i've been having some deep thoughts lately (deep like a saucer, really) and i just have to get them down before i asplode...
my country (canada, the great white north, where our highest paid comedians sit in parliment) wants to follow the united states lead and offer legal protection to TPM/DRM technology... let's examine what this means, shall we?
the way Digital Rights Management is enforced is through a Technical Protection Measure... it's some bit of technology used to stop you from doing something with the media that the content owners don't want you to do... legal protection for TPMs basically means that it's illegal to bypass the TPM to get at the media and use it in a way that the owners don't like...
what that effectively means is that our copywrite laws become pointless because the government will have given the content industry carte blanche to make policy regarding the copying of media as strict as they like... the TPMs enforce the content industry's policy and the government enforces protection against bypassing the TPMs...
do you think content industry will make balanced and fair copying policies? do you think they'll protect the consumer's rights? do you think the defacto copyright that only releasing content in Technically Protected form represents will ever be allowed to expire? hello perpetual copyright, goodbye public domain...
legal protection of TPMs constitutes outsourcing of policy creation to a relatively small group with a vested interest who are not answerable to public... a government that allows this to happen is either corrupt or incompetent or both...
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