p2pnet.net news view:- An article in Red Herring about a company named Widevine says it’s “tried to position itself as the answer to the solution to the vexing conflict between content owners’ rights to protection vs. consumers’ rights to easy access and playability”.

This demonstrates a lack of understanding of the issue.

I have several simple questions for anyone claiming to try to solve these problems:

• Is the hardware I purchase mine?
• Do I have all the tools to make my own software choices for the hardware I own?
• Do I have owner override, or is the hardware locked down against me?
• If the content is encrypted, am I (the customer) given the decryption key, or is the encryption being used to deny interoperability except for devices that have been locked down against me?

There’s no legitimate reason for me or anyone else to trust someone who disrespects me so much as to seek to deny me basic property rights. Companies like Widevine are the moral equivalent of for-profit organized thieves, and it is impossible for them to bridge a gap that they don’t seem to understand.

Russell McOrmond - p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]

Slashdot it!

If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 12:01 pm and is filed under DRM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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