This page is a crtique of an article proposing "open source" drm
The problem with middlemen
Well I guess that last point isn't quite correct, you legally cannot consume any sort of content without permission from the copyright holder, but in most of cases Amazon or Google or Apple or whatever other company is not the copyright holder, they are just middlemen who handle the distribution of digital media and the digital rights management.
If you have a basic understanding of economics you should understand that eliminating the middleman is good for everybody. A few months ago a friend of mine told me that a game I was interested in buying was 20% off, so I logged onto Steam* (the largest digital distributor of PC games) and saw that it wasn't on sale there, I told that to my friend who then said that it was on sale on the developer's website so I went there and bought it there 20% off. At the time I did not appreciate how smart it was for the developers to do that. Steam takes a 30% cut of all sales that take place on their platform, had I bought the game on Steam at full price the game's developers would have only gotten 70% of the money I paid. I instead bought the game at 80% price directly from the developer so even though I paid less money the developers ended up with more money since they didn't have to share any of it with a company that had nothing to do with actually developing the game.
It is always good to eliminate middlemen. When I was on a mission in the Philippines all of the shops we bought food from got their eggs from local chicken farmers, most of the shopkeepers were also very nice people and would tell us the supplier of their eggs if we asked them. Once we knew the supplier we'd switch to buying eggs from there because we could buy them at the prices the shops did. We saved two to five pesos per egg doing this. You should seek to do this too in any situation where it is practical, even if the supplier charges the same amount for a product that a shop would it is better to buy from them because 100% of what you paid would be going to the people who actually made the product.
My proposal
So how do we eliminate the middleman when it comes to buying and selling digital media? As I stated above the middlemen in these cases are responsible for two things distribution of the media and digital rights management. The distribution of media is easy, everything is just a computer file, everyone with an email account is capable of sending a file to someone (although that would not be the best way of doing it). Digital rights management is the thing that the average person currently does not have the ability to do. This is why we need to have a free and open source piece of DRM software.
Anyone who is fully engulfed in the free and open source software movement would have probably gagged at such a proposal, in fact the title of this article is total clickbait for these people since the philosophy behind that movement and the concept of DRM are mutually exclusive. But like all man-made philosophies this one has its flaws. While it can easily be argued that any software that is to be used as a tool should be open source, this argument does not translate over to the arts. There are plenty of companies that will commission software developers to modify a piece of software to better fit their needs, but good art these days is not made by commission. We do not live in the Renaissance, patrons are not approaching artists to do work for them, artists are approaching common folk asking for patronage. Richard Stallman is not a prophet, he was right about some things but wrong on a lot of others.
What I envision is a single application that would have the ability to validate a user's ownership of digital media files that they purchase.
The author proposes that elimating middle men when it comes to distributing digital media is a good thing. Well with that I agree, I disagree with the concept of "open source" drm and it is an oxymoron. When he mentioned about steam taking a 30% cut and the game he was looking for was cheaper else where, I do not see how there is a need to implement a drm system. There are digital games stores such as GOG and Itch.io (which focuses more on small creators) that sell games with no DRM and plenty of games like the Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Hollow Knight Silksong, and Expedition 33 that sold well despite not having any DRM. Just because someone may have put in a lot of effort into an artistic work doesn't mean that it is morally right that they think they should be able to restrict people with what they do after they buy their product. When I buy an apple from a grocery store, the apple is no longer the store's property and it is now mine. With DRM infected media, it is like having the store clerk watch over me after I buy an apple. Richard Stallman is right about DRM since it is a restriction on what you can do with software or media that you bought. The only good thing about an "open source" drm is that you would see how the DRM is restricting you.
How it would work
This program would follow the Unix Philosophy and only have one use, validating ownership. Every user would have an account somewhere (these accounts would probably best be handled similarly to accounts for federated social media sites where users can chose what host their account would be registered in or have the choice to host their own instance to host their account for ultimate privacy) that would have a record of all the digital media they owned. Whenever a user purchases a digital book, movie, or album they would be able to download an encrypted file containing whatever media they purchased. The user's account would also be added to a list of accounts who own that piece of media that would be kept on a server ran by the copyright holder.
When the user would want to view the media that they purchased the DRM program would send a simple query to the server of the copyright holder to validate that that user does own that media. In terms of internet bandwidth conservation this is far superior to streaming because the media isn't being redownloaded every time it is viewed, this is completely viable for people with terrible internet speeds. Once it has been validated that you own the media then your file will be temporarily decrypted so that you can open it with whatever program you choose (granted this program doesn't let you make a decrypted copy of the file). Once you close your chosen program the file would again be encrypted and the DRM software would have to validate it again the next time you wanted to open it.
I feel like in tech spaces, the phrase "Unix Philosphy" has become a buzzword and a meme. It doesn't matter if a program is modular and minimal if it is going to restrict my use of the program. Since "open source" DRM would have it's source code available and if licensed under a copyleft or permissive software license, it would be allowable to edit functions in the source code that would bypass things like encrypting files, needing an online account to access the content, and removing the need that drm'd media requires periodically authenicating "ownership" (in this case it is more like license authentication than actual ownership). If the drm was under a license that didn't allow modifying and redistributing the source code and changes to source code, it will no longer be open source, it would be source available. DRM is based on distrust of users and obfuscation which is the opposite of ideals from the free software movement and even open source advocates talk about. Even with closed source DRM, it is not foolproof. For instance if a game is using Steam DRM, it can bypassed easily with goldberg emulator (or gbe_fork) which emulates functions of the steam api that the game expects. There is a program called Steamless which removes the Steam drm stub in the executable file in the games that contain it. Recently even games with very strict DRM such as Denuvo have been cracked in the case of Sonic Colors and Persona 5 royal.
Offline use
The first question you should ask about this sort of system would be, "What happens if I want to do this when I'm not connected to the internet?" This question is something I ask about every program I use so this was not something I neglected when thinking this up. All the decryption keys will be held by the DRM software on your device, when it sends that query to the copyright holder's server it is not asking for the decryption key, it is asking for permission to use that decryption key. I don't think it is necessary to send that query every time the user wants to open one of these files, instead I think the program should only have to do this once for each file every 30 days or so. If this were to be the case the user would only have to connect to the internet once every 30 days.
Handling things this way would also protect the privacy of users. If the ownership of these files had to be validated every time they were used then the individual copyright holders of these pieces of media would be able to know how frequently you personally viewed their content. If it only has to be validated once a month they would not be able to tell if you viewed it only once in the month or one hundred times throughout the month.
One of the reasons why I dislike DRM is that some DRM's require periodic online connect like Denuvo. One time my internet went out and I wanted to play Persona 4 golden but it wouldn't let me since it would not connect to denuvo authentication servers. Even with a authentication period of 30 days, there are still possibilites that servers go down or people's internet goes down and now they cannot access content they paid for. There was an instance on May 2024 where denuvo authentication servers went down for Persona 5 royal and steam player count went down from 24,000 to 600. He mentions that only requring authentication every 30 days or so is more "privacy respecting". It still is not totally privacy respecting since the people who control the authentication servers would still see requests of authentication to that server since the drm'd program cannot not fully operate locally on one's machine. But even if a drm is "privacy respecting", I will still not like it since it is restricting what I can do with the content I paid for. And is a open source drm'd program really free and open source, it would violate freedom 0 for the 4 essential freedoms of free software for being able to run a program how you wish, for any purpose.
Sharing and selling
I mentioned before that services like Amazon Prime don't allow you to lend, sell or give things to friends. If you bought a digital copy of the Princess Bride that movie is eternally bound to your Amazon account, you can't give it to someone else like you would be able to if you had a DVD copy. It would be great if licenses for digital media could be transferable between friends, or if there were some feature that would allow you to let a friend use your license for a set period of time either defined by the copyright holder or by you the user. A user would simply have to find the correct encrypted file to give them and their DRM software could handle the decryption with your permission.
Users should also have the ability to give their copy of a piece of digital media over to another person like they would if it were a physical object. In this case the user would loose access to that piece of media but the same is true when you give an object to somebody else. If this were possible then you could sell the digital media you have purchased, as far as I know this is not possible for anyone to do (well legally at least). Do you really own something that you aren't allowed to sell.
It doesn't matter if I can share drm'd media if that drm is still restricting my puchase. Do you really own something if it requires periodic online verification?
End of copyright
Another question that should be asked is whether or not the files should remain encrypted forever. I don't think so. The moment the copyright ends on any piece of digital media I think it should be available to everyone. If the kind of DRM software I am proposing ever comes to be it should permanently decrypt any of the files it governs so that users may be free to use, modify, and share it just like any other normal file on their computer. I also think that if a copyright holder wishes they can forfeit their copyright through this system which would have the same effect as the copyright coming to a conclusion would.
How would a function and a system of the DRM being removed after a certain period in an open source drm program work? Each country has different copyright lengths and it would have to account for that. If a DRM expires at a certain point, why have it in the first place?
The end goal
Of course this proposal is not perfect, it has its flaws and there are still questions left to be answered but that doesn't mean they can't be. The ultimate goal here is to eliminate the need for middlemen and other third parties when it comes to purchasing digital media. If a system like this existed creators would not have to share a cut of their sales with companies like Amazon who had nothing to do with the creation of their product. How much more willing are you to buy a piece of art if you know that 100% of your purchase will be going to compensate the artist for their work? How much more art would be out there if artists did not have to jump through the hoops of third parties in order to get their art to the public? How is it that more people aren't talking about this sort of idea to empower creatives?
If it is possible for an individual to produce digital content without outside help, why are they forced to sell it with outside help?
A decentralized network of independent artist and publishers having a DRM system makes them no better than major companies like Amazon, Valve, Epic games, Spotify, Netflix, etc having their own centralized DRM system. It is just that now, the small publisher is now the tyrant instead of Amazon. I would still not like a decentralized open source drm system even if all the money I gave to an artist fully went to them because DRM restricts what I do with my purchase. I do not care if there is more art if it requires a restrictive DRM systems. It doesn't matter if a small artist or a major corporation is enforcing DRM, DRM is still restrictive.
If you look at a post made later by the author, it seems he no longer cares about the ideals of free and open source software. This is no surprise since he was trying to come up with the idea of "open source" drm and does not mind the restrictions of DRM with himself trying to justify it. He switched from using GNU/Linux to a Mac lol :D with himself saying the linux "community" is toxic and entitled with him repeating the NPC meme that Linux is free (as in beer) if you do not value your time. He said he only really started using GNU/Linux due to viewing Luke Smith video tutorials on Youtube.
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