DISQUS

Favorite one I found thus far? An electromagnetic weapon.

In somewhat related news: Yahoo, Sony BMG Offer DRM-Free Music

Also, AIM has had gaming features involved with it for years now. Is it that the IM is in the games, rather than the games were in the IM? I dunno, that's fishy...

This deserves an evaluation from the PTO, certainly.

...unless, of course, the government shuts down the lawsuit. Funny how that works, huh?




My favorite part of the government's letter in response is where it says that saying this should be a secret is not an admission that there is anything to be secretive about.





Classic.

Let's also not forget that a great number of albums and DVDs are leaked by people who are working for the production companies. The DVD or CD leaks before it ever gets to the point where DRM is involved. The industry insiders are the ones leaking this stuff, more often than not. Consider the early Star Wars III download, which came from someone at either Fox or Lucasfilm.

In these cases, DRM doesn't do anything at all.

I've been trying to find more data on broadband in Japan, which seems to be farther ahead than most anywhere in the world, with reports of 100Mbit download speeds. There have been some scattered reports (this one, most notably), but nothing concrete that I can read.




Although, I did find a direct Japan-to-UK comparison on broadband: BBC

"...conservatives want to teach evolution in schools, while liberals want to prohibit the teaching of evolution in schools."




Read that sentence, think about it, edit. ;-)





Other than that, another fine rebuttal post.

"I almost get the feeling that he's arguing, not with me, but with a generic anti-IP left-winger."




I got that same feeling, especially since throughout all the posts he kept referring to you as "the author," rather than by your name.

Tim:

"So far, bandwidth constraints have prevented widespread use of P2P for movies..."

They have?

Sounds like another tragedy of the anticommons to me.

"I left his post befuddled because it seemed he said lots of things and nothing at all."


Welcome to my world.

The main problem, of course, is this strange notion that DRM helps artists gain revenues. It doesn't, the art itself does that.




Does it protect against piracy? No, doesn't do that either. Only need ONE freerange copy and that's it. There is no speedbump, no reduction, nothing. It's completely and utterly ineffective, and for this reason alone should not be given the full force of the law.





Secondly, the government has granted a sweeping monopoly to one company: Macrovision. Excellent work on the part of the lobbying industry, but hardly a law to help the public or private industry (excepting Macrovision) in any way.





Finally, all those reasons you listed, Tim, were said very well. Until recently (and with few exceptions), copyright law was strictly a civil matter, and was covered quite well by contract and civil law. Useless laws annoy me far more than useless technologies.

Tim, would you mind sending it to me as well? E-mail is contact@_commonsmusic.com

I'm very interested in a Cato paper like that, particularly because Cato has, in past releases, been very up on DMCA and DRM (such as with the Einhorn and Rosenblatt paper on DRM and P2P, although I can't recall if the DMCA was mentioned specifically in there).

Thanks.