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By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted June 26, 2010 at 11:26:57
If he trusted the market he'd let us use our iPhones for what we want. He's trusting corporations.
Put aside the obvrious handouts to industry here - big corporate giants which dominate markets diabling functions on their high-priced gizos like the way iTouches and iPhones have been programmed not to use VOIP functions (or else people wouldn't buy phone contracts or use up their minutes). Or how most smart-phones these days won't connect to your own WiFi unless you buy a pricey data plan from them. Or how discs bought for DVD players or game systems in Europe won't work on the same players here. This is theft, plain and simple, being institutionalized under the guise of adapting to new technologies.
DRM just doesn't work. DVDs don't generally contain much more data than CDs (they certainly didn't for years) - the extra few gigabytes of space is just used up by encoding the data to many times its original size to make copying impossible. Though this code was cracked long ago and now even my sister can make backup copies of her DVDs, they still insist on this rediculous waste of space and materials. Or perhaps the perfect example Windows Genuine Advantage (two words of which are absolute lies), which not only fails miserably at stopping me from pirating anything, but also is dug so deep into Windows coding (with the usual microsoft quality) that it consistantly crashes windows systems of people who couldn't pirate a song if their life depended on it. For all too many people, breaking and bypassing DRM software or WGA is the only way to get their computer and music to work as promised - is that going to be illegal now?
Why would any consumer want a copy of a song, book or movie that can be disabled from a central server? That they can't share with friends or even move onto new computers iPods when the old ones break down without re-buying them. Why would a consumer want a file format which is virtually guaranteed to become unplayable at some point due the morons who tried to regulate your access to them? And finally, why would a consumer want to by hardware to play these things which has a pile of its basic features disabled?
"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford
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