[ale] [OT] rant - decadence in society - DRM

[Ron Frazier]

set rant on -->  set soapbox on -->

This will be an off topic rant.  Tune out now if you'd rather not read 
it.  You have been warned.  Note that everything I say here is general, 
and not directed at any specific person, even if I use pronouns like you 
and we, etc.

Later in the message, I'm going to rant about DRM.  However, first, I 
want to rant about decadence.  You walk into a Target or Walmart or 
Costco or ANY store.  You look over your head, there is a camera 
pointing at you.  You get to the door to walk out, there is a canyon of 
sensors you have to pass through.  You go bowling, there's a policeman 
parked outside and officers roaming around in the building 
continuously.  Heck, you send your kid to a public school, and THEY have 
cameras, policemen, and metal detectors everywhere.  You go buy a pair 
of sneakers.  They have RFID tags built in.  Your wife or relative has a 
baby in the hospital.  They put a bar code on the mother's wrist and the 
baby's wrist so the baby doesn't get stolen!  (I appreciate the 
proactive stance by the way.)  You buy a Nintendo / Sony / Microsoft 
game console for you kid at Christmas.  Someone follows you home from 
the parking lot and robs you in your driveway and takes the unit.  You 
go to the thrift store, find that really neat thing you want, and put it 
in your cart, turn your back for 5 seconds, and someone takes it out of 
your cart and buys it right out from under you.  60% - 70% of students 
surveyed say they cheat on tests.  WHY are all these things happening?  
You might say, because we can.  We have the technology for sensors and 
surveillance.  These are simply crimes of opportunity.

I don't believe that is solely the case.  Caveat, I'm only 45, but I'm 
going to be speculating about events of the past.  I could be entirely 
wrong, but I don't think so.  Now, obviously, you can go back to the 
bible and read about criminals and thieves all the way back 2000 years 
ago.  We've always had policemen, jails, and criminals.  Let's do a 
thought experiment, as Albert Einstein was fond of.  Imagine we're back 
in the 1700's, the early founding stages of our nation, with a twist.  
Imagine we have the culture of yesterday, with the technology of today.  
Compensate in the thought experiment for the difference in population, 
but, imagine they had the internet, they had the electricity, the 
stores, the appliances, the cars, etc.  Do you believe that a citizen in 
New England in the 1700's would go into a Target store and have a camera 
pointing in his face at the checkout?  Do you believe he would go 
bowling and have policemen looking over his shoulder.  Do you believe he 
would be worried about his baby being stolen from the hospital?  Do you 
believe he would be worried about having the game he bought for 
Christmas stolen from him in his driveway?  Even accounting for the 
random acts of violence that occur in any culture, do you think these 
things would be a common occurrence back then?  I, for one, do not think so.

I believe that, over the last hundred years, and particularly over the 
last 70 years, this nation has seen a substantial increase in decadence, 
a substantial decrease in morals, a substantial decrease in ethics, a 
substantial increase in crime.  I believe these changes have occurred at 
a rate even faster than the increases in population.  I believe that we, 
as a culture, are generally more decadent than were were 200 years ago.  
We have, in my opinion, to an alarming degree, lost some of the most 
important parts of our heritage.  We have largely left the time when 
honor, and integrity were the critical foundations of our psychology and 
our culture.  I am afraid for our culture, because I believe that, when 
honor and integrity are no longer the baseline for the culture, that the 
culture will self destruct.

Fast forward back to today.  Let's talk about intellectual property or 
IP.  Here's the definition from dictionary.com:

intellectual property - property that results from original creative 
thought, as patents, copyright material, and trademarks.

That's not the greatest definition in my opinion, but we'll go with it.  
There are two critical components of the definition.  The first is 
property.  Property conveys rights of control, privacy, and ownership.  
(PS - I'm not a lawyer.)  The laws of all civilized nations recognize 
the existence of IP.  Then, there is the part about creative thought.  
So, how does creative thought manifest itself in the real world and 
become property.  Typically, it will be in the form of a design, a 
pattern, a picture, a musical performance, a movie, a book, a thesis, 
etc.  Copyright laws generally protect written property and 
performances.  Patents generally protect designs.  We could debate 
endlessly about the appropriateness of these laws.  I, for one, have a 
problem with software patents.  Regardless, the laws are on the books, 
and we should honor them until we change them, in general.  These laws 
give the author or creator of IP the exclusive right to control its 
distribution and / or marketing, control its reproduction or 
replication, control it's performance (if applicable), and control 
derivative works made from it.

Let's talk money.  I am a firm believer that a man or woman has the 
right to benefit from the results of their work.  If you create a new 
popular novel, and you choose to sell it, you have every right to be 
compensated for the value of what you created.  You have a right to get 
paid.  If you choose to donate that work freely to society, for whatever 
reason, and you give it away, then that is a wonderful generous act, and 
I commend you for it.  But, there is no reason you should be REQUIRED to 
give it away.  It's your choice.  I would say the same thing about software.

One problem with IP, in general, is that it has to be manifested in some 
form.  Let's disregard physical inventions.  Other forms of IP are 
generally encapsulated as some kind of DATA.  All the things we can 
store and transfer with our computers are examples.  Songs, movies, 
books, reports, white papers, drawings, pictures, designs, poems, 
magazines, etc.  The computer and internet technology makes it 
phenomenally easier to create these works, but also easier to copy and 
distribute these works.

So, we have the perfect storm, a huge decrease in morals and ethics, a 
huge increase in disrespect for other people and property of all types, 
and a whole genre of DATA which is considered by the laws of all 
civilized nations to be PROPERTY, and the availability of technology 
that makes it incredibly easy to STEAL this genre of PROPERTY.

Let's talk about Avatar, the recent phenomenally successful movie which 
I happen to like.  What is the PRODUCT?  What is the PROPERTY involved?  
Is the property involved $ 2 worth of plastic, paper, and ink in the DVD 
and case?  Of course not.  We're talking about INTELLECTUAL property.  
The property, which conveys all the rights described above to the owner, 
is the script, and the performance of that script embodied on a reel of 
plastic film, a DVD, or even a hard drive.  Now, the producers of Avatar 
spent about $ 300 million to produce the film.  I'm not even going to 
talk about whether that's too much and how much actors get paid, etc.  
It is what it is.  To make the film, they hired thousands of people and 
contracted for hundreds of services.  Remember what I said about people 
having the right to get paid for their work.  They invested this money 
in the hopes that the film would be popular enough to make them back 
their investment plus profit.  As it turns out, it was phenomenally 
successful and turned in revenues of around $ 2.8 billion if I recall.  
They absolutely have the right to get paid for their work.

The problem is, that with modern technology, they don't have to get paid 
for their work.  If you went to see a movie at the 40's, you physically 
went to the theater and watched it.  Of course, we still do this today.  
You really couldn't steal it, since you had to be there, and there were 
no portable cameras that you could hide in your hat.  Now, as we all 
know, with modern technology, you can pop the DVD in the PC, rip it, and 
have a copy of the movie on your hard drive.  Then, if you are not an 
ethical person, you can have the computer make an infinite number of 
copies of the intellectual property, and distribute that intellectual 
property to any number of people.  (I'm not talking about copying the 
movie to your own PC's for your own purposes.)  The bottom line is that, 
if you distribute the movie to people who didn't buy it, you are 
STEALING, plain and simple.  It is illegal, and it is wrong, regardless 
of how technologically easy it is.  (There were some instances in the 
bible of things that were illegal and not wrong, but that's another story.)

Now, I may sound like a big fan of the movie industry.  I am not.  But 
these things I'm discussing are the realities of our modern society.  I 
have to acknowledge their point of view.  I may produce a movie or book 
myself someday.  It probably won't be an Avatar, but say I spend $ 10 K 
producing a training video on how to equip your home with solar power or 
make your own fuel or a book on the same subject.  If  I were the 
producers of Avatar, or even the producer of my little $ 10 K project, 
do I want thousands or millions of people STEALING my work, and not 
giving me the rewards for my labor, you bet I don't.  So, what choice do 
they have.  Given the confluence of a tremendous drop in ethics and 
morals; and a tremendous influx of technology which facilitates the 
stealing of IP; the creators of the content feel that they have no 
choice but to impose technological measures to prevent theft of their 
work AND their revenue which they deserve by law to get.

So, I have to ask myself, if I did produce such a movie or book, would I 
use copy protection on it.  As much as I hate to say it, I would 
seriously consider it.  The more the project cost me, and the more it 
was likely to be stolen, the more seriously I would consider it.  Now, 
some of you will probably flame me (please don't) about how ineffective 
that would be.  That's not the issue.  Copy protection would stop casual 
customers from casual theft.  Those knowledgeable and determined 
crackers might bypass it, and might steal the work, and might distribute 
the work.  HOWEVER, that requires motive and intent to break the law and 
commit the theft.  That is more likely to create an audit trail and that 
put's them into the ballpark of a prosecutable and provable offense.  If 
I was really concerned about theft, I would have the content watermarked 
in such a way that I could trace any illegal copies.

Having said all that about how I would consider DRM for my own IP work, 
should I create any, I now have to admit that I really hate DRM as a 
consumer.  I TOTALLY understand why ebooks and audio books have DRM.  I 
TOTALLY understand why the publishers won't release the copyright so 
audible.com (audio book company) and kobo.com (ebook company) cannot 
sell the works without DRM.  However, there is a dark side to DRM, as 
many of you know.

I recently purchased a Kobo ebook reader from one of the Borders stores 
which is going out of business.  I bought a book from Kobo which is in 
Adobe DRM EPUB format.  So, it's copy protected.  I launch the Kobo 
software.  It's Windows / Mac only, but I think they have an unsupported 
Linux version.  I log into my account.  I see the book I bought.  I 
connect the device via USB and click the button to sync the device.  The 
book is transferred.  I boot up the reader, and there it is.  Birds are 
singing.  The sun is shining.  All is good.

Then, I buy two more books.  This time, they're in Adobe DRM PDF 
format.  Suddenly, things are different.  You cannot load those from the 
Kobo software.  You have to install the Adobe Digital Editions software, 
download the book, import into Adobe DE, then download to the reader.  
OK, I think.  A hassle, but no big deal.  Wrong!  OK, at this point, I 
think this software is a stinking rotting pile of rubbish, to put it 
mildly.  Every time I click a button or do anything, it pegs my dual 
core 1.7 GHz cpu so hard that Windows complains that the program is not 
responding.  OK, I can wait.  I'm patient.  Breathe in.  Breathe out.  
Twiddle thumbs.  OK, cool.  The books I bought are on my computer 
screen.  I can read them on the screen.  Wait again.  Breathe again.  
OK, I can read them slowly on my screen.  But, they work.  I connect the 
book reader.  Oh, now I have to authorize the computer, authorize the 
reader, and log into Adobe's website.  Blah Blah Blah.  Waste more 
time.  But, I get it done.  Now, I drag my new books over to my ebook 
reader.  It says transferring files.  Yea!  I bought two books, one 
about facebook, and one about twitter.  It says done.  I unplug the 
reader and reboot it in anticipation of reading my new purchases on it.

@#$#%$^%^&&*%^&

I look in the book list on the reader.  The twitter book is there, and 
is readable.  The facebook book is not there at all!  Nowhere!  (Or the 
other way around maybe.)  I go back to the laptop with Adobe DE on it.  
I can read the book just fine there.  I reconnect the reader and 
retransfer the book.  No luck.  I delete the books from the reader, from 
Adobe DE, redownload from Kobo, and start over.  Same result.  This is 
infuriating, and insane.

Now, in all honesty, I don't know if Adobe is to blame, or if Kobo is to 
blame, or if the file got corrupted on their server, or what.  All I 
know is that I cannot read the book I bought on my reader.  It is very 
frustrating.

Given the nature of our culture, and all the IP thieves out there, and 
the state of technology, I really don't see any alternative but that the 
publishers will put out stuff with DRM on it.  I understand.  I just 
wish the @$@#%#@!# thing would work like it should.   I just want to 
read the stinking book I bought.  That's all.

Now that I've spent the morning ranting, I feel much better.  Now I can 
spend the afternoon trying to figure out what the heck is wrong with it.

By the way, I really like the Kobo reader.  It supports EPUB format, 
which is the most universal.  I would recommend this or a similar reader 
to anyone in the market for such a device.  Both the Amazon Kindle and 
the Barnes and Noble Nook use proprietary DRM, which means that books 
you buy there, you can only read on that device.

This took me way to long to write to proofread it.  So, I apologize for 
anything that sounds stupid due to a typo.  If anyone knows why this 
book won't read, I'd love to know.

<-- set rant off <-- set soapbox off

Sincerely,

Ron

-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier

770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
linuxdude AT c3energy.com