrote on that forum (kinda necessary but clearly non-obvious to most normal people), which demonstrates that people definitely feel strongly attached to even really dumb and low-value works if they are those works are their own.
[0] that they adhere to the relevant law about as well as all the YouTube videos saying “no copyright intended” adhere to IP laws is an enforcement problem, not a lack of rights
No, DRM is used to extend control to media players and manufacturers via licensing. The rest are just excuses.