Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
This headline has been splayed across the IT press sector this week: "Sun Microsystems has launched an ambitious community project aimed at building a universal system of digital rights management based on 'open source' software." But I think the final and authoritative word belongs to (Sun's) Tim Bray: " What all the DRM dreamers don’t want to admit is that 95% or more of the population hasn’t yet encountered DRM, and when they do, they aren’t going to like it. They’re going to scream and scream and scream and get mad as hell and not take it any more. I’m talking about the honest people who play by the rules: they buy a house and the vendor moves out and pulls no more strings. They buy sofas and flowers and wine and paper and the store where they bought them doesn’t try to limit what you can do with them, and when the digital-media vendors try to horn in on this relationship, the response is going to be 'you and whose army?'"

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2024 01:22 a.m.

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