alt Hacker NewsApple doesn’t need any laws to enforce the following:
- you can’t pirate App Store IAP
- you can’t pirate Apple News
- you can’t pirate Apple Arcade
- you can’t pirate iCloud storage and you can’t upgrade phone storage space from anyone but Apple, and therefore the amount of data you can practicably store in the iOS ecosystem
- it’s impracticable to pirate App Store apps
Okay, that’s like 90% of Apple services revenue.
Is Apple the only company allowed to make money? That’s kind of what your position is: “the only permissible limitations are the ones that cannot be surmounted technologically.” Why should the law be toothless in copyright protections, but not in other things? Because that is a Pro Apple position in disguise.
The law should have teeth and should say that DRM is actually illegal, or at the very least that circumventing it is legal.
No matter how ludicrously long Disney manages to get copyright terms extended to, copyright does still expire, and there are even other exceptions such accessibility and military and emergency usage that trump copyright.
But encryption never expires and does not care if it would save someones life to use some product in some unusual situation, so, it should either be illegal to sell an encrypted audiobook that can never be decrypted even 100 years later when it is public domain, or at the very least, if it is to be legal to produce such a thing, then the trade-off is it is at least legal for anyone else to try to overcome it.
How could drm risk anyone's life? I don't know but it isn't just protecting a movie from playing, it's baked into the hardware of devices and makes the entire device non-functional, like HDCP making a display not-display.
Maybe a pdf has critical emergency information like how to sanitize water during an natural disater or war, or identify if a berry is safe or poisonous, but the only pdf you have happened to come from an expensive college course so you can't read it. Contrived examples will always sound contrived and dismissable but no particular example matters. The principle holds even without any examples. If a tv can fail to tv, then forget about if tvs are important, what matters is a tool can be arbitrarily and artificially rendered non-functional.
The law should absolutely have teeth, but it should say something other than what it currently does, and have the teeth to enforce that.