Marketing Begins At Home

I agree completely. We need open DRM-free files that can simply be. It really doesn't need to simple deep down, but it helps. If we want to be able to view a file 50 years down the line, that format better be relatively easy to implement.

Of course, who knows what 50 years will bring in terms of dealing with the computer? Regardless, a spirit of transparency, something most start-ups understand implicitly, will help towards permanence of information. Big companies are only now starting to realize it.

Bill - exactly... in 50 years who knows what we'll be dealing with in terms of technologies but still, all the digital pictures being shot now in .jpeg format, shouldn't there be a way for them to last beyond the next great technological shift?

Not to correct your own comment david, but the point you make in your original post is more interesting than just wanting to view today's .jpegs on year 2055 technology. You draw an analogy to boat anchor radios... you want to view 2055's .jpegs on that good old '05 iPod Photo. That is of course much much tougher than making sure that the DRM we create today is easy to implement in future tech. It means that the DRM we create today is good enough and solid enough and flexible enough and behind-the-scenes enough to remain in use in 2055. So that a DRMed 2055 .jpg can be parsed and licensed on 2005 hardware. That is of course fairly unlikely. :) But it sure would be nice. Of course the simpler solution would be for DRM to be outlawed by then, so that we are using naked .jpegs. Hah! (Of course replace .jpeg with the medium of your choice... .mov or .wma or whatnot.)

"I don’t want DRM - I bought the file, I own it and if I want to burn a CD for my wife, that’s my business."

If you are living in the US or one of many other countries you a dead wrong. Even in age old form of a book, you don't OWN the content. With a book you own that single copy of the book. In most cases, you would be breaking the law even if you copied it by hand on to onion skin. Like it or not, you DO NOT own the content.

Do whatever you want and call it civil-disobedience if you like, but unless the laws change, saying you "own" it is a lie. (BTW AFIK, the old *single copy for backup* dones not even apply to books.)

Ben - a few more cups of coffee and I'll start to actually make sense ;-)

Jorgie - not sure about that ... I don't 'own' the content of any book and can't reproduce it for commercial purposes but I can loan it or give it to someone. I'm not talking about what I can or cannot do legally here, I'm talking about what I should or would like to be able to do... in a perfect world.

Aside from the legal issue of giving your wife an (illegal) copy of a CD[1], how much do you want to pay for all this? Could MS make Word 2020 open a version from PC Word 1.0?[2] Of course; there's no technology challenge. But it costs money to build, and testing it and supporting it costs more money, and it becomes more stuff that critics can complain about when they see how much space Word takes up on their hard drive[3]. PowerBook Word files should probably work on your PC, but the Mac folks want their own radically different version of Word that conforms to Mac standards and best practices, so there are probably two separate codebases -- again, what may seem simple isn't, and it's not free. Copy protection largely went away over time because so many people were paying for the real thing; if most folks start paying for movies and music on their computer, DRM would likely go away too - but it's there because content isn't free. If you like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or Schindler's List or Shrek, they weren't cheap to make, they weren't done by a couple of dudes with spare time and a $1000 DV camera and Adobe Premiere - they're not free.

Nothing is certain, said old Ben, but death and taxes. We may lament either of these, but stuff needs to be paid for, or folks won't build it. Yes, two riotgrrls with a DV camera can now create that not-bad-looking film with $4000 of camera + computer + software - but only because lots of other folks bought so much of this stuff -- paid for it -- that mass production brought costs down and created the innovation behind affordable megapixel video cameras, and editing s/w like Premiere and Pinnacle, and, yes, computers running Windows.

So if you're willing to ante up for your wishlist, rock on. And if you can convince enough others to put cash in the pot, your wishes will come true. But there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

[1] I make my living from IP (software), and my hobby (musician whose band has three CDs out) involves IP, and I like being paid, thank you. I'd probably do the music for free - it's not like I can list Musician at the top of my 1040 form - but it is my choice whether or not to give away copies of my IP. Likewise, it's my (company's) choice whether or not to give away copies of software.
[2]Anyone else remember the plastic disk in PC magazine in '83 or '84 on which PC Word v1 or V2 was distributed?!
[3]I bet Word takes up less space now than it did in 1984 - in percentage of space occupied on a standard HD!

Steven, why do you assume I'm not paying for any of this? I paid to see Lord of the Rings in the theater - all three movies, and then went out and purchased all three DVDs. I paid for every song on this hard drive just like I paid for every CD I own. If I saw your band and liked what I heard, I'd pay for those CDs too and gladly because you deserve it.

We need better auth systems for checking whether or not a user is legit, and also we need to make custom code to stop hackers from simply browsing agents using the 7c exploit!