- Monday, 16 November 2009
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The husbands of very beautiful women usually belong to the criminal classes - Oscar Wilde
Getting away with freedom
SLOWLY BUT SURELY, our freedom is being taken away, literally speaking, bit by bit. Various factions are investing great efforts into making sure that what we are herded together into a harmless flock of obedient sheep. This is not only about the restrictions that are brought upon us by greedy and manipulative organisations, but also about the excuses they employ in invading our privacy and freedom.
In all fairness, this is not only their fault but also ours. We invite you to an extended analysis on the subject of our freedom. The purpose is not to address blame, but rather to imagine a way to keep our way of life intact. The need to be free is possibly our greatest desire, but we, the consumers, are jeopardising this through our actions and by letting others push us around.
The Internet factor
The Internet is a blessing and a curse at the same time. It helped advance our
culture and technology in ways we didn’t dare imagine 20 years ago. It also
facilitates sharing content in ever-increasing quantities. The need to shut down
some of this traffic is what drives trade groups such as the Repressing
Information Association of America (RIAA) or its international counterpart, the
Initiative for Forceful Prohibition of Information (IFPI).
For most of us, the Internet brought a wealth of information beyond our wildest dreams, and access to endless games, movies, music and porn collections all around the world. We can now sample at leisure the products that we want to buy. From the comfort of our homes, we can decide what’s worth it and what’s not. But what about the creators of all this? The musicians, actors and developers who all invested their talent and countless work hours into a product.
They have to live too, right? Does the Internet help them? Arguably, it’s more like a curse for the majority of them. This is because some people did not yet reach the maturity required to show the respect which is rightly due to the effort invested in the products they enjoy. Maybe some will never understand this. And let’s not be unfair, some simply can’t afford to pay for art.
One of the biggest problems here concerns the record industry and the companies which deal in distribution. How much do you think an artist gets when you buy a CD album? 60 per cent? 50? 30? No... less than 20 per cent goes back to the people who actually created the music.
Is anybody going to tell us that producing an album, from the record company’s point of view, is so expensive as to determine it to return less than 20 per cent of the profits back to the artist? Come on, we’re talking about renting a studio, stamping some songs on a piece of plastic and distributing it. This is the worst case of leeching in the known Universe. The truth is that most of the profit goes into the pockets of greedy companies.
The same stands true for most content which is not distributed directly by its creators. The leeches between the authors and the consumers suck most of the revenue, forcing consumers to buy less and artists to starve. This is one of the driving forces of piracy, the ridiculous prices. If a CD would cost half its current price, it would be much easier for people to show more support for artists. Or if the percentage received by the artists was greater, there will be less pressure from them. But that’s not what the distributors want. What they want is to keep the artists fighting for bread crumbs, so they can have the moral support to suck more out of us.
To make matters even more complicated, for a certain person, some artists might be more important while some others, not so important. And this brings us to the necessity of sharing: it helps to popularise music, movies and software products. The next step is that some users will decide that a particular product is worth buying.
There is music you can’t find or listen in your neighbourhood store. There are movies which you can’t sample before you buy them and there are software products with unsatisfying trial periods or insufficiently functional demo versions. This is the reason why sharing is good: you can truly find out if something deserves your money or not. After that, you can buy it, online or in a store.
We live in an imperfect world and that is why some people will never be able to afford some things. Even so, they practically steal it, by downloading and never paying. However, this is what drove IT booms in many countries from the Eastern Europe and other parts of the world. Countries that now contribute to the world economy. Countries which now help solve problems.
How do you think a student can experiment in his or her free time with an expensive product in order to learn using it and gather experience? A pirated copy is the only way and the plain truth is that it helps. Piracy helps. That’s right. Piracy helps development of communities with little or no funds, piracy helps popularisation of products and piracy even helps recovering lost data which you legally owned. The problem is the exaggerated proportions at which piracy has risen in the past few years.
So who can say if piracy is good or bad? As long as certain groups have no profit from it, why condemn them? Still, it is the creators who suffer, make no mistake. But they also suffer because of the greediness of their distributors. The situation is very complex and all sides involved are right and wrong at the same time.
The people who suffer most from all of this are the artists and the consumers. But the distributors know they can double or triple their profits if they convince people to sell their furniture and kidneys in order to buy everything legal. Nobody will agree with paying for every form of electronic product, that’s a fantasy.
Even if you completely turn open source, there probably are movies and music you experience without paying. Is this a crime? Of course it isn’t. Not when you dedicate a reasonable portion of your income to supporting artists. The only result which will be reached by strangling people into not being able to listen to music, see movies or use programs without owning them, will be a slow-down of the entire industry.
Even more, as far as software is concerned, it might even lead to a serious decrease in the skills of IT professionals. Do you know how many computer programmers grew up with pirated products and learned their first steps using illegal copies of programs? A lot.
It’s time for the leeches that asphyxiate the industry to wake up and start doing something, too. Herding the consumers into a buying frenzy won’t work. First off, money doesn’t grow on trees. And there will always be a way to counteract the tyrannical measures which are imposed on us or are about to be imposed on us.
Legal concerns
Recently, the electronic watchdogs have started enhancing their influence and
power. There are plans of direct collaboration with the Police of several
countries. This paints a bleak horizon where you can end up with stainless steel
bracelets when you happen to download a cracked version of Bioshock,
just because the game’s copyright protection system is so excruciatingly
annoying that it forces you to install it in any way other than the legal way.
Each year, the crackers manage to overcome last year’s protection. Each year,
the paranoid studios attempt to come up with the next-generation security
mechanism. Unfortunately, it’s gotten to the point where this paranoia is
hurting the customer.
You need an internet connection to activate a game and, if you’re lucky, you can even play it after a few tries to unlock the product you legally bought. But the increase in the complexity of the protection results in an increase of the chance of something going wrong.
Such was the case with countless games last year and this year. Another game which comes to mind is Mass Effect. There, Electronic Arts practically begs us to pirate the game, as after three activations of the software, you will be forced to buy a new key. The reactivation is mandatory if you reinstall the game or change a hardware piece in your system. How revolting is that? There are people who change hardware often or reinstall their OS often. You can have at most three such changes. After that, it’s back to the store, you sucker.
Considering the fact that virtually nothing is impossible to crack, this will simply increase the need to have pirated copies of games. What Electronic Arts and other greedy giants do is encourage piracy. And piracy is what they’ll get.
After the apparition of the DMCA and similar laws all around the world, things have really started tumbling down when it comes to our freedom. The RIAA goes from one embarrassing situation to the next, prosecuting homeless people or school teachers. What these wood-heads need to understand is that stopping sharing is impossible unless our world turns into an Orwellian society.
This is a futile waste of money, and most of the time, it only brings misfortune to people who don’t deserve it. Why not invest money into convincing the distributors to stop suffocating both artists and consumers. Why not invest money into convincing people that artists need to live too. Instead of jumping from one ridiculous law suit to the next, why not put some money into legal sharing? Like a paid quota for access to unlimited online content. Oh, wait, in that case, how are they going to relieve us of billions just by moving a bunch of crates packed with CDs and DVDs from one city to another?
It is true that it’s not morally correct to steal art. But if an artist can have a decent life out of the earned money, most will not have any objection to allowing people with less fortunate financial situations to enjoy their creations. It is what we call humane behaviour. And for an artist, it is sheer joy to be appreciated, loved, watched or listened to. Almost all of these people do things out of passion. However, you can’t feed a family with passion only.
Laws are not built for ideal scenarios and the ones who wrote these laws don’t have a clue about how things work in real life, nor do they understand all the consequences of sharing, especially the positive consequences. And let’s be very clear about this, most of the people who write these laws, are rich individuals with no interest in the real workings of the world. For them, passing a law is very easy, even if we, the ones who voted for them, are all against it.
Technology concerns
People living in technologically-advanced countries suffer most from the latest
rules clamping down on our freedom. From this point of view, it is better to
live in the eastern part of Europe. At least there, the IFPI doesn’t ask ISPs
to shut down or block websites. Such was the case a few months ago where the
major Danish ISP, Tele2, was told to block its customers from accessing the
popular BitTorrent website, The Pirate Bay.
The ISP was forced by a court to reject the requests at its DNS servers. This is a flagrant case of censorship, quite unexpected from a country such as Denmark, it’s a pity they lowered themselves to that level.
Let’s talk about the Digital Repression Mechanism (the famous DRM), this monstrous offspring of Microsoft, Sony and their ilk. Now, this system was supposed to protect artists, right? Of course not, it was designed to suck more money out of us. But that’s alright, because the artists will benefit, too. However, do you feel happy when you have an electronic music collection and you can’t back it up? Or when you lose it all because some dimwit company decides to switch compatibility logos or standards? What about when you buy a legal product and then spend the next five hours trying to make it work. This is one of those cases when the cure is worse than the disease.
And if DRM wasn’t enough, let’s make way for its evil bro’, which may show up in a few years everywhere you look. This is another awful idea spearheaded by the dreaded Volish Empire, and it makes the present DRM look like child’s play. The so called Trusted Platform Module, formerly known as Palladium, is already included in many systems using Intel’s Core 2 Duo or AMD’s Athlon 64 processors. This is worse, much worse than software-based protection. It’s a hardware protection, based on a chip which holds a unique key within it. Fortunately, the broken OS doesn’t have it completely implemented yet, except BitLocker and a few other less dangerous features. But the future holds grim things indeed.
It is said that even through reverse engineering, it will be impossible to pry the key out of the chip. Should you lose your motherboard to an accident, you will automatically lose huge amounts of data. There have been requests by critics to create a so-called 'Owner Override' to the system, which would allow an alternative method of making the chip decode data. Doing so would, of course, grant the owner of the machine a greater control over the platform, and this is not desired.
Even if these chips could enhance the security of a machine by allowing owners to better protect stored data, they would lose much of their financial reliability. Because of this, Microsoft and its Trusted Computing Group totally refused even discussing such a safety feature.
Another questionable initiative by that Redmond Rat is something called 'Digital Manners Policy'. We told you about this, last week. It’s something that will give them a reason to put constraining chips not only in our computers, but also in our mobile phones, in our cameras and voice recorders and pretty much any imaginable recording or noise-making device.
We wouldn’t be surprised if they decide to put 'Digital Manners Chips' into flashlights. As with the other freedom-limiting sacks of transistors, these chips have their good sides, too. For example, making sure that when entering a theatre all phones will be set to vibrate. But what if malicious users can get a hold of some codes and frequencies, so they can mess with your hardware from the distance? We’re on the carrousel of the ridiculous.
Sadly, there is no apparent stop to this freak ride we’re on, except a mass boycott. And to each advantage this technology brings, there are another ten disadvantages.
Moral concerns
Don’t lie to yourselves. There is a disease. The disease is the lack of respect
and morality in a lot of people. There’s nothing new in this, it plagues our
society top to bottom.
Creators of great things are left unrewarded because most people simply don’t realise the effort which is being poured by artists and developers into music, movies and software. Just stop for a second and imagine how many days, weeks, months, years and how many people it takes to create just one minute of pleasure for you.
Focus on this a little: pleasure for you. Something that makes you feel good. Don’t think about the unfortunate ones, the ones who don’t have any possibility to buy that stuff anyway. Think about people who can spare a few bucks for something they love. Maybe think about what you can do to help.
This is where this entire scandal really started anyway: the Internet. Before the Internet, things were really calm. Now, it’s a mess. And we caused it, exaggerating our freedom because of our own greedy and selfish interests. Not everybody is like this, of course, but the majority is, that’s a fact.
It’s too bad, because our own mistakes make us easy targets for those who want to know every website we visit, every move we make. That 'war against terror' is a war against freedom. But the freedom to share should never be prohibited. People just need to think more about the artists.
Remember, always remember, that there is a lot of effort in every song you hear, movie you see and program you use. People just like you, worked hard for all that. And they deserve respect and reward, if you can afford to give it.
Also, people need to fight more against the ones who are trying to steal our privacy and way of life. We need to make it clear to the ones we vote for and the ones whose products we buy, that we will not settle with censorship and invasion of our privacy.
Like in an article Charlie wrote a few months ago, we should all go for sharing using encrypted decentralized trackers. Let’s see then what they’ll come up with to further restrict us. Put video cameras in every home? Maybe a personal prison guard for each of us?
Never forget that in the war against freedom there can be no winning side. Even those who try to constrain and suffocate our way of life will end up in the same bucket eventually. Or if they don’t, their children will. In this issue, what we really need is some maturity in dealing with this situation. And we all created this situation so we have to find the solution to keep things from getting out of hand. µ
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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.
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.
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?
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....
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.

What a great little article, if only we could all stand up the vole machine! But they make it so difficult!
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!
Obviously you have never seen an Uwe Boll movie. People like that don't deserve our money, they deserve pity.
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

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 )

:)
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...
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. 
ewe guys are being silly ;)
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??
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! :)
without sharing ideas humans still would live in caves. acordingly to riaa internet is illegal,
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?
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.
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 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.
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. 
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.
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.
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.
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.