alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
Replies
>he law should have teeth and should say that DRM is actually illegal, or at the very least that circumventing it is legal.
They law literally emboldened DRM. We'll see if the politics of the next generation changes that, but I don't see it happening in my lifetime that the US will just allow the consumer to legally copy software that does not want to be copied by the individual.
>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.
If encryption was that vacuum tight, we wouldn't see constant progress in cryptography. It's the generation ship paradox: what may take us 100 years to break with currently known knowledge may take someone next decade a month.
DRM isn’t the reason it is impracticable to pirate their IP. If you pirate Apple News, your iCloud account gets banned and your photos go poof. They could decide that your iPhone should stop working. It’s a networked device. Your position strengthens the power of network owners and weakens yours, ironically, in all the ways that matter.
> encryption never expires and does not care
wow, I never thought about it this way. Amazing point. Thanks.
> How could drm risk anyone's life?
- medical software - firmware on medical devices, eg people's vision implants are being turned off remotely, as well as anti-epilepsy implants, iirc - train you're taking to hospital has been turned off (trains being remotely disabled via DRM happened in Poland recently) - heated seats unable to provide warmth because you don't own DRM for a car long after the DRM servers have been shut down and copyright has lapsed. Or just because the DRM server is down right now - you get in your car to go to hospital and can't, because e.g. you bought a Fisker car which now doesn't start due to a DRM server that doesn't exist anymore after the company went bankrupt - pretty much the same thing with other EVs when they're outside of mobile network range. You have a car that works and could get you to safety, but instead you expire in the desert, and the thing doesn't even have a tank full of water you could drink - inability to repair medical devices makes them non-functional because any code fixes you could do via a disassembler are fully rpevented with DRM and TPMs - your juice press won't take your fruit pack because it's not DRM'd by them and so you die of thirst - your water fountain won't produce water because the water (!!) wasn't DRM'd, or because the server is just gone - you want to call someone for help via wifi but you're unable to because the app won't work on a jailbroken device due to DRM - you are strongly autistic and you are anchored to a specific piece of media to calm you down, and the DRM somehow becomes broken and now you can't watch that anymore and suddenly your quality of life deteriorates. you refuse to ingest foods and wither away in a hospital due to DRM
I could go on, but you get the gist. NONE of those trajectories will apply to EVERYONE, but once everything that uses electricity has DRM in it, the impact on the general population will be significant.