Comment Awareness Unlikely, There is Still Hope (Score 1) 389
Unfortunately, I disagree that general awareness is possible. For that, you'd need a public that had higher-than-average technical knowledge to understand what a rootkit was. Also, you'd need a level of public awareness and willingness to act against powerful interests that's pretty rare--think how few examples there are: labor unions, civil rights movement are about it and count them up. You DO have a hand injury if you haven't got fingers left over.
Being a student of history, I see this DRM vs. personal legal rights battle as parallel to those movements, particularly organized labor. Companies will start out being right by default in a capitalist system. However, they end up weaving such a terrible tangle of back-room laws that they end up breaking one law to 'protect' another.
What you may well see someday is one single test case that pins Sony (or whoever) to the wall for breaking a anti-hacking law with their DRM. Licensing agreements (as currently written) will hold only so long.
They don't override the U.S. Constitution or any other national charter, they are overturnable by high courts. We need (and we can only wait and hope) for a case where someone corporate does something that results in something so bad--maiming, wrongful death or reckless endangerment murder, that they are thrown into the limelight for what they are. Sony depends on the U.S. government to enforce their program of DRM, so when it starts to hurt the government (the CIA springs a leak, the President's laptop gets hacked, or whatever), the government might overturn it, particularly the judicial branch. Elected congressmen can be bought, appointed judges much less so.
If these Sony legal eagles had read the writings of the Founding Fathers or the Constitution itself, they would know that the world will only be their sandbox for so long. History as a whole stands with the advance of human rights, because they are necessary.
Being a student of history, I see this DRM vs. personal legal rights battle as parallel to those movements, particularly organized labor. Companies will start out being right by default in a capitalist system. However, they end up weaving such a terrible tangle of back-room laws that they end up breaking one law to 'protect' another.
What you may well see someday is one single test case that pins Sony (or whoever) to the wall for breaking a anti-hacking law with their DRM. Licensing agreements (as currently written) will hold only so long.
They don't override the U.S. Constitution or any other national charter, they are overturnable by high courts. We need (and we can only wait and hope) for a case where someone corporate does something that results in something so bad--maiming, wrongful death or reckless endangerment murder, that they are thrown into the limelight for what they are. Sony depends on the U.S. government to enforce their program of DRM, so when it starts to hurt the government (the CIA springs a leak, the President's laptop gets hacked, or whatever), the government might overturn it, particularly the judicial branch. Elected congressmen can be bought, appointed judges much less so.
If these Sony legal eagles had read the writings of the Founding Fathers or the Constitution itself, they would know that the world will only be their sandbox for so long. History as a whole stands with the advance of human rights, because they are necessary.
