• Katana314@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    True, most metaphors around DRM related to physical items collapse reasonably quickly. The thing about home locks was only worthwhile for the topic of how dysfunctional society gets with locks on everything and no trust.

    Most DRM metaphors start with “A person has X object, and is greedy for money” - nothing written as to how they obtained that object.

    The more intricate comparison is that someone has produced a good that is easily copied, but required deep financial investment on their part to first create. It’s disingenuous to forget that part or imply all people selling something digital are rich by those or other means. People put large investments into the idea that their copiable works would be desired by other people. No one’s obligated to buy it, but they’re betting enough people will want it to pay for it and recoup costs. “It’s okay, we didn’t delete your copy from your hard drive” means nothing.

    The extension to the thought about “we don’t put locks on everything because we trust most people act honorably” is this: If we naturally expected all players to pirate all games, then there would be much, much fewer artists dedicated to creating media. There are many cases of people writing software for donations, and they often need additional funding. Firefox is unfortunately a prime example of that, being primarily funded by Google.

    By the way, Google puts out its free software thanks to ads. Don’t you love those? Makes you prefer a different financial relationship with consumers.