The author can't even get basic facts...

The only OS that makes TPM Manditory is APPLE. TPM is disabled by default on the vast majority of PCs that even have it installed. The OS can't even see it until it is turned on in BIOS Setup.

TPM is optional even for Bitlocker. The bigger worry about Bitlocker shold be making certain MS hasn't got a backdoor hidden in it.

The author is apparently either asleep,or just brain dead. His big panic is DRM?

DRM is the least of most people's worries. Clicking the wrong link can get you jailed and tracked as a terrorist or sex criminal for life now. 10 years and a sex offender tag for Text messages? Download Paper X or Book Y and you can be labled a Terrorist, which even if they don't lock you up can get you on travel bans and have police rooting around your job what is almost certain to get people fired even if no crime is ever charged.

When Gov't and ISPs in "Western" "First World" countries are banning content all over the place under the banners of "Protect the Children" and Anti Terror/National Security? It is only a matter of time before ISPs are forced to log everything for years. They are already capable of it and are limited now only by the amount of storage they want to throw at it. After that it's nothing for gov't to force in even more automated searching than NSA and other agencies are already doing. 

Certain U.S. ISPs are now only going to carry aprooved Usenet groups? Do you think they are going to stop with Usenet? It's just the easy target right now. There is already pressure on Facebook etc to control content and who can use the service.

But you all keep whinning about your petty entertainment issue with DRM. Soon you won't have to worry about it because all there will be is what your Gov't says is safe for you to read/see/hear.

The only thing Orwell got wrong was the year.

I agree with the poster nicknamed 'Anonymous Coward', basically people invented singing, people liked to listen and they started to ask them to perform at gathering and gave them some money or gifts, then they invented records but they were expensive/complex to produce and you needed a way to distribute them, and so record companies came, but now we have perfect copies at no cost and the whole idea which brought the record companies their billions is just dead and they should accept that already, and so do you.
It's like trying to keep the wooden wheel industry from the past alive by outlawing rubber wheels, ludicrous and hopeless.

That was too long for me to read properly, I didn't even skim over it if I'm being honest.

Music etc on the internet and the bands getting their share is an easy to solve problem. Just tell the ISPs they have to pay for any connections that come from their customer's or that ISPs customer will be blocked from downloading the "free" song/movie etc.

The cost of internet providings should include entertainment. Why else would we pay money to isp if there was nothing to download.

Same with games, make them free and let the isp's fund them from our payments.

The more popular something is, the bigger share they get.

Quite simple really.

The Core of all these problems is unfairly small profit-slice given to Artist or Creator in old business formula. If artist ONLY Receives less than 5% of profits, then he should try to sell CDs (or songs) directly to us (listeners) for about 5-10 cents a song, and this whole problem will disappear. 
The issue is a BIG-Four know than, and they are trying to prolong old completely ineffective business formula from Artist’s side as LONG AS THEY CAN. 

I like the article and it reflects a lot of my views. The main reason there will be no uprising against the foul practices of these companies is simple. The vast majority of people who own and use computers have no real idea or understanding of what is really happening. Mainline news outlets never cover items about chips in your Pc controlling what you do. They dont mention the laughable antics of the RIAA or have any serious output on DRM. If you want a revolution you need to get this information out to the masses. Mainstream news outlets such as the BBC etc need to discuss this in an open and serious manner. Without this knowledge most people will carry on oblivious to the actions of the RIAA et al.

As much as I love reading conspiracy theories, they do tend to repeat one another and unfortunately for my reading experience - to crack down on major points.

For me, it's all about the point of view. And that is: you don't like something - don't buy it. The only conspiracy there is that some major organizations try to shape up the software/multimedia PC market to be either more profitable or less pirated, but that is something for which we, consumers are definitely guilty about...

Then the reason people don't buy CD's like they did a decade ago is much trivial - they prefer to choose specifically their songs, not buy a whole bunch of crap just for the one hit they heard on the radio. Ofc. there is the Internet factor - "just click and listen" can beat any other distribution method, but that does not justify the »authors' greediness and laziness when they try to "sell" us songs made in no time, out of nothing. Which nowdays is the major factor that drives the audience, hence profits out.

About those pesky integrated hardware multimedia protection chips, I think the point is to drive ppl out of the PC multimedia towards the home entertainment systems and game consoles. Which are much profitable and by now alot easier for both developers and consumers to use.

You want cheap/free? Use GNU/GPL software, watch HBO (at least it is cheap, tho arguably entertaining), listen to online streaming radios, play free online games. You will always have these options...

I must say, this is an awsome piece of writing - hitting all the good points etc etc. Lets hope the people behind all those laws and DRMs and whatnot happen to read it too.

It's not as simple as consumers and producers, the majority of us are both (ie I'm an engineer + open-sauce programmer, and I buy stuff). The only "consumers" are those that live exclusively off others labour, like those living off of "return on investment"?

Also, at times, it seemed like you were equating copyright infringement and stealing, but they cannot be the same, one can only steal property (and "IP" isn't property). It's just that we break the well-analysed business models when we share.

The RIAA/MPAA crowd simply takes advantage of current law to enforce artificial scarcity. If, thanks to the Internet, no real information scarcity exists anymore, the cost of sharing/duplication is almost zero, (unlike with property), maybe we need to redraft the laws?

without sharing ideas humans still would live in caves. acordingly to riaa internet is illegal,

Does this mean I have to delete the music collection I started back on dial-up with napster?

and how about the time I got banned from napster for downloading Metallica..... when I friggin hated Metallica!

Or how about the time I bought an album from cmt canada only to be unable to download digital rights...... apparently I just rented the music, and didn't own it even though I shelled out 10 bucks to buy it!

I think I'll have to sleep on the fate of my music collection! :)

Good article, too bad everything is true.

Truth is, some people want money, other are just stupidely naive. For exemple I know a guy having a job in IT who think downloading music is "evil". For him I am a thief simple as that. However, I still buy much more music that he does and more games etc ... 

So who hurting the industrie the most??

ewe guys are being silly ;)

Hi there!
You are touching several important aspects related to internet, the free/controlled distribution of information on internet, intellectual property and moral rights, technology implications, etc. A few of the topics “en vogue” in the last years are centered on the losses generated by illegal use of software and media products by using file sharing applications, facts more or less exaggerated in the news and debated in the blogs. There are many reference points like Napster’s bankruptcy, the Donkey servers’ shut-down, and as you pointed out ISPs (Internet Service Providers)’ adhesion to copyright holders that happens not only in Europe but also in Japan and I think also US. Software and music piracy existed also before the boom of WWW, though not at the same scale and variation of implications.

I find the complaints of the important music producers and software vendors a little unrealistic as long they are doing less than expected/needed in solving the current problems, of finding an equilibrium between manufacturing and product costs, customers and own needs. Companies are profit orientated, that’s not news, though they are doing less in identifying customers’ needs and allow more buying flexibility. They can weep for the huge amount of losses caused by file sharing, but totally ignore that they reach more possible customers in this way, a broader market, and faster popularity of their releases. Somebody who likes a song or an album (especially fans) more likely will buy the album, while for the ones more selective, why buy an album when there is only one or two songs he likes? Same aspect related to e-books, and here I can express my frustration that many technical books are not so professional written as pretended, however I have to gladly admit that services like on-line libraries or publishers started to allow limited preview to their publications, and this in context in which online purchasing was lacking for many years in the so useful sensorial evaluation of products possible when buying a product in a store. 

Within this context, I’d like to add the case of software products. Is not a secret that many vendors make money from customers’ credulity in products’ capabilities, center their sales campaign on buzzwords without actually demonstrating products’ capabilities in any acceptable form. That’s common practice, though software products come with a EULA (End User License Agreement), which includes a “Disclaimer of Warranty” in formulations like “this software is given "AS IS", without any guarantee certain or implied” or “The software is licensed ‘as-is’. You bear the risk of using it.”. Often you buy a software product without any warranty that it will work on your platform, run eventually from one issue to another, while vendors support is out of question, too poor or too costly. 
Software’s quality is another issue, the important number of defects in software products is not Science Fiction but reality, each product requires a certain time in order to reach an acceptable stability, that’s often done on customer’s expense. Add to it the learning and adoption curves, life time, portability, interoperability and we can get a better picture of the whole complexity. 


Is also the fault of organizations acting as mediators or indirect counterparts in this conflict between software vendors and media producers on one side, and the users on the other side. I consider important the lack of technological and legislative infrastructure required for efficient controlling mechanisms; both require time and effort, their evolution being strongly correlated. Unfortunately the legislative infrastructure is created too late, when the issues become a social danger or the pressure from vendors becomes powerful enough, its outcomes being altered by political ambitions or group interests. It is interesting how much customers’ rights are or will be respected. I hope that the controlling mechanisms will not infringe direct or indirect citizenship rights like freedom of expression, equality before law or the privacy of life, home and correspondence. 

WOW what major record label pays 20% to their artists!!1!!??/?

I have to bitch about that point : artists often see less than 5% of the gross of CD sales, and even then they will only see such a large amount as 5% that much after the second or third or eighth major album - record companies often tell new artists all the money comes later, pay them bugger nothing then pretty set them up to be one-hit-wonders. Throw in that often have very creative accounting with costs, and the fact they own the industry almost all the way to the record store they can extract revenue at any point they please and you really feel little guilt in piracy because your mostly hurting one of the most dishonest industries on the face of the planet and only mildy hindering artists that should have gone with a indie label anyway...

I have a friend who is a recording artist who was offered a contract with [censored!] 1% of gross. Naturally he's going to indie labels to look at getting 20 times as much...

wow! my eyes glazed over reading the first paragraph on this article!.

Award for the longest article ever to be written on the inquirer (can't say if the content was any good as I couldn't bring myself to read it all )

:)

I loved your paper a lot. It goes back to what made the human species to rise and rule the earth: solidarity.
Unfortunately, that's a cuss word for big companies and right-ists who scream "socialists" at the mere suggestion of solidarity behaviour.

Guess it's time for me to stop being a no life internet weirdo and start doing something useful with my spare time. That's OK. I was getting pretty sick of staring at TV’s and monitors like a slack jawed chimp. 

Perhaps I’ll go to the library tonight and check out a good book which can be discussed with real flesh-and-blood people over real drinks in a real pub this weekend. 

Time to move on.

sj


Obviously you have never seen an Uwe Boll movie. People like that don't deserve our money, they deserve pity.

Don't trust software that doesn't trust you.

Don't buy dongle-protected, DRM-infested crap, etc., and it will quietly disappear. No sense in publishers trying to sell things people refuse to buy, eh.

Stick to your guns, folks!

What a great little article, if only we could all stand up the vole machine! But they make it so difficult!

I am an artist.

I make very little money.

I give away a lot of art for free on the web.

When I first heard about micropayments way back in the stoneage I thought:

What a brilliant idea.

A card with some cash on it.

Just a little, like a digital pocketbook.

If someone steals it you lose a bit of cash. Not your identity and all your bank accounts.

The card need not hold any identifying information whatsoever.

Money can be transferred into the card with internet bank or ATMs.

You have a cheap $20 card reader on your PC.

With it, I could donate money to artists I like but whose CD is not in the stores. Like Buck 65, I like Buck 65. If he had a website with his music on it, or even just a website with a picture. I could donate him some money and download the CD on torrent.

Or Zokurov, I like his movies very much but they're difficult to come by. I feel like giving him some money.

And me.

There are people who enjoy my work, some of which would probably be willing to part with five bucks now and then.

But I don't have a website with paypal or VISA, and when I buy something online, there's this whole procedure.

It's much too complicated.

And unsafe.

Phishermen everywhere.



What I'm saying is the distributors has to go. The exact same thing Valve realized when they decided to sell Half Life 2 themselves. No middleman. Ofcourse, they went into the whole authorizing thing and I recently spent a month away from the internet. Steam wouldn't start. That sucked. Fortunately I had my old pirate copy of the original Half Life, which I by the own a proper copy of, it's just annoying to keep a lot of physical discs around. So on with the NoCD crack.

Yes. I fully agree, piracy is good, as a starving artist there is a limited amount I can spend on other peoples art. The internet gives me access to millions of songs, movies, games. I have been inspired by art I would have never experience but for the internet. My horizon have been expanded. My art has grown and matured into directions that once seemed inconceivable.

We, the artists, and we, the consumers, need to get together and work this out. And leave the corporations out of it.

Imagine a movie, say, funded by fans, fans acquired by making a little bit of it and posting it online for free. Fans will want the finished product, and for the finished product to be made perhaps millions of dollars will be needed. But a million fans donating a fiver each ought to solve that problem. And there are a lot of users on the internet, a zero budget video like Chocolate Rain gets twenty million views in a very short time. If every hundreth person who saw it dispensed with a dollar for the pleasure that would make the artist a nice living and encourgament to better himself.

I believe it is possible.

I believe we no longer need big corporations to fund art.

And we definetly don't need DRM and the DMCA.


And excellent article. I'll have to finish reading it during lunch.

We have become marginalized as niche communities. Those of us who recognize the affront to our freedoms that digital copyright law has become are such a small minority of the general voting public, that we are essentially nonexistent. 

A lot of people don't look further than two inches from their own face, how can they look two years, two decades down the road? They don't care because they don't reconcile their actions with personal responsibility. If that sounds to you like Generation Y or X, I say it also sounds like the core of the Baby Boomer generation and every generation of humanity that has ever come before.

That kind of explains both the cause and effect there.. on one hand, a group wholeheartedly steals, which forces certain repurcussions. It's easier to steal if we think we won't get caught, et cetera. On the other hand a group doesn't care about gov't meddling and protections, goes on consuming and living the real life and otherwise not caring, which begets another spate of repurcussions through lost liberties.

How have we come to this? The governments that protect us, make us dependent upon the governments. We believe something is looking over our shoulder, guarding us. What if that guardian angel turns out to be half the problem affecting us? Gee, nobody's ever explored that subject before in books or film, have they? : )

Gov'ts have their place, they certainly are useful in disasters and grouping like needs, but individually, each of us could stand to be thinking leaders and not affected followers....

Before the internet, there was no cheap way to distribute content. So a whole industry grew up - at all levels, each making his or her little bit of profit - to provide this service. And that all adds up to a *lot* of profit.

The internet has changed all that. But that industry is now old, and mature, and entrenched. And it wont give up its profit easily. Yes, it is doomed, but its death throes will injure us all. It was ever thus.

And there are those who would exploit this situation for their own ends. Buy our content protection system! It will STOP PIRACY! We *need* ID cards! They will STOP PIRACY! et cetera, ad nauseam.

And then there are the "useful idiots", who will believe everything theyre told and support the manipulators and support the fat cats with their broken business model.

And the artists?

Meh. Who cares about us?

As much as I admire the spirit of the article I cannot help but notice a touch of paranoia.

If you consider that no peoples in the history of the world ever remained conquered...It's probably a safe bet that microsoft, IFPI & or the war against terror will manage to subdue our lively spirit.

For a company like microsoft; users are the very worst of all possible threats. One day they love it, another they hate it.

Vista is not liked by most people...the vole did a lot to make it sell...but it didnt.
Now imagine for a moment that most users felt they were aggressively forced to have vista, can you imagine the backlash of hundreds of millions of people?

Trust me when I say that the RIAA, MPAA & the rest of them are playing with fire.

One wrong move and the swarming of angry users will cripple them. Just imagine for a moment what happens when 100 million people decide to LEGALLY act in protest against one of them.

Let's say each of us writes a letter, you know, a paper letter. What would a company do with 100, 000, 000 letters?

It's not even funny what would happen if even a fraction of the internet population would get angry and focus that anger.
Ask any successful game developer that had some bugs to deal with...the insults, the blogs, the emails, the refunds, the manpower to deal with it...

While mobsters in disguise think they can muscle people into submission, with threat of legal charges, can delude themselves all day.

If you could get something for free, or if you had to pay for it, what would you choose?

Currently there is some sort of balance. I have the chance to sample almost any program/game/movie I want & I can LATER decide to pay for it.

Now a company with a crap product that is trying to save its bacon with some fancy advertising simply cannot get my money.

How many times did I go to the theater and seen a movie that was crap despite the trailer being awesome??

What about the annoying kids in the back row or the once in a while interruption during a premier?

How about the 15 crap songs & the 2 good ones on a CD?

Well this can go on for quite some time...but let me say this...we the consumers are we the pirates are we the CUSTOMERS!

The customer is always right. You cannot demand respect, you earn it.

The more pressure big companies put in the form of DRM/copy protection the more ways consumers will find to circumvent them.

The people designing copy protection are outnumbered by the people cracking those protections by a high ratio. Better yet, some people that design the protection also are the ones which break it.

Companies are going to learn the hard way that the old business models need to change, adapt & evolve.

Every company attempts to corner the market if it can. It's a simple matter of profit.
The internet market is big & it seems the users are cornering the companies.

Don't make us angry.

What a surprisingly well written piece!

Thank you for creating this. I believe I'll be sending links to a number of my friends and family to read this page.

It is truly great.