Yeah, I know. I should just give up, accept DRM, and acknowledge that I should not ever have control over my hardware, instead ceeding control to Microsoft/Apple/Nokia/the RIAA/ the MPAA/etc.

No, DRM is an abusive, customer hostile defense that can at worst fail, and at best make life a ***** for legit customers.

But never mind that. I am WRONG for arguing against it. Thank you ysss for pointing out the fallacy of my ways.

n900/maemo 5 is probably our last best hope for 'freedom'

Now I know why the call it step V:The Empire Strikes Back

That's not necessarily so. You can do DRM on mobile devices pretty easily without needing to be totally closed. You can do that by implementing the locking code into the app vs into the downloader.

Look at how JoikuSpot and Sygic did their distribution without OVI. You got a deb, and that deb was totally in the open. To unlock the program you needed a key, which it based on an input string from the device (probably a hash of your user ID and your IMEI). The same applies for SSL: The implementation is opensource, yet the encryption capabilities of it stand and work well.

You can do DRM with opensource, it just takes some thinking and planning on how to do it properly. The question is, will they take the proper route and do it right in an opensource way, or take the easy route of security through obscurity, which in the end is usually not as secure long term.

@wmarone:
Don't get me wrong. As a paying customer I'd love to do away with DRM. But knowing the commercial developer side, I also can sympathize with their concerns. That's why I phrased my last post that way.

If there is a better 'defense' than DRM that the content producer/middlemen can accept, then we can all move on from this mess.

The biggest issue that content producers/middlemen need to acknowledge and learn from is:

Your product will always be pirated. So the real issue is, how many customers do you want to **** off in your quest to protect your product. And remember, some of those customers might just go pirate it (out of spite) or because it's easier than dealing with the DRM mess.

From what I've seen on the PC games, I find Steam's one of the best. It balances DRM without causing too many troubles to the user.

Edit: Some of the things that happened during the Humble Bundle donation/sale were interesting too. Even if the price was 1 cent or 0, people still "pirated" the software. Indicating that it's not price or even DRM that's necessarily an issue. It could even be distribution and methods of advertisement (alot of people were posting links to the download and people who had no clue about what was happening were downloading it).

All of this just shows what most companies advocating stringent DRM don't understand. That piracy is a multi-faceted problem and one hammer solution (e.g. DRM) doesn't work if you don't tackle the other angles.

Well, no, you can't. What Sygic and Joikuspot did is nothing new in the grand scheme of copy control technologies, and not terribly robust. That said, I prefer and respect that means rather than demanding that I allow my property to treat me like the enemy.

As for actual device-level DRM, you can't do it with open source unless you do like Motorola and employ TrustZone to ensure that the system remains in a known state, otherwise you could simply strip out the access controls and roll on.

Their concerns are largely the same as the media companies: they want artificial constraint of supply on something that necessarily has none. While I disagree with piracy myself, I would assert that it will happen no matter what unless we are completely and totally stripped of freedom, and that they should compensate appropriately instead of demanding I knuckle under.

as always, my thoughts can be perfectly expressed by xkcd:

@wmarone: and understandably so, if they're laying out the same kind of investments for big production content as conventional media companies. We're talking about contents with significant production quality that are generally quite desirable and easy to put a price tag on right?

I'm not defending any particular corners because imho each have good/acceptable explanation for their stance, but unless someone comes up with a better drm then current drm then *shrugs*.

Beat me to it!

The honest purchasers are the only ones who suffer the DRM version. The pirates are downloading the DRM-free version.

So DRM can never work, and DRM never makes financial sense for the content producer, no matter how big the investment they have made.