Red Hat: Bird Song: A requiem for DRM

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RedHatVideos
January 27, 2009

DRMs are often designed by ambitious, well-funded consortia, with top-notch engineers from every corner of the industry. They spend millions. They take years. They are defeated in days, for pennies, by hobbyists. - Cory Doctorow, Guardian Unlimited, Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Sure, its probably too early to dance on the grave of Digital Rights Management (DRM), but we can certainly continue pounding nails in its coffin after Wal-Mart drove a stake through its heart this week. And that's not counting all the garlic, silver bullets, and hemlock showered on DRM recently by Apple, EMI, Amazon, and Universal (not to mention consumers). Its still twitching and gasping, and we may have some zombification ahead of us, but the tipping point is nigh. You can smell it.

The important thing isn't that another copy protection technology that's worse than the problem its designed to solve is imploding. That always happens and will happen every time something impedes the flow of culture too effectively. What is important about the demise of DRM is that it gives all those who railed against it a sense of their own power.

A community grew around the DRM fight, found common cause and common values, stood up, and prevailed. This bodes well for future fights: in favor of net neutrality, against onerous copyright enforcement that inhibits free thinking, against absurd patents that stifle innovation, [add your own issue here].

Its good to win, even when the victories are fleeting and there is more to be done. DRM brought us together and truth happened.

To celebrate the beginning of the end of DRM, we've created a prototype agit-prop cartoon, a parable with a bird. It is being released as a prototype under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license with an open invitation to use, share, add-to remix, as long as you give us and those before you some attribution (or ask not to), don't use it for commercial purposes, and share your production under the same terms.

Get the elements here: http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/08...

Category: Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

DRM digital rights management Red Hat Linux open source

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Keruaran (1 month ago) Show Hide

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It's beautiful.

ExilLarkdanx (8 months ago) Show Hide

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I hate these DRMs and EMI.
I would very much like to rip my Chronicles of Narnia soundtrack to PC, but for some retarded reason, that flash program for it crashes instantly and I just can't even use the CD for that.

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