DRM: You have the right to know what you're buying!

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Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/08/05/drm-you-have-the-right-to-kno.html
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Consumers have rights? That’s so retro. Bet you voted Nader too, right?

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(Note to Cory → In the penultimate paragraph of the separate letter:

Today, we published a letter [Deeplinks Blog | Electronic Frontier Foundation] signed by publishers, rightsholders,

the link is malformed and leads only to the deeplinks 404-ish page.)

Perhaps the EFF could make a DRM-contents version of the many Nutrition Facts labels used 'round the world. Call it something like Ownership Facts and list some ingredients analysis: Ownership status (you own the product, you own a license, you lease a license, etc.); Repair Status (you are/are-not allowed to modify the product, must use officially sanctioned repair facilities, etc.); Network Dependency (requires internet or no, performance penalties for not connecting, etc.); Network Security (maybe some 1-5 scales of data privacy and communication security); Dispute Resolution (free to use the courts, or limited to arbitration, or offshored to some distant land making lawsuit impractical, etc.); and the like…

…because it’s hard to catch the eye (and then the mind) of the casual surfer with nothing but another EFF wall of text.

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I would further add that if the DRM infringes on the Doctrine of First Sale (or Patent Exhaustion) , the provider of the good shall be liable as if they wrote a bad check (a Class A felony) and be subjected to fines and “treble damages” up to the value of the good they sold.

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If a company doesn’t label the deliberately disabled features of their product to temper a reasonable buyer’s expectations, they should be liable for fraud.

Silly example: I buy a new computer expecting to be able to use any source of Wi-Fi.

  • If the machine doesn’t support the latest 802.11xx, that’s on me.

  • If it’s been programmed to only connect to “Boingo brand” Wi-Fi hotspots, I can sue.

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When I buy an e-book, I first buy from a site that advertises the book as being DRM-free. If I can’t find that and still want the book, I buy from a site which has DRM that I can break. I don’t buy from sites like Apple that won’t let me remove the DRM.

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Actually, it’s not that the link is malformed, it’s that the EFF seems to have removed or moved the letter. The same link is in an email I got due to my story being quoted in said letter. Putting “cache:” before the URL pulls it up from the Google cache.

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Back when I posted, the “separate letter” link still worked, yielding the letter as a pdf. The link quoted from that letter was, on my phone at least, malformed, adding a trailing “]” to the url. Didn’t throw a 404 per se; a deeplinks page opened saying, in effect, “Huh?”

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