DRM is like Nonsensical Gun Control
It struck me today that the problem of software, music, and movie piracy is a fairly similar one to gun regulation.
In New York, there exists a law stating that one cannot own two or more handgun permits. Seems harmless enough, until you discover that New York City requires its own permit and does not honor non-NYC ones. Furthermore, acquiring one in NYC is a herculean task that only politicians, and celebrities, and others with a full time legal staff can reasonably accomplish—a form of class discrimination (hear that, Democrats?) in that only the rich and powerful can afford to defend themselves with guns.
But let’s say such a person decides he wants an NYC permit. Let’s also posit that this hypothetical individual commutes into the city every day, living somewhere north of the Bronx—not en entirely unreasonable assumption. Any handgun he’s licensed to carry in upstate New York will never be legally allowed into NYC, and the reverse is also true; if he acquires an NYC permit, he will never be able to take his gun out into the rest of New York State.
This situation is ridiculous. There exists no justification for preventing someone legally allowed to defend himself with a gun from exercising that right in a more dangerous part of the state! It calls to mind the recent incidents in Chicago whereby law-abiding gun-owners who are trying to re-register their guns in order to comply with the law are being turned away because they’ve missed an arbitrary and draconian deadline, essentially preventing them from following the very law they’re trying to be in compliance with!
The New York State Legislature has essentially said, “In response to New York City’s elevated crime rate, we require that law-abiding concealed firearms-carrying citizens give up their ability to protect themselves in that area.” I’m sorry, but that simply doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
There’s an eerie parallel here to the problem of music piracy.
Basically, the music labels have come up with a “solution” to piracy that, so far, people haven’t really taken much of a liking to: DRM. The idea is that digital files are wrapped in a protective barrier that determines what types of uses are authorized; sometimes a server has to be consulted before the song can be played, sometimes it keeps track of the number of times it’s been burned to disc so as to prevent too much copying—those sorts of things. In other words, DRM-equipped songs are intentionally crippled to protect the music industry, the result being that those who follow the law wind up with an inferior product to those who steal it, either out of disrespect for artists or as a protest against DRM.
Those who break the law appear to have more freedoms; in the case of, say, music piracy, the “pirates” are able to transfer their music to whatever device they want, and to edit, alter, or modify their files in any way they see fit; to make as many backups as they want, or to transcode the files to more modern formats. In the case of gun ownership, otherwise legal gun owners who carry their guns with them in circumvention of oppressive laws gain the ability to use their weapons in locations where entirely law-abiding ones do not. Criminals have always done this because they don’t count on getting caught, while the law-abiding citizens who actually respect the law will generally follow it. All this does is increase the ratio of armed criminals to armed bystanders in gun-free zones!
The core of the issue is that these types of restrictions appear to penalize those who follow them because they wind up being able to use their music/guns in fewer instances and places than they should. Meanwhile, those who will always disregard the law like criminals and music pirates wind up with more “rights”—the ability to carry weapons anywhere, or music they can put on any device, respectively.
Sometimes, following the law gets you a worse deal than breaking it. Such laws will inevitably be changed in the interests of sanity and progress. DRM is slowly but surely being abandoned as the computer-literate howl in fury, just as firearms laws are becoming more liberal (as in “permissive”, not “aligned with the Democratic party’s agenda”). But boy what an annoyance it is for the logically-minded man who ever finds himself butting against one such arbitrary restriction.