As someone said earlier on tihs list, this discussion is not
theoretical. DRM may be a new issue for geodata, but it's an old and
painful one for music and movies. And it's shown repeatedly that DRM is
a failure for stopping piracy but does a great job of preventing
legitimate users from doing useful, legal things.
People who develop valuable sets of geodata deserve to be paid for use
of that data. How do we create an environment where that happens? Trying
to write software that's a data jails won't work. Creating business
models and that naturally lead to fair compensation will work. And
that's something worth everyone working towards.
Raj Singh wrote:
How do we enforce digital rights in an open, interoperable software
environment?
You can't enforce DRM with open software. No, really. You can't. It's
just not technically possible. So you're left with a choice; try to
restrict it so your data only works on closed, non-interoperable
software. or find business models where your data doesn't need to be
locked up.
The movie industry is going the former way, to the point where we get
absurd things like CPUs that run in a "trusted mode" communicating via
an encrypted channel to the monitor so that some $10 movie can be
displayed in a theoretically secure environment. Meanwhile the pirates
go to BitTorrent and download the movie for free. It just doesn't work.
Don't do that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDCP
It's hard to come up with business models that allow free use of data.
One way is you tax your citizens, use the money to make maps, then
release the maps for free so the whole world benefits and builds value.
Which has worked out pretty well in some circumstances. Other ways
include building communities of people who create annotations, or
building hardware so good that people want to buy your devices to use
the data, or simply putting advertisements on top of the free use of
your data.
There's lots of options that don't require trying to do something
technically impossible and obnoxious. Look for those, because DRM
enforcement technology simply does not work.
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