Videos/Transcripts/ho-license drm.mp4

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38:37 So lets move on to the DRM issue, Eben suggested to talk about it. 38:44 and I think the person who is in a very good and also very delicate position is Arnold, who starts giving his position about this.

[Arnold]

38:55 ok. So at Philips we believe in the view that you should have fair use rights for the content, if you buy something, you should have the right to play it, to use it. And I'm not just saying this because we sell burners and copying machines, but also because it fits in the idea, just like in offline world. If you have content, if you have videos, books, you should be able to copy it sore it in a different location, use them in different places. So I don't think that any of the current DRM systems we have is consistent with that model. So the current DRM systems basically lockup the content and say you can play it only on this one player and if that one player gets lost or burns or you drive over with your car, your music or videos are lost, that is not good. You should have the ability to copy that around in your home. On the other hand, its called the digital rights management. I call it digital rights management because the copyright holder has some rights and if the copyright holder don't want it to give it to everybody then that is the right, current copyright law should be respected.

40:05 So there should be a balance between the rights of consumers and people's right to the content that they buy and copyright holders to say I don't like it with my content buy it from somewhere else. And that is a very delicate situation right now. 40:25 So there are initiatives that we have launched, Amalin and Coral, may be that names are not familiar with you, those are the initiatives that will establish atleast interoparability between DRM systems. It let you say "OK. I have bought this with Apple iPod and now I have Microsoft windows media player and want to transfer it". Traditional DRM systems won't let you do that. We are introducing a system that will let you do that, transfer content from one DRM system to another. I admit, may be it is not a perfect situation if you say DRM is evil, but I think it is a very practical way of working and we hope it will become a success.

[Eben]

41:03 But you see it hasn't anything to do with anything. My dear friend Arnold is showing you why I asked the question that I asked, why do you think this is about music and movies? We are not the Free Music Foundation, we are not the Free Movie Foundation, that may be a problem. I'm not in agreement with everyting he had to say about that by any means, but that is not what we talk about here. We are talking about software and if there is a problem with DRM that is relevant to our conversation then that is relevant to software and he didn't tell you a word about it. So lets talk about it. Lets talk about that for a bit. Here is the problem with ....

[Moderator interrupts]

[Eben]

Is this a debate or something else?

[Moderator]

It is a debate.

[Eben]

Thank you. So let me tell you I want to ...

[Moderator interrupts]

[Eben]

42:00 You get a question mark I promise. He took some time, he took some time to put forward his position. I thought it was a leaky position but irrelevent and now I want to take time to show why.

[Arnold]

Go ahead [smiles].

[Eben]

So the problem with restriction systems is that they require your computer to be under control of somebody other than you. In order to implement it up at layer seven, something that they want to achieve, we could argue what they are trying to achieve at layer seven is a good thing or a bad thing or it should be allowed or it shouldn't be allowed. My problem is that if they are gonna lock you down way back down layer zero inside the kernel inorder to achieve an effect at layer seven, you know what they are going to accomplish, a zillion unintented consequences or at any rate irrelevant consequences.

42:48 If they lock down every layer below the top in order to achieve a result at the top then they achieve a zillion consequences which are none of their legitimate business and which are harmful to our ability to make software.

43:02 It is the fundamental question, you get a computer, you put it on your business network, it doesn't allow you to read it, it doesn't allow you to change it, because if you change it, you are either breaking a criminal law or it is gonna stop working the way it was supposed to work.

43:21 And now it force you to talk to people in a way that you don't understand. And the idea is that you should put those on the table at work and you should bring that home and keep next to your kid who does his homework. WHY? Because we don't want people sharing music and movies in the wrong way. I don't want to talk about their objectives. Their objective is fine or not fine, I only want to talk about the obvious fact that this is no legitimate way to achieve this. We have to protect our rightd, which are our users rights, so we can continue to know what the software does, to modify it, to change it, to use it for its intented purpose without permission if we change it. Thats what we need, when Arnold want to talk about the issue, these are the issues he needs to talk about.

44:14