Now that classes have ended, I’ve found myself with tons of spare time (that I should be using to study). While searching for things to read last night, I came upon RMS’s The Right to Read.
It’s an interesting short essay about what could happen if we allow the government and media companies to take away our rights to digital content. Now that DRM and the DMCA have come upon us, RMS’s concern is especially valid.
Take the music industry. If the RIAA gets their way in Congress, we won’t be able to make legal copies of the CDs we own. We wouldn’t be able to legally convert our CDs into mp3s that we could play on our portable music players. Instead, we’d be forced to purchase special copies of our music that would work only on one physical music player; if our player broke, and we purchased a new one, we’d have to buy new copies of our music.
A scarier, but actually emerging concept is the idea of subscription-licensed content. People would no longer own a static license to their digital media. Rather, people would be renting content from media companies. Again, take music as an example. Instead of purchasing a physical, static, permanent copy of a song, people would purchase songs on a time-limited basis, like a couple of weeks. When the license expired, people would have to renew their license for an additional fee if they wanted to keep listening to the song.
Although media companies have pitched DRM as a way to allow them to distribute affordable content, it’s actually a way for them to squeeze more money out of consumers. Buying time-licensed media might be cheaper, but consumers will always be dependent upon the company that issued the license. Media companies could easily decide to drastically increase renewal fees.
We can’t let this happen. Read RMS’s article and write a letter to your representative.
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