
DRM Broke Its Promise - dredmorbius
https://locusmag.com/2019/09/cory-doctorow-drm-broke-its-promise/
======
Animats
Microsoft is on at least its third generation of DRM that broke old content.
Doctorow mentions "Plays for Sure", which doesn't play any more. There was
also "Zune", which doesn't play any more unless you downloaded the content
before they pulled the plug. Then they had an "eBook store", which doesn't
play any more. Not sure what they have now.

~~~
cabalamat
> Doctorow mentions "Plays for Sure", which doesn't play any more.

Ironically, if you do want something that really does play for sure, get a
pirated copy.

~~~
foxylad
Or physical. I buy CDs for my favourite music, and rip them for digital
consumption. Shame there is no way to do this with books.

~~~
adrianmsmith
Even physical CDs are not as easy to use as they used to be; this article
[https://www.databasesandlife.com/playing-a-cd-on-a-
computer/](https://www.databasesandlife.com/playing-a-cd-on-a-computer/) is
from 2007: I bought a CD from a shop, a few months later tried to play it on
my computer and the DRM had already somehow gone wrong in that short space of
time. (At least CDs still work in CD players.)

~~~
iamnotacrook
If the DRM stopped it working then it was not a CD (aka "a defective CD), as a
CD - as per the Red Book standard - does not support DRM. You should get your
money back.

~~~
adrianmsmith
Right, I mean, I agree, but my point was: It looked like a CD, I bought it
from a physical shop selling CDs, it was a modern release from a top 10 pop
star at the time. So if you want to listen to music, the algorithm "just buy
[what looks like] a CD from a shop, then you won't have to deal with DRM" was
not true, at least in my case.

------
paultopia
Professor here: this part isn't correct in my experience:

> Professors are offered substantial bribes to select the most expensive texts

I've never heard of this happening, and certainly have never been offered a
kickback myself to take a book. Accepting one would be a crime for state
university professors where I am, and probably almost everywhere else.

~~~
DangitBobby
I've always wondered why I had to buy the new edition of textbooks each year.
I know it's fairly common practice to assign the newest edition of a book. Is
there a good reason for that that I don't understand? How different is my
Calculus 1 textbook Ed. 17 from this year's Ed. 18?

~~~
javajosh
The reason doctors will often prescribe the "next generation" drug, even if
the old one works fine and is generic, and 100x cheaper, is that they believe
it's better. They aren't stupid, and know its only _marginally better_ , but
they want _the best_ for their patients. Professors also want the best for
their students, and so the latest edition is prescribed. In a way, it's a
point of pride, but its also a little bit lazy, because it's the simplest way
they can signal "hey, I'm staying current, doing my job and not just phoning
it in."

So, yeah, I don't think it's bribery, it's just a heady mix of (ignorance of)
diminishing returns, moral hazard, and status signaling. Plus its a petty
injustice that only hurts people in aggregate, and it only hurts people who
already can afford college in rich places, so no-one is really going to care
about this to change it.

~~~
Scoundreller
The new intervention being “marginally better” can be questionable.

New interventions often aren’t tested head to head against their alternatives.
Or inadequately tested against them.

So we have no idea if they’re even better, but manufacturers don’t want to
risk the embarrassment of evidence that they’re inferior.

~~~
JohnFen
Yes. Here's a personal anecdote to illustrate. Years ago I had dental surgery,
and the dentist prescribed a new and very expensive antibiotic for me. I was
poor at the time, and paying for that was a serious hardship.

The next day I had a severe allergic reaction to it, and the dentist replaced
that prescription with plain old penicillin (which cost me $10 for the
complete treatment). I was absolutely furious that he didn't go with the
affordable and time-tested treatment first.

------
anotherevan
Anything with DRM is not sold, it is leased. My bugbear is that they still
have "Buy Now!" buttons and such, which to my mind is fraud.

I wonder what the reaction would be if it said, "Lease Now!" instead?

~~~
kcbanner
I suppose "Buy Now!" refers to buying a license.

~~~
DangitBobby
It would still be misleading in that case, because you are on the e-book's
page, not the e-book's licensing page. Or at least, you are led to believe
that's the case.

------
rolph
DRM is exactly why i have a ^large^ personal server, and is also what
motivated me to learn how to extract data from a display buffer.

~~~
amflare
I would be curious to hear more about both of these. I've often thought about
setting up a private server, but the set up and maintenance seems like a
massive undertaking.

And then being able to extract from a display buffer seems like a good skill
to have.

~~~
ChuckMcM
My media server is currently a FreeNAS system from iXSystems. It provides
about 26TB of RAID-6 protected storage and relies on open source products so
if iXSystems goes away I can still maintain/upgrade it. My "management"
consists of some Nagios scripts that tell me if it is complaining about
anything (disk goes bad, scrubs haven't completed, ECC errors have spiked,
etc).

In its "media" volume it holds my movies, books & papers, and music that have
been de-DRMed (if necessary, I always prefer buying non-DRM products). Each
medium has a slightly different method of de-DRMing. My toy search engine only
indexes the books/papers though.

~~~
ndmrs
If you don't mind to answer, how do you deal with backups for that much data?

Is RAID the only redundancy?

------
minikites
>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.

You could add this paragraph to the introduction of many other subjects:
healthcare, education, for-profit prisons, etc

~~~
pjkundert
I’ll listen to people complain about how bad markets are, as soon as they
cease exchanging what they value less, for something they value more.

Edit: To clarify: when you claim markets are bad, maybe don't engage in
"market" behavior for your own benefit, while encouraging the use of force to
deny others the same benefits.

And, if you _do_ believe in markets (as virtually everyone does, for
themselves anyway, even avowed socialists and communists) -- but you have a
problem with _corrupt_ markets, then be specific. Say "I disagree with
Mercantilism masquerading itself as a free marketplace", or "regulatory
capture and rent seeking by those aligned with government is corruption".

Don't say stuff like ... this. It reduces your credibility.

~~~
minikites
>I’ll listen to people complain about how bad markets are, as soon as they
cease exchanging what they value less, for something they value more.

Where does duress fit into your overly simplistic view of markets?

~~~
pjkundert
Because the only way to get people to stop naturally forming markets, is by
force. Usually lethal, if history is any guide.

~~~
minikites
So the market is virtuous when it charges usurious prices for medicine because
people are getting something they value more (their lives) in exchange for
something they value less (literally anything else)?

~~~
pjkundert
Conflating the patent-protected status of medicines plus the spectacularly
expensive FDA approval process, with a “market”, does not a powerful argument
make...

Don’t get me wrong. There may or may not be a bunch of things wrong with the
highly regulated (read: lobbiest controlled) and inefficient (almost
insurmountable barriers to entry) medical industry — but using that as an
argument against “markets” in general?

Weak.

------
linuxhansl
That's why I have never - and will never - purchased any DRM controlled
content. Especially books. Period.

Just imagine a thousand, or even just 100, years from now people want to find
out what we read and did; of course by then all current DRM license servers
will be gone.

I read the same books to my kids that my parents had read to me, I have books
that people gave me, or books that I found at book-giveaways... The author
mentions this all.

We've been duped.

~~~
JohnFen
> That's why I have never - and will never - purchased any DRM controlled
> content. Especially books. Period.

I do purchase such books, but only if I know that I can strip the DRM from
them and convert them to a format that I can use normal software to read.

------
ben7799
Good reminder I should be cracking the DRM on all my eBooks to take a backup
again.

This is a perfect time for the companies to do stuff like make DRM digital
goods go "poof" cause everyone (including the .gov) seems to have bigger
things to worry about.

------
Wowfunhappy
Worth noting, obtaining DRM-Free _Audiobooks_ is significantly easier.

• downpour.com

• libro.fm

• audiobooksnow.com

Selection isn't _as_ good as Audible, but it's more than decent between all
three stores, with titles from many different publishers. I posted about this
in a bit more detail a few months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20450647](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20450647)

~~~
rhamzeh
I love Libro.fm!

Also, as a last resort, Google Play has most of Audible's content but DRM
free.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Are you sure Google Play audiobooks are DRM free? I’d read they were not.

~~~
shkkmo
Where did you read that? I see an "export" option for all my audiobooks that
allows you to download them as MP4 files of various qualities.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Okay, so it depends on the audiobook:

[https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7572879#export_...](https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7572879#export_audio)
> Some audiobooks may not be available for export. Open the book's details
page, scroll to the Additional information and check under "Export option."

Still, very good to know that Google Play is an option in some cases!

~~~
shkkmo
I looked a little closer, out of the 37 audiobooks I have on google play, only
2 of them are not exportable (both of which are published by
[https://www.booktrack.com/](https://www.booktrack.com/) so this is probably a
mostly per publisher thing.)

------
bhhaskin
Frankly I have no idea what religion has to do with DRM. This seems a bit
ranty to me.

~~~
correct_horse
I don't necessarily agree or disagree, but the author is comparing religion to
free market capitalism, not to DRM directly.

~~~
johnfactorial
And when capitalists start telling you to trust the invisible hand of the
market, the comparison to religion becomes obvious & apt.

Edit: for those who, for some reason, think my comment unworthy: "The
‘invisible hand’ has an iron grip on America "
[https://fortune.com/2014/08/13/invisible-hand-american-
econo...](https://fortune.com/2014/08/13/invisible-hand-american-economy/)

------
gumby
wonderful propaganda that they got to call restrictions "rights"

~~~
isomorphic
They _are_ rights. _Their_ rights. You have no rights. They can afford to buy
legislation to ensure this. E.g.,

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act)

------
georgeecollins
I love this quote: >> There’s a name for societies where a small elite own
property and everyone else rents that prop­erty from them: it’s called
feudalism.

~~~
gowld
We're talking about art, music, literature, movies. There's no small elite;
anyone can create intellectual property to sell, share, or rent.

~~~
rutierut
I think this is a bit of a weak argument, the overwhelming majority of
creative works are not sold by the creator themselves.

~~~
behringer
When a small time creator does sell something, they might even still lock it
down! Serial keys and web-activation? That's the bread and butter for
countless software titles.

I've now bought a blu-ray player 3 times from Cyberlink. What's going to
happen to my blu-ray player when they go out of business? I doubt I'll be able
to get it to play blu-rays at all unless I find a crack somewhere. The
software I need to play the media I own is DRM'd lol.

~~~
voltagex_
Even VLC can play Blurays now, with the correct library and configuration.

~~~
behringer
Not properly.

------
shmerl
Simply boycott DRMed stores and only buy in DRM-free ones. Vote with your
wallet.

~~~
taffer
DRM has won. Steam has DRM, Playstation has DRM, Netflix has DRM, Spotify has
DRM, practically all browsers support DRM.

~~~
stevewillows
Personally, I view DRM for streaming different than DRM for purchased content.
For streaming, DRM is to prevent the user from essentially archiving the
catalog, which its fine by me. But DRM for purchased / non-subscription
content isn't something I support.

There have only been a few times when I've purchased a book or audiobook with
DRM. Removing that DRM was trivial with the right tools.

Basically, DRM sucks, but I'm willing to forgive it for streaming content,
since you're paying for access to a catalog and not a specific product.

~~~
shmerl
Firstly, streaming doesn't need to be equivalent to renting. That's a wrong
notion. For example Bandcamp allows you to buy music and download DRM-free
copy, but you can as well stream it from their site for convenience.

Secondly, even if you can say, renting has value if you rent the same thing
for lower price than buying, it's only reasonable if you still have the option
to buy the same thing (DRM-free).

But it becomes a major problem, when someone only provides renting of digital
goods and you can't buy them. In such case DRM on streaming isn't any better.
I.e. for example Google Stadia or Netflix exclusives would be such example.

~~~
stevewillows
Streaming definitely isn't renting, though. For an analog, it'd be like a
video rental shop saying 'rent all you want for $11 per month'. Streaming
services have released physical copies of their series. I doubt they've done
it for lesser properties, but the main ones are out there.

But as for DRM, I view it in the same way we didn't technically own DVDs [1].
We purchased access to the film, but not the film itself -- except now its
done with far more complex methods that change every few years.

> When consumers buy a DVD or Blu-ray disc, they are not purchasing the motion
> picture itself, rather they are purchasing access to the motion picture
> which affords only the right to access the work according to the format’s
> particular specifications (i.e., through the use of a DVD player), or the
> Blu-ray Disc format specifications (i.e., through the use of a Blu-ray
> format player). Consumers are able to purchase the copy at its retail price
> because it is distributed on a specific medium that will play back on only a
> licensed player. In prior exemption proceedings, the Register and Librarian
> have recognized that there is no unqualified right to access a work on a
> particular device. _(pg 4 - 5)_

The benefit of physical media is that you'll pretty much always have access to
it so long as you have a method to consume it.

I agree that DRM isn't good, but I don't see this problem as anything new --
just the next step for the content manager's control over their owned content.
Sadly, it's the consumer that loses.. but that's also not new. The only
difference between the license for DVDs and bluray vs DRM is that DRM is
enforceable, typically by time.

None of this speaks to DRM in gaming. Of all forms of entertainment, I think
the DRM there has the greatest consequence to the consumer -- but I'm also not
as familiar with that market.

[1]
[https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/class%20...](https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/class%208/DVDCCA_and_AACS_LA_class08_1201_2014.pdf)

~~~
shmerl
_> Streaming definitely isn't renting, though._

Something like Netflix is surely intended as digital renting. I.e. you can
rent the entire catalog, for some period of time. When you stop your
continuous payments, you can't use it anymore.

------
Causality1
It's my belief we need a comprehensive set of digital consumer rights
enshrined in law. Things like the ability to resell used licenses, create
player-owned servers for abandoned games, and "service expiration guarantees"
printed directly on the packaging for all products that rely on external
servers stating a minimum time period for which the manufacturer is legally
bound to support that product. Things like what Google did to its Revolv
customers should never be allowed to happen.

~~~
dmwallin
This is the key here. Proper application of user rights could also push
companies to open up voluntarily. For example, if required by law to continue
to support access to content sold for a period of time it could change the
liability math for companies and lead to less DRM in many cases.

------
amflare
DRM is just digital feudalism.

------
bsder
> Professors are offered substantial bribes to select the most expensive texts

Really? I'm still waiting for my check. Somebody call me.

I know this his article is a rant, but that particular statement calls into
question the veracity of anything else he says.

Maybe. _Maybe_ there is a bribe _somewhere_ involved in a 200+ person
introductory class. Maybe.

No one in their right mind is going to offer or accept a bribe over 30 books
at $150 each. The biggest "bribe" I ever get is that the publishers often send
me a free copy of a book. And, if I ask for one, it probably won't be free,
I'll have to send it back.

Most EECS professors I know of are keenly aware of the price of textbooks.
They do _NOT_ go out of their way to make things difficult. And, if we pick a
book, it's a book you are going to make use of again in your career. We also
place it on reserve in the library, and we avoid the digital lock in which
generally causes us as much grief as it causes the students.

Maybe this is different in the non-technical fields.

~~~
gowld
Administration captures the profit in education, not rank and file professors.

[https://www.the-scientist.com/profession/textbook-
adoption-h...](https://www.the-scientist.com/profession/textbook-adoption-how-
do-professors-select-the-right-one-60192)

> Many professors and departments encourage such practices, which can be
> viewed as either bribes or legitimate marketing ploys. Richard McKenzie, a
> professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine, was appalled
> at schools' requests for inducements to adopt his textbook The New World of
> Economics (Homewood, Ill., Irwin Publishing Inc., 1989), written with Gordon
> Tullock. "A department at a Southwestern university chose our book and two
> others, and put them up for auction," says McKenzie. "They would adopt the
> book with the biggest side payment." So McKenzie began talking to
> publishers' sales reps and quickly learned that monetary enticement to adopt
> a book, although not rampant, does happen, and not just in economics. In
> science, these extras are encountered in large introductory biology and
> chemistry courses--but less so in physics and geology classes, which tend to
> attract fewer students.

~~~
microtherion
It's somewhat amusing that an economist is shocked to see market mechanisms at
work…

------
privateSFacct
Huh? DRM broke it's "promise"? What did DRM promise this guy.

DRM made a promise to business that it would control content in ways that
would let them extract more money from users and make it much harder for them
to copy or use the content outside of approved uses.

DRM has lived up that promise and more.

It's been so successfully lucrative this promise and similar systems of
control may expand to ink, coffee, tractors, phones etc etc.

Sounds like a promise kept.

~~~
kerkeslager
> DRM made a promise to business that it would control content in ways that
> would let them extract more money from users and make it much harder for
> them to copy or use the content outside of approved uses.

1\. If you think it's harder for users to copy or use content outside of
approved usage, choose your favorite TV show, and type the name of the show
with the text "s01e01" into Google. You'll find links to stream it in low
quality or torrent a high quality MP4.

2\. Meanwhile, try downloading a book from Amazon and transforming it into
epub so you can read it on a different reader. If you manage to figure out how
to do that, please let me know.

It's not at all clear that the minor difficulty of 1 prevents so much lost
profits that it outweighs the profits lost from 2. So it's absolutely not
clear that DRM has resulted in extracting more money from users.

~~~
paulddraper
> It's not at all clear that the minor difficulty of 1

You're gonna be ad-blasted, have inconsistent video quality, and be given a
million popups.

Also, the availability is not nearly what you think it is.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=battlestar+galactica+2003+s0...](https://www.google.com/search?q=battlestar+galactica+2003+s01e01)

~~~
kerkeslager
> You're gonna be ad-blasted, have inconsistent video quality, and be given a
> million popups.

If you're seeing ads and popups, you should get an ad-blocker and update it.
No one should be seeing these in 2019. The quality I noted, but I also noted
that you can torrent higher-quality video easily.

> Also, the availability is not nearly what you think it is.

>
> [https://www.google.com/search?q=battlestar+galactica+2003+s0...](https://www.google.com/search?q=battlestar+galactica+2003+s0..).

I clicked your link. Second page of results, first result, was a link to
DailyMotion where the full 54-minute episode was available to stream in
quality as good as it was in 2003.

I suspect the fact that this shows up on the _second_ page of search results
instead of the first is a success of DMCA threats against Google, not a
success of DRM. But I'm sure if you added some combination of keywords like
"torrent", "stream" or "free" you could get an illegal copy to show up as the
first result.

I'm not encouraging anyone to do this. I encourage everyone to pay for content
with money, preferably in the most direct way you can so the creators actually
get the money. I'm just saying that DRM only affects people who want to do
things the "proper" way. People who don't want to pay for content can easily
bypass DRM with a Google search.

------
pontifier
VidAngel is fighting a legal battle that may change the face of media
ownership.

[https://blog.vidangel.com/2019/08/23/update-family-movie-
act...](https://blog.vidangel.com/2019/08/23/update-family-movie-act/)

Note: I am a shareholder and have a substantial intetest the outcome of this
battle.

------
miki123211
For those here who are unconvinced and still believe DRM should exist, let me
present some further evidence proving the contrary.

1\. Polish ebook/audiobook stores. In the polish electronic book market, DRM
doesn't exist. Instead, it has been replaced with watermarks, which are
prolific. Almost every ebook out there has one. I've seen some clear warnings
displayed at checkout, so that people know what might happen if they share a
book on line. This is a pretty good compromise. You can read the bookwhenever
you want, you're not dependent on any server, you can read on any device you
want to read on, and you can even share it with a trusted friend. However, if
someone pirates the book (and someone will, regardless of DRM), it's much
easier to track them. DRM is an obvious barrier to overcome, and usually no
traces of the original downloader are left after stripping it. Watermarks, on
the other hand, can easily be forgotten about, and, if done well, even hard to
detect. This is not that easy to achieve in ebooks, as they're fundamentally
made of text (though you can embed them in covers, images etc), but for
audiobooks, movies or music, it's pretty trivial.

2\. Streaming. Some say DRM for music streaming is absolutely needed, but I
disagree here. For those who want to do it, downloading music from streaming
services is pretty trivial. Playlist migration tools from one streaming
service to another exist and are widely available, and ripping music from
Deezer, on a mass scale, is also pretty simple. A tool called Deezloader exist
and can get anything from Deezer, and their database is pretty similar to what
other music services have. It's not as easy to find as it used to be
(currently residing on a wiki on notabug.org and a Telegram channel as far as
I know), but it's certainly doable. I could use it to get all my music out of
my Spotify in 10 minutes... but somehow I still didn't. I, as well as other
people, value the recommendations, the instant search, the syncing of
libraries between devices and the social functions too much to bother. I know
people who use it regularly, mostly to i.e. rip stuff out to play in a car
that only accepts mp3s on pendrives, but they stil are active users and
subscribers of streaming. People who don't care that much usually use youtube
and rip using shady websites anyway. That's pretty onvincing evidence that
removing DRM wouldn't change much, at least for me.

3\. Piracy. Piracy exists. It existed and it will,, regardless of DRM. DRM
doesn't change the piracy landscape in any substantial way, and removing it
won't change it either. Making the files magically easier to download won't
mean that they become magically easier to host. Those who want to host them
now can do it already, i.e. by downloading existing torrents. The people who
actually might benefit from DRM stripping are consumers themselves. Pirates
will still do their things, but we, the consumers, would be able to do much,
much more.

~~~
holy_city
I have personally seen both sides of the this and have worked on DRM
solutions. The merits and efficacy of DRM highly depends on what you're
locking down, how you lock it down, and who is being locked out.

For example. Hardware DRM (TPM/dongles/etc) is near impossible to crack, or
worthless if you _did_ crack it. Try and find a contemporary version of
Steinberg/Avid software that has been cracked - to my knowledge it doesn't
exist, at least not in a usable form.

I've also heard of some content where DRM increased revenue by a moderate
integer factor.

On the other hand, I'm also aware of content in the same market that saw
significantly increased revenue due to piracy, and other content where
legitimate users pirated because it was _easier_ to access than the legitimate
content!

It's all a balancing act over how much your users can tolerate and how much
benefit you see. There's no one solution for all digital content, and
sometimes none is the best business decision. I will say that people deciding
to use DRM are not stupid and have better numbers than the author of this
article. The big guys know _exactly_ how much money they would lose by
abandoning DRM. In a smaller shop it's more of a guessing game, but that's
just because we have less information and forecasting ability.

------
thrillgore
DRM never promised me anything besides endless pitfalls for wanting to listen
to music or watch movies legally on my own terms.

------
jccalhoun
I don't pay for drm unless I can crack it. But I don't remember publisher's
saying they would lower prices for drmed goods. Does anyone?

There are lots of arguments against drm but this seems like a weak one.

~~~
JohnFen
> Does anyone?

Yes, I do.

------
vertis
I didn't need to click through to know it was an article by Cory Doctorow :D

------
Iv
If you want a collection you can count on, you have to pirate it [1], unless
it is somehow sold DRM-free.

[1] [https://xkcd.com/488/](https://xkcd.com/488/)

------
dragontamer
> Despite the fact that they do less, they don’t cost less.

I realize that Cory doesn't like the idea of capitalism. But consider for a
moment: the free market offers you a choice. You can choose to buy a "libre"
book, or you can choose to buy a DRM-locked down e-book for the same price.

Why do people buy the DRM-locked e-books? Because they don't care about the
DRM-restrictions, and prefer to have the space-savings associated with a
digital file.

That's all it comes down to. Cory Doctorow can wax poetic about why old-school
books are better (and maybe they are better for many people), but for all
e-book buyers out there... e-books are worth the tradeoffs.

\----------

Now, I certainly think there's some market-problems going on in the book
world. Amazon and Apple engaged in price fixing a few years back, Microsoft
DRM shutdown their Zune service, terminating the songs that many people
bought, etc. etc. Plenty of issues abound that should get fixed.

But a lot of this blog post seems to be complaining about choices that other
people are freely making, and fails to understand WHY those people are
choosing e-books over the alternative.

~~~
glandium
> Why do people buy the DRM-locked e-books?

Do these people actually know a) that e-books are DRM-locked and b) what DRM-
locked implies to their ownership of said e-books?

------
mnemonicsloth
1\. Most Republicans don't understand DRM

2\. Most Republicans favor DRM because the Chamber of Commerce favors it.

3\. The primary proponents of DRM in the Chamber of Commerce are groups the
Republicans hate: the RIAA, MPAA and a few others.

4\. Republicans sign on for things like DRM and copyright extension because
they think they're "good for business".

5\. Point 3 says Republicans could have an interest in weakening some kinds of
intellectual property protection. They are prevented from doing this by their
ideology (Point 4).

6\. All that said, writing a whole piece that will encourage republicans to
double down on that ideology [1] is not doing the world a favor.

[1] Doubling down on ideology is what people do when you make fun of their
ideas. They just yell louder. This has been the heat source for every flame
war that has ever been.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
The DMCA had broad bipartisan support, and as far as I'm aware no political
leaders are proposing to revoke DRM protections.

~~~
mnemonicsloth
Yes, like I said, the Democrats did it because the entertainment industry is
an important constituency of theirs. The Republicans did it because they
thought it would be good for business. But the businesses that benefit most
from expanding IP protection (record companies, movie studios, publishers) are
not very big as big businesses go. Sony pictures made $9 billion last year.
Exxon-Mobil made $279 billion -- probably more than all the major studios put
together. So it's possible that the Republicans could be persuaded to cut the
entertainment industry loose. You could tell them they'd be helping millions
of smaller businesses who could benefit from lower IP costs and that the
departing RIAA and MPAA members weren't their kind of businesses anyway.

This is a longshot. I'm not pretending it isn't. But if it did work, looser IP
laws would fall clearly on one side of the political spectrum, making it
possible for them to get enacted in time. When they aren't on either side of
the spectrum, there's no chance.

~~~
rhino369
1) I don't think you did say "Democrats did it because the entertainment
industry is an important constituency of theirs" in your OP

2) Why do you seem to be more angry at the party you think earnestly made a
mistake rather than the one who whored out to a special interest group.

