capitalist desperation to maintain the status quo of expensive limited supply in a modern age of infinite basically-free 1:1 copying. An attempt to keep the genie in the bottle by jamming a cork in it. Really the genie just leaked around the sides but they'll still pretend the cork works and anyone who tries to take it out gets shot with a gun or something.
- He/Him
I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.
Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.
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in reply to @pendell's post:
It's even weirder than that, once you look closely, because a lot of DRM needs to be trivial (things like supplying keys along with the data stream) so that cheap hardware can decode it without needing a field update every time anybody releases anything. It's not there to try to protect anything, but because the DMCA gives them standing to sue anybody who tries to circumvent their cheap lock.
It would be like if people like LockPickingLawyer could get sued into oblivion by Master Lock for bypassing proprietary lock protection systems in violation of the Analog Millennium Copyright Act.
It's also extremely funny how previous court decisions on things like time-shifting programs in the VHS era and being legally permitted to create personal backups of your software from the floppy disk era has created this bizarre grey market where companies like MakeMKV and AnyDVD are able to legally sell software whose sole purpose is to bypass DRM encryption on blu-rays and such, but so long as they insist it's only for personal use, it's totally legal.
Right? And that mess goes both ways, with file-sharing getting crushed because well technically when you upload something and someone downloads it, transient copies show up on dozens of routers, repeaters, and caches, which means that you're widely publishing it.
And then there's the bizarre history of DeCSS (the software breaking original DVD encryption scheme) that dodged around the DMCA by translating the code into art to claim Free Speech protections...