Bravo Vlad!
http://www.vladville.com/2008/08/drm-because-someone-has-to-pay-for-it.html
from the comments…
This is about more than some slick recording industry execs trying to make another buck…
This is about defending Intellectual Property. Some people use their Intellectual property to build widgets. Some people become Doctors. Some people create art or software or music or…whatever. It's pretty simple the person who creates has the right to sell the product of their intellectual property, lawyers do so by the hour, mechanics by the job, the people who run the Doggie Hotel by the night…The person creating the IP also has the right to give away or sell the right to resell or re-give away the fruits of the original labor.
In the case of the musician and the record label. Record label may pay up front large sums of money for the rights to resell said musician's music for a given period or even eternity. And based on a contract they can control the distribution and consumption of the music. When I buy Music, I do not own Music, I buy the right to consume music. When I buy software, I buy the right to use the software. When I by a TV I buy the right to consume a TV feed. When you pay +/- $10 for a movie ticket, you do not buy the movie, you buy the right to consume the fruits of someone else's labors…
As a consumer, it sucks, wanting something, but not being able to have it. So people being who they are, naturally tending toward sin, we have come up with ways around these rules…We RIP the CD onto our iPod or rip a DVD onto our Media Server, and in the best of times, it is for our re-consumption, but…there are people who recognize that if it costs $15 for a DVD, and a couple hundred to get a computer that can functionally copy the DVD and maybe a little more $ to bust the copyright protection, they can turn that $15 investment into cold hard cash, again and again and again. Pretty soon that minor investment for 'personal use' becomes a lucrative endeavor, and now they can redistribute content that they don't own, don't have the right to redistribute and make large piles of dough in the process.
Yes, that's a bit extreme, and the number of people who actually do it are very small compared to the people who follow the rules…BUT the fact is they don't OWN the right to do this, somebody else does. So, back to the Olympics and the right to distribute that content, Vlad addresses that pretty wholly. Does it suck that Microsoft did not 'include' the disenfranchised in their distribution model? Perhaps, but they paid for the right to distribute it. Welcome to the free-market. The Government could act a s a watch dog to protect the rights of the disenfranchised, but..well the American Public has spoken repeatedly, that they want less government oversight…something about a Nanny-state or something? And lest you think it's a function of America…The Olympic Committee made the agreement with Microsoft to distribute the content over the net. I believe the Olympics is run by a Corporate entity, whose purpose is to promote sport. They sold the right to distribute to Microsoft, not to the US Government, or the Government of India or the Government of the Intertubes. They have a contract with Microsoft, for which they got bucket loads of money. If the Olympics wanted to protect the rights of the disenfranchised Net population, they should have gone elsewhere, or written such language into the contract. It would appear that they chose not to do that. They took the wheelbarrows full of coin and said thank you, and have a nice day.