In the digital world, you can make anything anywhere and anyone can have copies without you losing yours. I would so download a car, and so would anyone. But traditional business models rely on scarcity.
The answer? Digital Personal Property! Which is certainly not Digital Rights Management or Digital Consumer Enhancement, no no. It’s an entirely different wrapper for physically and mathematically impossible snake oil.
As Penny Arcade put it about similar schemes elsewhere: “Chief among these bizarre maneuvers is the idea that, when manufacturing their flimsy dystopia, they actually ported the pernicious notion of scarcity from our world into their digital one. This is like having the ability to shape being from non-being at the subatomic level, and the first thing you decide to make is AIDS.”
I’ll believe it’s my “personal property” when I’m free to do what I want with it. Until then, DPP is a load of BS.
DPP, just another form of DRM, is a desperate move to prop-up a dying business model.
When I say “free” above, I mean free as in free speech — I don’t mind paying money for good music and think artists deserve support.
And when I say “do what I want with it”, I mean make a back-up, play it on my PDA, keep a copy on my laptop, burn it to CD to play in the car, etc. It’s gotta work with and be transferable between existing digital devices. Oh, and not have it remotely tampered with or deleted on whim, as suckers with a Kindle recently discovered.