This puts me in mind of the vast gulf between the dogmatic anti-DRM crowd like Cory Doctorow and the way life is in the real world. I don’t like DRM much myself and wouldn’t lose any sleep if it went away, but it’s largely been implemented in fashions that don’t get in the way of the vast majority of ordinary consumers…and even when it does, they’re more likely to accept it as “just the way it is” than realize it should be different.
So it’s really hard to get anyone other than tech geeks excited over it…and even many of those tech geeks simply shrug and download a crack (or buy a region-free DVD player) and then get on with their lives rather than getting their mad on.
As long as that remains the state of affairs, it’s going to be hard for even the most dogmatic of anti-DRM crusaders to make a difference. They’ll continue to be lone voices crying in the wilderness.
I suspect that even if they were right, this sort of behavior on their part would in fact lead the “ordinary consumer” to shrug their shoulders and conclude that maybe whatever DRM is, there must be a good reason for it after all.
But of course not all the anti-DRM crew behave like crazy people and since anti-DRM is only one part of the overall EFF agenda, its kind of more the shame that this kind of pseudo-science report here does not actually help.
Ain’t that the truth. The more you think about it, the more clever the DRM lobby seems. They had the camel poke its nose into the tent, then take up residence altogether without anybody even noticing. I’ve got to give them credit: buying the DMCA, and then implementing DRM in such a way that it impinged on relatively few people’s daily lives, was a really clever tactic, and has by and large rendered anti-DRM maneuvering effectively impotent. It’s hard even to get people to understand what they’re so upset about without acting out, and if they act out it makes them look silly. It remains to be seen if that will ever change.
Even though the territory issues have gotten in my way in the past, its honestly such a minor inconvenience in the overall scale of things, plus I can understand the underlying reasoning as not being some Krazy Kapitalist Konspiracy, in the end, even I “know” DRM isn’t a “good thing” its hard to get worked up about, even considering the Chicken Little whatif scenarios about DRM’d toasters requiring proprietary bread that Doctorow is so fond of.
The sad reality is most people are probably happy to use their things in whatever way the people who sold them to them are prepared to allow. If that means it’s far more expensive than it should be or that they have to by some extra thing to do stuff that their device can in fact do already but the manufacturer has just switched that feature off - well, they don’t know any different and therefore don’t care.
As for Chicken Little scenarios:
This has of course also been covered here on BB but in deference to your views on Cory I thought I’d go with wired.com instead.
And:
Not as far as I can see DRM’d (and seems to have failed miserably as it deserved to) but the intent is there. Our juice packs only!
Same for coffee makers, printers, etc. although those are of course DRM’d.
Why would you assume that a manufacturer wouldn’t try and tie you in to their product if they have the technical ability to do so and are allowed to do it?
If you had the choice to buy a machine that did that and one that didn’t but was otherwise the same, which would you choose?
I dont assume that at all. I’m an avid user of Apple products and they have plenty of use cases where Apple Product A works best with other Apple products and poorly with other vendor products. I don’t expect the proprietary bits of my Casio watches will be repairable with non-Casio parts. Etc etc etc.
Honestly its never that simple. Well, maybe for things like guitar or bass strings but for more complex stuff I also consider my past experience with the manufacturers in question, ability to get service if needed and so on.
This is an interesting line of conversation but this thread closes in 5 hrs and shabbat starts in 10 minutes here so I’m going offline for 25hrs as of this reply.
