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Re: W3C standards and the Hollyweb

2013-04-29 17:01:29
From: mrex(_at_)sap(_dot_)com (Martin Rex)

DRM system are evil in any way you look at it.

Originally, copyright was a conceived as a temporary (50yrs) monopoly.
The protection period has in recent years been prolonged in many years
to at least 70 years.
[...]

I read an analysis somewhere that pointed out that DRM is evil in
considerably different ways than one naively thinks.  You tend to
think of DRM as a way of enforcing copyright.  But the real power of
DRM is in effectively eliminating the "right of first sale".

Currently, once you've bought a copy of a copyrighted work, you have
bought a physical object, the "copy", and that ownership gives you a
bundle containing a considerable number of rights, including the right
to sell the copy to someone else.

The real economic purpose of DRM is to be able to subdivide the bundle
of rights traditionally associated with the "copy" so that they can be
sold and priced individually.  Even better, since the "copy" may no
longer be transferrable between customers, different customers can be
charged different prices for the same thing.

The net effect is that the work creators can get larger aggregate
sales for the creation than before.  Which may or may not be a good
thing.  Wikipedia has a long article, "Price discrimination", on this.

Dale