*Digital Rights Management schemes are mediated. No form of mediation lasts forever. Ergo, the default ought to be to Gothically annihilate everything that was locked up by the DRM whenever the DRM becomes obsolete, defunct, or too expensive to run. It's like a giant cultural-suicide service.
(...)
"We reject the view," he writes in a letter to the top legal advisor at the Copyright Office, "that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so." (((Ergo, copyrighted works in general should share the brief lifespan of electronic devices: "write for the Kindle, die with the Kindle: record for the iPod, die with the iPod." I wonder what would happen if the Copyright Office had its own works copyrighted for distribution under DRM with some electronic device. What if the Copyright Office woke up one morning and copyright had simply failed with all hands and there was no way to reboot it?)))
"This is, of course, true, but that doesn't make it any less weird. (((I agree that it's weird, but I think it's weird in a different and more sinister way than the freewarez-friendly author of this Ars Technica blogpost thinks it is weird.))) The only reason that such tracks are crippled after authentication servers go down is because of a system that was demanded by content owners and imposed on companies like Wal-Mart and Apple; buyers who grudgingly bought tracks online because it was easy accepted, but never desired the DRM. To simply say that they are "out of luck" because they used a system that the rightsholders demanded is the height of callousness to one's customers. While computers and electronics devices do break down over time, these music tracks were crippled by design.
(((We might say that the Gothic decay is hitting different layers of High Tech at different speeds. If you want to preserve some electronically generated piece of content indefinitely, you have to go all the way up and down the stack: the chip, the operating system, the application, and the content, the network, plus any DRM padlocks you built into the thing or diffused into the thing from distant servers. Servers go dark? (because, let's say, California fell into the ocean?) The content vanishes like a "vaporized" unperson from Orwell's 1984.)))
(((But let's say you do abandon copyright, so that all this commercial material becomes public domain? Maybe you can swap the valuable Big Content P2P style as it gets older and older. Hand-me-downs. Cultural recycling. Favela Chic pastiche? How do you pay anybody to make any more of that glossy well-financed Big Content stuff? Through "freemium" maybe? You generate it through crowdsourcing? Corrugated tin and concrete breeze blocks? Favela Chic production.)))
(((Gothic High Tech or Favela Chic, you make your choice or you mix-and-match. The one thing you don't get, and can't get, is a functional culture industry with workable economic and legal underpinnings. Welcome to the dark euphoria of the Twenty-Teens.)))
