> Accessing various types of IP content is not a human right.
DRM interferes with various legal usage of content (fair use), especially because of anti circumvention provisions which are derivatives of DRM (like DMCA 1201). Plus DRM is always a violation of privacy and security. You need to analyze it deeper, beyond PR labels put on it by the DRM proponents.
There is no acceptable reason for DRM proponents to institute a police state approach to "protect their IP".
> I find the arguments that somehow DRM is detrimental to the production and distribution of high quality content to be obtuse.
I fully agree with that. High quality products can be and are produced and sold successfully without any DRM. And on the contrary, DRM always degrades the quality of any product because it cripples its usability.
> I am familiar with: software for audio production. Many of the best creators of such software have moved to a very annoying and powerful form of DRM: the use of a physical dongle. Most of them say that without this, they could not be in business, as the pirating of such software is rampant. The DRM doesn't stop it, it merely throws enough roadblocks in the to get a significant percentage of users to pay who otherwise wouldn't.
The pirating of such software is rampant despite any DRM they put in it (as you said yourself it doesn't stop it, and once DRM is broken - that's it, piracy ensues). So they can stop wasting their time and resources on putting that DRM there, and instead of crippling the product for paying customers reallocate efforts to making their product more attractive for them.
I'm simply discussing this because I know the market, but it's a clear case of developers using DRM to minimize piracy, not to control the distribution channel.
The product is attractive to them already, they are illegally downloading it for use already. By making it more attractive do you mean lower their price to compete with piracy? Hard to stay in business when you compete with illegal free copies of your software.
In this sense, nothing is a "human right" per se, not even not being murdered.
Human rights are what we define them to be.
Now you might change your argument to "it's not a serious enough right".
But in that case, I'd argue that the issue of open access to cultural artifacts, even if it's Ben Stiller and not Plato or the Principia Mathematica, is quite serious matter.
if Plato were DRM-ed, the license servers would probably be not available today, and thus the Plato itself. In that regard DRM to today's cultural artifacts is like Alexandria library fire to the artifacts of ancients.
there is significant difference - knowing the format (or even just basic principles of the format like in case of compression) one can restore the content ( http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/ ), while in DRM case knowing format isn't enough. Another illustration - one can apply some analysis and probably read lost ancient language texts while it is fundamentally different from reading cyphertext even in known language. I.e. DRM is intentionally and explicitly converts "information" into highest entropy content, i.e. "erases" the "information". Basically what flame does to human artifacts.
Plus, there are formats that would be able to be read a trillion years for now. Plain utf-8 or ascii text for one.
I obviously fail to grasp why DRM is so bad, or its importance. I just can't fathom why everyone thinks it's so sinister. I mean, don't get me wrong, it coukd be annoying as fuck, but just don't visit that website? I don't do things that make me unhappy.
Also, the point some people are making about distribution channels, I would like to point out that we, people who frequent HN, are sometimes too idealistic, which is good, but can be a fallacy sometimes (at least I belive so).
Imagine you're Paramount, you spent years working on a movie, and you want the product of your hard labour (and that of thousands of your employees, probably) to be distributed the way you want and how you want it. I think that's fair. Yes, there's still gonna be piracy (and I thank God for that), but DRM gives them that option to protect themselves against it, if only at least legally. If someone is so horrendously against DRM, then they don't have to watch your movie? I find the whole affair as simple as that.
And like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_Am...
But that's the result, not the reason why it's sinister. It's sinister because it shifts from presumption of innocence to police state method of "all guilty by default". Like the Sony exec quoted in the first link above expressed it:
>>> The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source - we will block it at your cable company. We will block it at your phone company. We will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC... These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake.
And in practice it's always bad because it's not a theoretical "protection of content", but something actual running in your private digital space (your computer, your OS, your program), with the sole purpose of not trusting you and doing whatever (you usually have no clue what - DRM is a black box). Something not trusting you should be not trusted in return - i.e. always treated as potential malware.
I find the hysterical arguments against DRM hard to grasp. Accessing various types of IP content is not a human right. There is an abundance of content available in the US which is not DRM'd. It just happens to usually of low quality.
FWIW, the contribution of the artist is only a small cost of the "product" that we consume. There are many other people who work on the teams that create content, and without them it won't reach a mass market (publishers, finance, legal, marketing, logistics).
I find the arguments that somehow DRM is detrimental to the production and distribution of high quality content to be obtuse.
To take another example I am familiar with: software for audio production. Many of the best creators of such software have moved to a very annoying and powerful form of DRM: the use of a physical dongle. Most of them say that without this, they could not be in business, as the pirating of such software is rampant. The DRM doesn't stop it, it merely throws enough roadblocks in the to get a significant percentage of users to pay who otherwise wouldn't.