| Saturday, March 26, 2005 |
20:52 - It's a victimless crime. The only victim is Moe!
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Steven Den Beste writes:
Apple's fix was cracked, and the door is wide open again.
The article has some interesting commentary on the question of whether this
is actually a violation of the DMCA. In principle, cracking DRM is. But what
this is doing is to prevent DRM from being applied. Is that illegal?
Will Apple go to court and find out?
Well, I'm sure they're not going to just push their hats back on their heads and say, "Welp, boys, they got us fair and square. Guess we're licked."
This, and this, are just further demonstrations to me of the human propensity to kill golden-egg-laying geese. Yes, just as "information wants to be free", so the capitalist system is based on the principle of "may the best cheater win", so one can't really complain without being hypocritical. But that doesn't stop me from being disgusted that people will do stuff like this and then try to convince themselves and the world that what they're actually doing is a philanthropic public service.
There seem to be some people who think that some goods are just destined to be free, if only we figure out a nice magical way to get them (never mind that the heavy lifting is done by someone else, usually a big faceless corporation). People steal cable because it's easy (or used to be). Linux users think that if only they believe hard enough, GNOME and KDE and Linspire will become free ubiquitous replacements for evil Windows. Electric car owners smugly think they're protecting the environment, because (as one comedian put it) "electricity comes from magic!" And these iTunes-cracking people have convinced themselves that retail music comes from magic too, and the only reason it costs anything is bloodsucking companies like Apple who dare to try to make money delivering it to them.
No, I don't know a good morally and politically consistent argument to make in favor of a legal ruling on Apple's behalf that would enforce that DRM circumvention be given the same spirit-of-the-law treatment as actual copyright infringement. But I do know that the company's going to do what it can to maintain the viability of its business model, and considering its practical merits in the marketplace, I'm going to root for it regardless of whether I find it ethically justified.
Though I guess that attitude is pretty consistent with the War on Terror, et al...
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Brian Tiemann
