The DRM debate to me is like the gay marriage debate: A dangerous diversion from a deeper more widespread, and more pressing problem.
(In the case of gay marriage the deeper issue is why we permit the state to regulate what is essentially a religious ritual in the first place. Marriage should not exist in any official capacity. It should not be an official status any more than the state of your baptism. I should not get a tax break or hike for participating in any religious ritual.)
In the case of DRM the deeper problem is intellectual property law (IPL) itself. DRM is part and parcel with IPL. The reason the anti-drm groups look frankly small time and a bit whacked out fringe is because of where they are attacking the logic chain. To the pro DRM crowd they are the enemy, and to the abolitionist crowd they seem like collaborators or traitors of some stripe. The anti-DRM movement seem to be a walking contradiction because if you assert or imply that IPL itself is ok, then the logic of DRM is quite sound. If on the other hand you assume that logic is bogus, then why are you limiting yourself to opposing DRM?
Anti-DRM groups by their very nature seem to imply a compromise. They suggest that the phenomenon of selling copies, selling strings of numbers, patenting numbers, is ok. They seem to say it’s just that how those laws are enforced that’s the problem.
They seem a little insane in their level of compromise. Whether or not that compromise is practical and wise politically is a separate issue. It would be like segregation era black arguing that the policy isn’t the problem, just the police violence that occurs when its enforced.
And if you think for one second this issue is trivial because games and movies, I remind you that these exact same laws apply to drugs and the food supply. Where do you think the drug companies got the legal framework that lets them charge what they want to whomever they want? Where do you think Monsanto got the idea of a terminator gene?
Compare anti DRM efforts with the people attacking the correct root, the hardcore abolitionists and the full on pirate party types who assert that the whole business model is unjust and more than a little insane. They somehow seem more serious, more credible. And there’s a whole lot more of them.
The reason a conservative 1% rules the world is because their opposition is by definition fragmented. There is only one status quo, one way it is, and there are a million different directions we can progress in.
That will always be the case, but you could at least get the progressives of whatever strike to be more effective if you could get it across to them that root problems are the ones worth curing.
