This discussion has been very interesting, thank you.
Here's my use case. I'm a tourist in Paris. I buy a GPS device from
Gargellan to help me be a tourist. It comes with all sorts of cool data
telling me which places to go, where to eat, some nice walking tours
with useful audio annotations, etc. The device itself is dirt cheap, say
$50, but Gargellan sells me the data on a subscription basis for $5 a
day. Sort of an iPod for GPS.
My fear is what restrictions that device and the data will have on it.
Will I be able to merge in other data from openstreetmap or wikimapia to
augment my tourist wanderings? Will I be able to export the walking tour
I took to Flickr so I can easily annotate my photos? Am I stuck with the
Zagat restaurant ratings that Gargellan made a deal to supply, or can I
buy Michelin ratings too even though Gargellan doesn't like Michelin?
If the GPS device market follows the music player market, I fear the
answer to my questions will be "no". Because Gargellan's business model
will demand that they not let me use the data the way I want.
Cheap-device expensive-data is a very common business model, but it's
technically fragile because it relies on the data staying expensive. For
the past ten years tech companies have increasingly been turning to DRM
to try to keep that data expensive. And DRM sucks; not because I have to
pay (I don't mind), but because I in turn can't do useful things with
the data.
We can be purists and say we will only use non-proprietary devices and
free data. But that's an uphill battle. In the meantime commercial
companies are going to be designing the hardware and software that
ordinary people will be using. Will those products be awful closed
platforms like cell phones? Or open friendly platforms like
pre-trusted-computing PCs? Or somewhere inbetween? The folks on this
mailing list have an opportunity to influence that decision.
A couple of specific points:
Cameron, I'm only talking about the dangers of DRM for reading and
copying geodata. It doesn't worry me at all to have restrictions on
who's allowed to modify the canonical copy of a major database.
SteveC, you and I agree on the fundamental technical problem of DRM.
Where we differ is on whether the futile attempts at enforcing DRM will
matter. Personally, I don't like having to infringe on various laws and
software just to do what I want. And while I have a lot of respect for
openstreetmap and other open data development projects, but I also think
that commercial and proprietary data is too valuable to ignore entirely.
Raj Singh wrote:
One thing our GeoDRM work seeks to support is the ability of towns to
attach disclaimer statement to data, so that the well-intentioned city
staff can post things more freely and at least say they "told"
everyone that those plans were not as-built drawings, and do not imply
that building permits will be issued, etc. So the idea is basically to
make sure that the things you would make sure to tell someone when you
gave them data, are transmitted when you provide the data in an
automated fashion.
That's a reasonable goal, but there's a huge technical difference
between "this data contains an annotation that you SHOULD display" and
"this data contains an annotation that the software MUST display because
our DRM technology can enforce what is done with our data". The former
is good metadata standards and seems like a very useful thing to
develop. The latter is DRM that will be used to screw users. I'm
sincerely hoping that kind of technology is never developed for geodata.
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