[link|http://www.advogato.org/article/56.html|Here].

Interview: Christopher Montgomery of Xiphophorus
Posted 4 Apr 2000 by advogato

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But aren't there some people who prefer digital audio to be a closed club? After all, Vorbis doesn't have any copy protection, region codes, or any of that.

Neither does the competition. The algorithmic equivalent of a wad of gum in the keyhole is not real security, regardless of the press releases that claim otherwise.

But really, this is the real can of worms.

I try to avoid political baggage and philosophical dogma, but I fundamentally disagree with the amount of control the music industry is trying to place over distribution. It is not realistic, it is not practical, and moreover it just worries me.

Let me state for the record that I want the artists to get their money, and much more so than the record companies do. The [link|http://www.riaa.com/|RIAA] can shout piracy all they want, but that isn't what it's about. It's about control, and only about control.

Do you want the RIAA to have the ability to tell you that you may only play your music on a single 'Walkman'? BTW, they have a deal with Sony this year, and the price of that Walkman just went up.

Similar scenarios played out just this past month (albeit concerning MPEG licensing, not the RIAA)! I don't have to construct a 'slippery slope' argument, because we've already fallen down it. You, Joe Consumer, are losing the very right to listen to music you've already bought.

The last piece that completes the absurdity is that the protection schemes the RIAA demands are impossible to implement securely. They'll always end up cracked. Thus, the RIAA, DVD Forum and MPAA are trying to make the act of reverse engineering these flimsy protections itself a crime.

None of this makes sense, and I'm simply not going to participate in the madness. It makes no engineering sense, it makes no legal sense, and my conscience won't let me implement a feature that takes reasonable rights away from people.


Probably not what everyone's looking for though...

Cheers,
Scott.
(Hmm. The square bracket ... square bracket construct is giving me a Zope Attribute Error again... I'll mention it in Suggestions.)