Gates on DRM
Larry Lessig surprised at Bill Gates’ clarification — in an excellent Gizmodo interivew — of his “You’re all a bunch of freaking communists!” remarks. I’m more frustrated than surprised.
Gates says that we need DRM so that artists and scientists will create and innovate, and to ensure privacy of stuff like medical records. E.g.:
Gates: …Take medical records: is it your position that rights management for medical records is evil? … We remind people that, like if there’s a medical record that has somebody’s AIDS status in it, we have software—which is identical software—that says, ‘Hey, if you’re trying to forward to someone,’ that, ‘No, this is restricted. You can’t forward this to someone. They don’t have the right to see this.’ It’s the notion of ‘should there be confidential information?’
Gizmodo: I think that’s a different question.
Gates: It’s not different. It’s identical technology. It’s the same bits!
Gizmodo: No, no, no. I think in calling that evil as opposed to whatever, I think that still basically comes down to, ‘Do you feel like things should be able to have passwords on them or not?’ And of course the answer is ‘yes.’ I do think that’s reasonable. So I don’t think anybody is trying to say ‘DRM is evil.’ I think what people are trying to say is that DRM, as sanctioned by the big players, may be holding back culture as a whole.
Right on. It doesn’t have to be evil to be a bad idea. Gizmodo is right to raise ask about the likely overall outcome of mandating (through legislation or market forces) the ability of “content producers” to lock us out of using products we’ve purchased in the ways that we want, within the limits of the law.
Gates is using AIDS to nuke the conversation, and it’s a trick. “Is it your position that securing your house against burglars is evil?” No, we want our houses secure. “The very same automatic weapons you’d like to ban protects houses. ” Yes, but the security of my house is not the only thing affected by allowing the sale of automatic weapons. Of course the analogy isn’t exact, especially if you drive it further than where I’ve left it, but I think the point is right: We should not be expected to pay any price to achieve any particular goal, even if it’s something as positive as protecting medical privacy. We need to look at the range of options and make the trade-offs.
Further, Gates is disingenuous when he says:
We’re the guys of empowerment. We want these things [creative stuff like personal slide shows with music added] to be out there everywhere. But it wouldn’t serve anyone’s interests to go out there and say, ‘Hey, by the way, there’s no way to remind anyone at any time about any rights boundaries.’
Microsoft’s DRM is way overkill for “reminding” people about rights boundaries. It does everything it can to prevent it, at the cost of Fair Use.
DRM lets Microsoft go up to the next level in our economy, becoming the platform required by Hollywood to view its products. If that means we have to shut down the way in which culture is absorbed and advanced, Microsoft doesn’t care. This bullshit about medical records and AIDS may well be what Gates tells himself as he falls asleep. It fits so nicely in a universe in which software is either good or evil. But the whole point about copyright and Fair Use is that culture is complex and art is the discovery of new shades of gray. That’s why we need the right to exercise our judgment and to build new visions based on the old.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
some non-DRM business models:
tailoring, knitting patterns, editorial
http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/000417.html
In other news: Microsoft DRM Broken
http://home.wanadoo.nl/lc.staak/freeme.htm
And Fairplay broken by Hymn. Face it. DRM doesn’t work. They should really go back and re-read Cory’s Microsoft DRM talk.
Interestingly, Microsoft has an opportunity here to stand up and say “We’re not evil”. But they’re unable to do this, all the way to the very top, because they see they’re own survival threatened by exactly the same issues. They think they need the shrink wrap license and software copy protection for their own business model just as much as the music companies think they need DRM for their survival.
Um, Julian. They do need the software copy protection for their business model. I really don’t want to rehash all the reasons software developer/publishers have for activation code schemes and the like, but believe me, having them will almost always make you significantly more money than not having them (all other channel factors being the same enough). DRM doesn’t have to be provably unbreakable to have the effect. It’s probably 99% psychological and 1% technical, but strangely, the 99% is 100% dependent on the 1% being there. When you take Cory’s famous Microsoft talk, and put it up against observable phenomena in the marketplace (i.e. that DRM almost invariably increases profits) and you sell a product in the marketplace, all you can do is throw up your hands and conclude that the anti-DRM crowd just wants stuff for free. Convince me that your intentions are otherwise, please. I ask and ask and ask and listen and listen and listen, and still, that’s all I hear in 1000 different ways. DRM wouldn’t bug you a bit if it didn’t make you pay. DRM would not bug you if it weren’t effective. If people (** in general **) really were honest with their payment for use of software and content, DRM would add no value to the equation. And while they may be honest in heart, they tend not to be in deed, either through laziness (“I’ll pay later”), resentment (“Why should I have to pay $15 for this?”), or whatever.
BTW David, even the most partisan copyfighter would recognize that “Fair Use” is not a right. It is a defense against infringement.
Back to DRM a moment…. Do you guys know what makes the best argument for it in my mind? The way you are so against it — as if anti-DRM has become a convenient proxy for being against the concept of IP. You can say you are for IP while trying to cut off its practicality at the ankles. I think you’ll find that content producers are actually much happy to have the debate be over DRM, as we have the revealed preference of the market (i.e. more money with DRM) on our side against your moralistic arguments. The debate might just as well be birth control and out of wedlock sex versus the screwballs who still run the Catholic church. It’s the kind of corner you’ve painted yourselves into .
I think the term “DRM” is so loaded that its use ends up tricking / tripping up the conversation, e.g., I don’t think Brad’s suggested DRM that maybe does something good is the really same as other’s DRM that maybe does something bad.
Maybe it would be more useful to consider: locks aren’t bad or good, but there are some very bad uses for locks as well as some very good ones.
Some uses are less clearly very bad or very good (and require a lot of nuance to be properly managed), so what are the implications when those uses are widely deployed by large scale bureaucracies that don’t do nuance very well?
DRM is neither security nor privacy.
David Weinberger noticed that Bill Gates is now using the concept of confidential medical information to further his digital rights management (DRM) agenda. David quotes the Gizmodo interview:Gates: …Take medical records: is it your position that rig…
Jay, Please offer a specific example of a “bad” use for DRM. It would be instructive to dissect the example with law and the market as context. For example, if you were to pick Lexmark printer cartridges, I would counter that a court recently held that the DMCA is not a license for them to shut out competition in the printer cartridge market. Lexmark may still deploy DRM at that interface to put an obstacle to competition, but they can’t deploy lawyers to protect the DRM via the DMCA. Cost and availability of cartridges, as well as sustained compatibility with third party vendors’ cartridges will affect buying decisions in the market. Maybe they even get a slight black-eye for dragging the DMCA into this in the first place. But if you’re against their use of DRM to protect printer cartridges (even sans DMCA protections), then it seems to me that you want their printers cheap and don’t want to give them any business on the cartridge side. And in that case, they might prefer not to do business with you. Shouldn’t they have that right?
Weinberger on Gates, Lessig, DRM
David Weinberger blogs about Bill Gates’ remarks regarding Digital Rights Management, Larry Lessig’s response, and what it all means. DRM lets Microsoft go up to the next level in our economy, becoming the platform required by Hollywood to view its…