If you really want to undermine DRM in an honest and ethical manner, you should leave those DRM'd properties to their owners and support non-DRM media.
How many of you listen to itunes media and are raging about this...
If you really want to undermine DRM in an honest and ethical manner, you should leave those DRM'd properties to their owners and support non-DRM media.
How many of you listen to itunes media and are raging about this...
I seem to remember reports that iTunes sales increased quite a bit as they removed the DRM, indicating that removing DRM does indeed make the most business sense, not just the most moral sense or whatever. The best source I've been able to come up with quickly is this: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1022890/emi-drm-fre...
Copyright is something that is granted to someone by society for a purpose. Encumbering a creation with DRM defeats that purpose.
Sure, anyone has the "right and freedom" to add DRM to anything. But in that case anyone should also have the right and freedom to break the DRM and redistribute the content.
We do this with physical goods through laws around theft, and police to enforce those laws. Information goods however, are non-rival, thus aren't subject to theft, just copying. So, generally, society doesn't enforce "excludability breaking" with information as stringently as we would with a rival good. Sometimes it does go completely, and inexcusably overboard: see Aaron Swartz.
We haven't had a lot of time to think through what we really want as a society here. Information economics concepts like transparency, excludability and rivalry are still very new to people. The nature of information goods is not a market economy, it's a gift exchange economy. Yet we've built 300 years of progress on a market economy. So we're evolved to a hybrid of market-gift economies in the information sector, but no one really knows where it will end up in the long run.
Amusingly, the most free country on breaking and redistributing digital content is China. I remember the old saw that Adobe Photoshop used to cost $0 in China, but $300 for the manuals. Almost every other country frowns upon such behaviour and tries in some way to make it illegal.