Re: Managing licenses in Gnutella

Am Samstag, 24 de März de 2007 01:53 schrieb Philippe Verdy:
> You want me to drop the acronym "DRM"; what I want is not that, I want to
> give this acronym the true and necessary meaning "Rights Management"; 

I don't want you to drop it, because it is a wrong useage of the word, but 
because you're playing in the hands of thise who pervert the meaning of 
rights management, if you use it. 

You don't have millions of dollars for a marketing campaign to reclaim the 
term DRM, and you don't have civil rights groups who want to reclaim it. 

Instead you'll find, that civil rights groups fight the term DRM altogether, 
and that this is the best way for them to fight against bad practises. 

Most people wouldn't understand "DRM is useful, but what the big media does is 
not DRM but something else", but they understand "When the big media talks 
about DRM, they mean that they want to take away your computer". 

When you now create a DRM which doesn't control the computer and call it DRM, 
you weaken the stance of the civil rights groups, because they suddenly have 
to say "DRM is evil, except this one" or they have to fight you, too, and 
lose their ethical legitimation. 

So you can decide on your battle and think about the battle, which will allow 
you to accomplish your goal easier: Going against millions of marketing 
dollars and against civil rights groups and taking the risk, that you further 
the twisted cause of Treacherous Computing and Digital Restrictions 
Management (I intentionally use the FSF names for them), or taking the 
backdoor and implementing a system with another name, which isn't a red flag 
to everyone who ever read about the DRM which is done by big media. 

If your goal is to cleanse the name "DRM", then you'll have to go against big 
opposition. But if your goal is to implement a license management scheme, 
then you can have it easier by avoiding the name DRM, at least as long as you 
are small enough to be destroyed easily. 

If you manage to make that license management widespread and well-known, you 
can still decide to take a stance against treacherous DRM to cleanse the 
name. 

At least this is my understanding. 

Wishes, 
Arne
PS: I called it receipt, because a receipt is easy to understand even for 
completely non-technical people, and because in germany we use receipts to 
testify for ownership, so the receipt works like a smaller license. 


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]