Prisoners of our own device
by Peter Coffee on January 26, 2007 at 05:44 PM
I guess I'd better find a Ziploc bag to protect my copy of Pamela McCorduck's 1986 book, The Universal Machine: Confessions of a Technological Optimist. Not only does the book appear to be out of print, but even the idea expressed in its title appears to be gravely endangered.
The intentional crippling of our machines, in the vain pursuit of robust digital rights management, is a crime against the future.
Developers have two dogs in this fight. They want to protect their work against uninvited appropriation. They also bear the brunt of writing the non-value-adding code that's required to navigate a growing maze of DRM restrictions.
On a time-value-of-money basis, I believe most developers would prefer to get to market sooner with a product that lets the user do more -- rather than spend more time merely getting over the threshold into a claustrophobic chamber of limited function. If the thick-client platform vendors are going to sell their souls -- or perhaps, more tangible parts of their anatomy -- to commercial content creators, then it's up to developers to look for ways to deliver function to new classes of device and through less compromised channels.
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Comments
Posted by petercoffee on January 27, 2007 10:47 AM:
And if you came to the comments page to ask what the title of this post is supposed to mean, I apologize for failing to attribute the reference to the Eagles' 1976 "Hotel California." More at http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=1121
Posted by Mike Leach on January 27, 2007 04:04 PM:
The fundamental feature that is going to make Apex successful is the ability for Developers to upload their intellectual property (IP) to Salesforce with the assurance that sufficient DRM is in place to manage IP distribution, usage, and prevention of reverse engineering.
This is quite analogous to Vista's DRM features, which you apparently hold in great disdain.
I sincerely hope this opinion is not shared by others at SFDC, as it will absolutely impair the growth of SFDC as a business platform.
Posted by Peter Coffee on January 27, 2007 04:27 PM:
I see a pretty fundamental distinction here. On the one hand, there's the protection of intellectual property that's provided by a multi-tenant platform -- salesforce.com, for example -- where that property, including the functionality provided by a developer's Apex code, is offered under mutually understood and accepted terms of service. That's contract law.
On the other hand, there's deliberate crippling of consumer hardware's functions that's done in the process of rejecting centuries of precedent as to what is "fair use" of information content. That's copyright law.
Does that seem like splitting hairs? To me, they seem like quite different things.
Posted by Peter Coffee on January 27, 2007 07:22 PM:
P.S. to my previous: I thought about this over dinner (seriously, my wife would confirm this if asked), and if Mike is concerned enough to ask this question, others are probably wondering about it but not posting it. Responding at any greater length, though, would clearly be something that belongs under The Business of Apex -- where I've started a new thread, "It's Your Code: We Just Run It," to do that. I welcome follow-up there.
Posted by Mike Leach on January 28, 2007 09:54 PM:
I regularly use my PC for playback of protected content using traditional audio equipment (with Rhapsody... an on-demand DRM-enabled service), but I have not yet encountered the "crippling of hardware", although it does not surprise me that this problem exists.
A personal computer is no longer "personal" when it is used as a media playback device of protected content. It is an appliance.
As a matter of principal, I still believe content producers, whether they're Musicians or Developers, have a right to prevent a tragedy of the commons and manage the distribution of their works.
Developers have always had to bear the brunt of writing license management code, so I don't think things will change much in the on-demand world, except that they will outsource these features to platforms like Salesforce (AppStore?) and trust that platform vendors will be an advocate for their publishing rights.
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