He does go on and, like creationist theory spouted to pentecostals, Cory Doctorow’s anti-digital rights management posts like the latest at Boing do quite well with the right audience – but he really does not get the reality of the law of copyright that he lives within. Science fiction is much more compelling than legal fiction when you get right down to it.
Earlier versions have wallowed in illustrastion without clear definition of the point being illustrated and, as a result, verges on Winerian anti-thought. Like most writers of fiction and software, he seems to like a world of absolutes and result, finding the practical, actual and traditional uncomfortable or, with today’s introduction of the “straw-man” retort, hypocritical. Unfortunately, all he is doing is slagging the way the world really works and saying how bad that it. That is not the deepest of analysis and really gets us nowhere. Consider this:
The final straw-man here is about whether DRM is “too restrictive” — whether it impinges on “reasonable expectations.” But that’s not what anyone in this fight actually is arguing about. It’s about the ability of the studios to change the rules of the game: whether the factors that influence your purchase today are subject to change later. Not whether the device is too restrictive today, but how restrictive it might someday become. What are the anti-features of the device, the technologies that can be used to remove features you enjoy today? That is the question, not “how restrictive is the DRM today?” If you believe in markets, in making money, in providing shareholder value, in all the cant of capitalism, then this is the question you should want to see uppermost in the minds of “consumers” when they make a purchase decision, because that is the only way that the market can “correct” DRM that overreaches.
People simply do not monitor the effectiveness of their purchases in this way. Think about it. The greatest success in terms of a digital device recently is the iPod which provides the user with a quality of sound greatly below that which was avalaible from the 80s Walkman and the 90s Diskman. But no one cares. The consumer buys because iPods are new and because everyone else is buying them. This is the sort of thing he does not think about – the disposability of most things, especially quality and performance in the mind of the western consumer. Yet it is a cornerstone of the market. And the wise vendor will use that to control and protect content will also maximizing sales. There is nothing new about this.
His ideal of consumer freedom to the point that owners of things should not be able to control their assets has gone mad with Doctorow, all in the name of doing whatever can be done with content regardless of whose content it is. This removes him from a realistic analysis which is compounded by his somewhat sweetly naive view of how people make decisions and how much they care about their digital assets. New economy thinking…and that is a slur.
