Copyright (DRM in particular) turns us into technology idots and makes us disingenuous too. Consider Leonardo Chiariglione’s reply (“A simple way to skin the DRM cat”) to Steve Jobs’ DRM bashing.
Chiariglione goes out of his way to muddy the waters by
- Including rights expression or rights description (including Creative Commons) under the rubric of DRM. This is not what anyone, including Jobs, is talking about when they dismiss DRM.
- Conflating standards generally and standards with security components in particular, with DRM.
- Pretending there is a non-zero chance of any “interoperable DRM” (where we’re talking about Digital Restrictions Management, not mere description or expression) scheme gaining any traction.
Clue: a skinned cat is dead.
Addendum: Some never learn, see Chiariglione’s Secure Digital Music Initiative, spawned late 1998, dead since early 2001.
I think you make a good point here. Although I don’t want to be too quick to draw a universal from a specific situation, I often find that DRM discussions tend to get confused by a few folks who want to have the debate about whether proprietary rights in IP generally should exist at all. They’re somewhat of the same genre, I suppose, in the same way that Mercury and Saturn are both planets (and I am still mourning Pluto), but I rarely find it useful when someone wants to debate the general proposition that some hold to the effect that “all IP ‘rights’ should be abolished, and therefore everything not consistent with tihs theory is DRM” under the guise of a DRM debate, as opposed to the very real and specific proposition about the wisdom of DRM as it is used in the music industry today.
Mercury is the IP debate, Saturn is the DRM debate, Pluto is the music industry trying to justify its current business model in spite of the fact it doesn’t measure up. :)
CC is Venus, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter. :)
I believe a true loyalist would suggest that CC is the sun itself :)
But CC is moderate and you already established Mercury and Saturn as radical. :)
Sol is pure thought, or something like that.
p.s. gurdonark, listening to your songs to love right now, great choices.
Thanks, Mike. One thing I love about mixter is that it’s really expanded me from a more “pure” ambient listener into someone who now appreciates chill, downtempo, and others of the “upstart” electronica genres, because so many of them are so well-represented on mixter.
I enjoyed putting a playlist together to spotlight some of those, although
my favorite mixter remix of all is none of those genres, but Pat Chilla’s wonderful “Brilliant Daze”.
I’m glad that neither of us has contended that CC is the sun, the moon and the stars, and, for that matter, that no third voice has arisen to point out, with force, that open source is the entire, infinite universe.
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