https://locusmag.com/2019/09/cory-doctorow-drm-broke-its-promise/
"When states had established religions and all-powerful churches, the
clergy could impose many indignities on their parishoners merely by
asserting that it was “God’s will.” Our modern secular religion is the
worship of markets as self-correcting, self-perfecting systems that
merely demand that we all act in our own self-interest to produce an
outcome that makes us all better off. Whenever corporations thrive by
making us all worse off, we’re told to stop complaining, because it is
the “will of the market” at work."
Punchline: "There’s a name for societies where a small elite own
property and everyone else rents that property from them: it’s called
feudalism. DRM never delivered a world of flexible consumer choice, but
it was never supposed to. Instead, twenty years on, DRM is revealed to
be exactly what we feared: an oligarchic gambit to end property
ownership for the people, who become tenants in the fields of greedy,
confiscatory tech and media companies, whose inventiveness is not
devoted to marvelous new market propositions, but, rather, to new ways
to coerce us into spending more for less."
Via Isaac Kuo, who wrote: "Anyone who believed the promises they spun
around DRM is a fool. I never trusted it from the start, and with good
reason that completely played out exactly how all the critics said it would.
Even now, I still use the digital equivalent of the crude old VCR, and I
refuse to buy any eBooks. Oh, I do buy Netflix and such, but due to my
justified lack of trust about them, I record anything I care about onto
that crude digital equivalent of the VCR. But with eBooks? The sheer
stupidity of not being able to copy-and-paste plain old text to a file
where I can read it in a form I desire (definitely not some mobile
tablet/phone) … that stupidity is just something I can’t get past."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://www.xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
http://www.glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
http://www.sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
