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Napkinini
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Name: Ryan
Country: United States
State: California
Gender: Male
Interests: Christianity (and the obligatory Bible, Jesus, and God)
English Literature
Philosophy
History
Art
Music
Life!
Expertise: I generally like to think I have a degree of experience in my various interests. Except the last one.
Occupation: Quilter
Industry: Napkin
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
3/29/2004
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| The new Napkinini.com at http://napkinini.wordpress.com is sleek and shiny and new and polished and potentially updated more. Pretty soon the paperwork will be filed, and napkinini.com will automatically lead you to the wordpress site. Until then, you can use the link provided.
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| People frequently ask me, after hearing I currently attend law school, what field of law I want to get into. For some people, they know the answer to that question right off the bat. They can tell you what subject brought them into law school and where it's going to take them once they've graduated. Not so for most people, and least of all, me.
I began law school just off of training to teach English, and while I do know one guy who ended up teaching history instead of following up on his tax law credentials, I don't think I want to head back into the education arena--at least, not on the secondary education level.
Not knowing what I want to do out of law school strikes many as odd, and this makes sense. Law school is, in some senses, a professional school married to a graduate school. Different law schools--and even different classes in the same law school--manifest different teaching paradigms. Some focus on philosophical and theoretical notions fueling law and government. Others have an angle of historicity, looking at how judges have embraced and employed (or ignored) laws in their rulings. Finally, others have the angle of "learn this; it's on the bar exam."
One thing they typically don't have is career experience. None of the classes really show you what working a job as a lawyer in a particular field is like. They give you a big slice of the hulking Rhubarb Pie of the Law, but lawyers tend to spend their careers focusing on a tiny aspect of a tiny element of a field of law, a single strand of a legal rhubarb nugget, if you will.
Therefore, it's hard to say what I want to do as a lawyer. As I gain more real world experience outside of law school, I can garner a better appreciation for my skill sets and where I can best serve and edify. Until then, I am keeping an open mind and praying often for insight and guidance. I can tell you what areas of law interest me in the abstract, but not in the nitty gritty of the career.
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| So I wanted to talk about this story, which, in sum, concerns HBO's Chief Technology Officer Bob Zitter and his desire to rename Digital Rights Management, or DRM, to Digital Consumer Enablement, or DCE.
DRM is the umbrella name for technologies which give content providers control over access to content. One example of this is the encryption of DVDs. Another example comes if the form of various copy protection devices with software. However, the most pervasive and pesky are the technologies which limit digital content. For example, the audio you purchase on iTunes is encrypted such that only the purchaser can listen to it on their account and iTunes purchases can only be uploaded onto iPods, not other devices.
DRM's are so named because it allows the copyright holder to dictate the terms on which the content will be made available to the consumer. For the business, this model makes sense: Apple increases demands for iPods by making them the sole device compatible with iTunes downloads. This makes a lot of sense. As does the name, "digital rights management."
It also makes ready sense that those disgruntled with disturbing long-arm grasping of the provider would call DRM "digital restriction management," as consumers begin to feel as though DRM is providing companies with better technologies to nickel-and-dime consumers to death. Now, what used to be one-time purchases have subscription fees or surcharges for bonuses tacked on. Imagine a Goodyear tire with DRM which allowed you to place the tire on a car manufactured by a company which paid Goodyear for that ability, or which would go flat if you failed to maintain monthly "subscription" fees. While some DRM makes sense, it's easy to see how corporate strong-arming can produce such an effect on consumers.
What doesn't make sense is Zitter's hocus-pocus maneuver of introducing the term "DCE." His point is that DRM, well, that just sounds like companies are trying to restrict. But that's not what's going on at all. Companies are allowing consumers to use stuff they wouldn't otherwise be able to. Clearly, Apple would never have provided the world with iTunes if they couldn't keep iTunes content on iPods. Obviously, people are more enabled if they are restricted to their content for subscription periods. And a consumer who is allowed to enjoy their content, unrestricted, after a one-time purchase is the most un-enabled consumer of all.
Of course, Zitter's point is this: corporations aren't willing to provide content for a one-time fee if they can make much greater profits through the application of DRM, er, DCE technologies. In this sense, consumer's are "enabled" to have their content, but such thinking is slippery and misleading, at best (and that's an incredibly lenient best.) This is just like Microsoft's language in Window's Genuine Advantage, Microsoft's way of restricting license and copyright violations, a type of DRM. Don't point out that consumers are hassled and restricted in clever new ways. Instead, use magical happy words like "advantage," "enable," "euphoria," "giddy," or anything else. I can just hear these corporations holding the planning meetings where these ideas are put forward while singing "A spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down." I'm sorry; no amount of sugar helps Robitussin go down, and the only time I'll call a DRM a DCE is when that DRM is not placed on my content.
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| I would like to take this opportunity to point out I would just love to sink my rather stunted teeth into this story on DRM once the finals storm passes me tomorrow. So, until then. Or substantially longer, when I end up remembering I made this reservation.
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GUILTY!