Why DRM exists [was Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!]

[Larry McVoy]

On Sun, Apr 27, 2003 at 04:21:06PM +0200, Matthias Andree wrote:
> It seems that the people who form the "market" (and buy shares, write
> analyses, buy CDs/DVDs) need to be told the implications of buying
> copy-protected material or material that enforces to boot only
> particlular kernels or whatever.

This is in the "it's too late to fix it" category but here's my opinion
about all this digital rights stuff.

There is much hand wringing and gnashing of teeth over the fact that
the evil corporations are locking things up with DRM as well as various
laws like the DMCA.  People talk about their "rights" being violated,
about how awful this all is, etc, etc, etc.

What seems to be forgotten is that the people who are locking things up
are the people who own those things and the people who are complaining
are the people who got those things, illegally, for free.  There seems
to be a wide spread feeling that whenever anything desirable comes along
it is OK to take it if you want it.  Napster is a good example.  I don't
like the record companies any better than anyone else but they do own
the material and you either respect the rules or the record companies
will lock it up and force you to respect the rules.

The open source community, in my opinion, is certainly a contributing
factor in the emergence of the DMCA and DRM efforts.  This community
thinks it is perfectly acceptable to copy anything that they find useful.
Take a look at some of the recent BK flamewars and over and over you
will see people saying "we'll clone it".   That's not unique to BK,
it's the same with anything else which is viewed as useful.  And nobody
sees anything wrong with that, or copying music, whatever.  "If it's
useful, take it" is the attitude.

This problem is pervasive, it's not just a handful of people.  Upon the
advice of several of the leading kernel developers, I contacted Pavel's
boss at SuSE and said "how about you nudge Pavel onto something more
productive" and he said that he couldn't control Pavel.  That's nonsense
and everyone knows that.  If one of my employees were doing something
like that, it would be trivial to say "choose between your job and that".
But Garloff just shrugged it off as not his problem.

Corporations are certainly watching things like our efforts with
BitKeeper, as well as the other companies who are trying to play nice
with the open source world.  What are they learning?  That if you don't
lock it up, the open source world has no conscience, no respect, and will
steal anything that isn't locked down.  Show me a single example of the
community going "no, we can't take that, someone else did all the work
to produce it, we didn't".  Good luck finding it.  Instead you get "hey,
that's cool, let's copy it".  With no acknowledgement that the creation
of the product took 100x the effort it takes to copy the product.

Do you think that corporations are going sit by and watch you do that and
do nothing to stop you?  Of course they aren't, they have a strong self
preservation instinct and they have the resources to apply to the problem.
The DMCA, DRM, all that stuff is just the beginning.  You will respond
with all sorts of clever hacks to get around it and they will respond
with even more clever hacks to stop you.  They have both more resources
and more at stake so they will win.

The depressing thing is that it is so obvious to me that the corporations
will win, they will protect themselves, they have the money to lobby the
government to get the laws they want and build the technology they need.
The more you push back the more locked up things will become.