On Wed, 27 Aug 2003 05:53:51 -0500, in <alt.privacy.spyware>, "Bob"
<rpl-erroroneous@goldengate.net> wrote:
>
[snip]
>
> What is " digital rights management " ?
>

Pick whichever cliché strikes your fancy:

"Pandora's Box"
"A really HUGE can of worms"
"The Copy-Protection Wars, Part Deux"

It's a big, complicated issue, far too much so to cover adequately in a
newsgroup post, or even a series of such posts. And beyond that, it is only
tangetally on-topic for this newsgroup. Having said all that, I'll now
attempt a "thumbnail sketch"...

DRM is the currently fashionable broad term denoting any/all of several
various attempts by software vendors (which in this context includes such
entites as the MPAA and RIAA) to micro-manage the use of their products
*after* they have been purchased and put into service by the end-users.

The putative reason for these schemes is to protect their copyrights; and to
the extent that any given DRM scheme does *only* that, it is (theoretically
at least) acceptable -- tho' the whole "Mother, may I?" aspect is likely to
remain quite distasteful. But this assumes "perfect" implementations which
consider and make allowance for *every* possible scenario *and* do not in
any way trample the end-users' rights -- and to date, no such "perfect"
implementation has been devised. Yet, some vendors, in their short-sighted
greed, have failed to absorb the lessons of history (cf., floppy-disk
"copy-protection" schemes, particularly as applied to/by "Lotus 1-2-3" back
in the early '80s, which became a well-publicized "lightning rod" for this
issue -- and was the PR debacle which finally made it clear to ALL software
vendors of the era that such schemes were inherently anti-customer and
therefore a VERY bad idea) and are once again attemptiong to foist these
ill-conceived "features" off on the marketplace.

For more information on one of the better-publicized *recent* DRM disasters,
see:

<http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,863408,00.asp>

Pay particular attention to the section entitled "Sector 33 Naughtiness".

--

Jay T. Blocksom
--------------------------------
Appropriate Technology, Inc.
usenet01[at]appropriate-tech.net


"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759.

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