Re: <nettime> The Return of DRM

[Florian Cramer <fc-nettime@pleintekst.nl>]

Hello Felix,

Sorry for chiming in late:

> Fast-forward three years. Increasingly, our data is up in the clouds.
> The decentralized architectures for digital production of the 1990s
> are being phased-out. Google is pushing an operating system (Chrome)
> were all data is being stored online and virtually nothing remains on
> the computer. The device which individuals own is being reduced to a
> relatively dumb terminal. 

Of course it is true that if people no longer keep their files on their
own computers, the issue of open file formats becomes of lesser tangible
relevance for the individual computer user. The industry might even, as
currently the case with Apple, push more open formats such as HTML5
against Flash because the 'issue' that DRM formerly tried to address,
sharing of locally stored files, will simply go away with local storage
of media files becoming a thing of the past. 

But perhaps the implications are even more radical: That, for the
mainstream computer user, the differentiation of files, software and
network service will evaporate; the whole notion of the file may soon
become engineering lingo and be considered an awkward paradigm of an
unfriendly tech past. 

> point here is YouTube. It has morphed from a freewheeling platform
> where users could share whatever they wanted, to a highly controlled
> system, where all content is scanned and mointored for copyright
> violation. 

This is not only true for 'content', but also for software if we look at
the new 'app store' paradigm of software development. If this more than
just a fad, then it's effective DRMing by embedding content into viewer
applications and no longer providing it as files/data, and tying it to
tightly controlled platforms (such as iTunes).

Even outside the app store paradigm, Free Software/Open Source is now
factually dead, or at least irrelevant as a vision for personal
computing, because the computer and Internet industry has efficaciously
circumvented copyleft by using Free Software as a productivity stack
underneath proprietary cloud/web applications and operating systems
from Mac OS X to Android.  

Florian

-- 
blog:     http://en.pleintekst.nl
homepage: http://cramer.pleintekst.nl:70
          gopher://cramer.pleintekst.nl





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