who do you bully?
drm week is apparently over, but i guess i’m not finished…
robert scoble watched cory’s presentation to microsoft on drm.
I want to see us avoid the courtroom if at all possible and avoid situations where we’re bullying anyone.
true, microsoft has a history of avoiding the courtroom, though some of those courtroom-avoidance tactics could be interpreted as bullying, depending on how you frame it.
My reaction? Cory is right. DRM is not something that users want. At least not if you frame it that way (someone in the audience framed it another way, though: do you want your private email protected? How about your medical documents?.
microsoft doesn’t have the option to “avoid the courtroom if at all possible and avoid situations where we’re bullying anyone.” i’d try to write a coherent argument about this, but fortunately, it’s already been done by rob heverly, and through the power of the internet, i can just point at it.
i’ve technically violated copyrights, because i’ve read both scoble’s post and heverly’s posts on the subject. and in so doing, i caused a computer to copy the information from its hard disk to its memory, copy it again, in chunks, to the network, caused my computer to copy those chunks into its memory, and finally, copied to the display and disk cache. so now that i’m done with that criminal act, i’ve left you a link to both, so you can commit the same crimes. that’s probably a violation of the pending induce-act.
so i’m off to a great start at avoiding the courtroom myself. depending on how you count those violations, i’m probably on the hook for more than my total potential lifetime earnings at this point, but it’s fairly likely that i’ll be able to settle for everything i own at the moment – at least that’s how the riaa handles copyright infringement lately. sure, i exaggerate a bit, and i probably won’t be prosecuted for reading things on the internet, unless it becomes important to someone to prosecute me for something, in which case i’ve just admitted by crimes in public. i’m more likely to be arrested for wearing the wrong t-shirt or protesting without a permit or taking pictures. but i digress…
i guess what i’m trying to say here is that microsoft can’t avoid the courtroom (and neither can i, most likely), and it’s big enough that any move it makes in the drm space is going to bully someone. so that leaves the question, for microsoft, in simple terms: who do you bully? who do you love?