[sldev] Re: [ARCH] Permissions (Abh Serechai Belxjander)

[Argent Stonecutter]

First, DRM is not a tool that prevents copying. It's a tool for  
encouraging honest behavior. It makes copying inconvenient, and it  
makes it clear that when you're bypassing it you're dealing with  
information you're not supposed to be redistributing. So it doesn't  
need to be perfect, and in fact most of the benefits of DRM are  
available from even the weakest systems... like the one in iTunes.  
Trying to do more than that doesn't give you a lot more protection,  
it just abuses your customers.

Abh Serechai Belxjander writes:
> Argent:  what is to stop an individual purchasing a certificate and
> providing such as a server certificate and being "trusted"
>   and then forwarding to untrusted servers?

Just having a certificate won't do you any good. You need to get your  
certificate signed by one of the people who are in the business of  
signing certificates. If you want it signed by LL so you can use  
content for distribution under SL's policies, you have to have a  
contract with them, and if you violate that contract it's up to LL to  
enforce... by, for example, putting your certificate in a revocation  
list.

If they do a good job of enforcing it, then people will click [x]  
Export to regions certified by (x) Linden Labs.

If they don't, then people won't.

The market will sort things out.

> DRM has already been proven to be a failure, DeCSS / OpenFairPlay  
> and other tools as applied to existing DRM schemes, how is  
> secondlife to be any different than those other schemes?

It isn't. As to whether things like "OpenFairplay" make it a failure,  
only time will tell. I suspect not, since Apple's let you remove the  
DRM from your tracks in iTunes from the beginning... and so far that  
doesn't seem to have hurt Apple and artists are still happy to get  
distribution through iTunes. But, hey, I could be wrong over the long  
term...

The only thing I'm sure of is that you get into diminishing returns  
from any stronger DRM than that pretty damn quick.

PS, shouldn't the permissions discussion be tagged [ARCH] or [META]?

(yes, I forgot too, mea culpa)