Intellectual property Toolkit

Story: Siggraph audience takes Sony to task on DRM

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Greater choice?

I guess they mean to say: greater choice within the boundaries and how we see fit.

That's not choice. That's control.

If you take a bird and lock it into a empty cage one can put all sorts of toys and gadgets into that cage and claim: look, more choice. But in reality that bird is under your control. Ready to be conditioned by only feeding it what it likes when it does the tricks you want it to do. And if it doesn't? Well, let it sit. It's not going anywhere.

Moral of the story. By restricting the natural desires one can introduce unnatural desires. Same applies to market mechanisms. Even market requirements to be able to function as desired. In short, the expected and assumed natural behaviour of a market. So take away the ability to behave natural and thus gain control to enforce unnatural (unexpected, not assumed, undesired) behaviour.

What is DRM? The cage around the (data/audio) content you have access to. And thus the means to make you perform all sorts of tricks just to continue to have that access. Don't like? What are you going to do? Start over?

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