This is the funny part of the question. There is no original content
protected by DRM because the original content gets copied before the DRM is
applied and distributed in its natural pre-DRM state because in the DRM step is
also lossy compression that loses quality and doesn't convert well. People
don't defeat DRM mostly: they make copies of the pre-DRM masters, compress and
encode those. So what DRM protects is the version that is lossy-compressed then
DRM protected version sharers don't want. It's a circular reasoning sort of
thing.
Somebody else has pointed out that the point of DRM is not to prevent
people from sharing content but to assert control over mechanisms of
distribution such as DVD and BluRay. There's a lot of truth in that.
I'm not
a sharer myself but I've been involved in this tech for some decades and know
folk who are busy about this business. While I respect their POV, I'd rather
just pretend the content that its vendor wanted to protect didn't exist. It's
not culturally relevant anyway since it will never legally enter the culture
(forever less a day, continuous extension, &c). It's a deliberately
ephemeral distraction soon to be supplanted by an equally irrelevant distraction
and then be forgotten forever. I've too little brain space left to dedicate
some to deliberate forgettery. I've got more than enough unwanted forgettery
going on already, thank you.
In the US our cultural evolution was moving
forward up until about 1976. Unfortunately then the copyright lobby took over
and rolled back the commons acceptance of cultural works to 1938 to protect
Steamboat Willy. That was the end of cultural progress. Nothing new can now
enter the public domain ever, as the process of extending copyright will
continue forever. Unless we solve this problem, cultural progress is dead for
all time. None of the stories that define, for example, American Literature
post-Twain will ever enter the public domain. All of that is lost to us.
The
purpose of copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts..."
The US Copyright Act is now being actively used to prevent that purpose. This
will continue until we do something about it. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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