That's a nice example of a scenario we should study. Thanks.
---
Raj
On Oct 16, 2006, at 3:50 AM, Nelson Minar wrote:
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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