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Same as always: if you want freedom you have to fight for it.
People certainly CAN stop buying DRM'ed gear, because they can stop buying ANY gear. If it's too dangerous or difficult to liberate Hollywood content, people also have the option to live as though paid movies and music did not exist.
You can use old pre-DRM gear and the industry knows it. Here's an example: they required recognition of DRM content in new video cameras, the result would be high Ebay prices on older 1080P video cameras, used by pirates to record from 1080p screens with a near pixel to pixel match. People shooting only live scenes would sell their suddenly high-value gear to pirates and buy newer gear if they don't care themselves about DRM. The result would be like laws against guns: the entire supply of copyright-busting cameras would go to outlaws.
People do not obey represssive laws. It may be theoretically illegal to install libdvdcss, but everyone does it anyway. If you encrypt your system with a strong passphrase nobody else can even find out what software you are using offline-even after a police raid. You can strip out all the DRM support, install pirate support, and the only counter against this for offline systems would be a legal prohibition on posession of computers with a modified OS, backed with a prohibition against flash drive or removable media support on approved online machines using trusted computing.
It would not take many raids for unapproved software to cause fearful end users to simply discard all computing devices entirely, so the computer industry will always have to fight against laws that criminalize any commonly practiced online activity, as they did over SOPA. Treating torrenting movies like kiddie porn won't put approved DRM computers in people's homes, instead fearful people will discard all computers and possibly also to throw away all music and movies, even if paid for out of fear. Those who choose to resist will encrypt their computers and hide all online activity behind Tor-style networks or even mesh networks.
As someone who publicly refused in 1983 to register for Ronald Reagan's attempt to bring back the draft (for aggression against El Salvador) and dared the Feds to fight over it, I will never be afraid to defy laws about DRM, codecs, etc!
Originally posted by brosis
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You can use old pre-DRM gear and the industry knows it. Here's an example: they required recognition of DRM content in new video cameras, the result would be high Ebay prices on older 1080P video cameras, used by pirates to record from 1080p screens with a near pixel to pixel match. People shooting only live scenes would sell their suddenly high-value gear to pirates and buy newer gear if they don't care themselves about DRM. The result would be like laws against guns: the entire supply of copyright-busting cameras would go to outlaws.
People do not obey represssive laws. It may be theoretically illegal to install libdvdcss, but everyone does it anyway. If you encrypt your system with a strong passphrase nobody else can even find out what software you are using offline-even after a police raid. You can strip out all the DRM support, install pirate support, and the only counter against this for offline systems would be a legal prohibition on posession of computers with a modified OS, backed with a prohibition against flash drive or removable media support on approved online machines using trusted computing.
It would not take many raids for unapproved software to cause fearful end users to simply discard all computing devices entirely, so the computer industry will always have to fight against laws that criminalize any commonly practiced online activity, as they did over SOPA. Treating torrenting movies like kiddie porn won't put approved DRM computers in people's homes, instead fearful people will discard all computers and possibly also to throw away all music and movies, even if paid for out of fear. Those who choose to resist will encrypt their computers and hide all online activity behind Tor-style networks or even mesh networks.
As someone who publicly refused in 1983 to register for Ronald Reagan's attempt to bring back the draft (for aggression against El Salvador) and dared the Feds to fight over it, I will never be afraid to defy laws about DRM, codecs, etc!
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