Lars D. Nood�n wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Feb 2005, Mathias Bauer wrote:
>> IMHO DRM does not necessarily give anyone control of your computer. At
>> first DRM gives *you* control over your content and how it is used by
>> others. For non-private use this can be a useful and important feature
>> even for office programs.
> 
> In order for DRM to work, you must cede control of your computer. 
> Otherwise, circumvention of the technology is trivial.  Read up on how 
> the LaGrande CPU is supposed to work. There is similar work with 
> BIOS (Pheonix) and with hard drives.

(...and some more...)

That's more or less what I wanted to express by writing: The problem
with DRM is that following the common understanding it needs hardware
support to make it safe.

If that means that one gives away control of ones computer is still open
for me until it is clear how the used implementations really work.
Giving away control in my understanding means that this control is taken
over by someone/something else. That must be proven in the products when
they are accessible. I prefer to cross the bridge when I get to it.

But even if I find that those implementations take too much control away
from me I still can decide not to use them and so not use DRM. OTOH this
means that DRM and the hardware to support it are OK as long as there
are other options.

There's too much fuss around DRM.
Besides that there are two valid arguments against DRM I absolutely
agree to:

- DRM can be used to tie your work to a single implementation if it
doesn not use free standards. DRM based on a MS infrastructure would be
a distaster, it might give you the control over your content, but it
gives MS the control over how you create it. This would be the perfect
lock-in.

- It's absolutely unclear if such "free standards based" DRM (and this
is the only acceptable one IMHO) is possible at all. So maybe this whole
discussion is useless. ;-)

Best regards,
Mathias

-- 
Mathias Bauer - OpenOffice.org Application Framework Project Lead
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