DRM could be cool if, rather than cryptographically preventing copying, it would encode complicated licensing agreements especially if it effectively, when transmitting, rewrites the license for the recipient.

This could be guaranteed by laws rather than tech. Laws don't do much to protect big companies from the little people. That's why DRM is currently about technical solutions. But laws can have a huge impact on protecting little people from big companies. That's why big companies lobby!

I don't doubt that such 'license encoding DRM' as I envision will be abused by media publishers by linking it to cryptographic protection. But the underlying idea is pretty nice.

This is a very thoughtful take! I agree that an encoding of intent for enforcement by law rather than code would be a useful solution.

But let's come up with a different name for that than DRM :)

Why not? These are separate concepts.

It's a good question, so let me try to explain why this is dissonant to me, if I can.

I think maybe the easiest way to illustrate it is through the person of Cory Doctorow. I don't know for sure because I haven't been following him for awhile, but I suspect he is a fan of the fediverse concept. He and the kinds of people that he influenced (like me) strike me as the kind of people for whom open federated social networks are appealing and satisfying as a solution in contrast to closed centralized corporate social networks.

But then, a big part of my time following him and just generally being in that milieu, one of the primary boogeymen for us was the DRM being pushed by corporate interests.

So to me, DRM seems anathema to this entire aesthetic of federation.

Licensing != DRM though ... ?

You can have a very strict license without actually using any cryptographic 'protection' on the content.

See, for example, the way IBM used to in the 00s (still does?) release software. There was no copy protection, no license servers, no keys. But copyright was absolutely retained and you couldn't legally just give it to anyone.

If you were found to be running their stuff without the appropriate commercial license then their sales department will be along very shortly to work out a nice cost-effective plan for you, and failing that the lawyers will be involved.

Closed, licensed, but it's not DRM.

You could also look at the FOSS world. Licenses are actually important because if you license some software under GPL, you have legal grounds to sue if a corporation then uses that software in violation of the license. Most corporations just treat GPL as anathema because it's rarely worth the legal effort.

So far we haven't thought of social media content as licensed but it effectively is: the license is usually the EULA of the host giving them the ability to do whatever they want with it.

So really to be responsible with social media content we really should both get a license from our users and then provide a compatible license to federating peers. At that point they can decide not to accept the license, thereby refusing to federate that content. There are already filters like this for filtering certain kinds of content from peers, so it doesn't seem like it should be a huge reach.

Creative Commons might be sufficient here. If you license content as non-commercial, then would Facebook be barred from choosing to display it to the users of their commercial platform?

It's important to note that Stallman considers the GPL a hack on the copyright system (a clever one, sure, but a hack nonetheless). He'd rather it not have to exist, because we shouldn't need to exist in a world where companies can own the recipe to mix bytes around and achieve a certain software flavor.

I mean you can't copyright a food recipe. It so obviously would be stupid to have designer meals and chefs who are the only person that can cook a certain dish. The argument is that software isn't any different. And you can't copyright the fastest route from point A to B on a map. So why can you e.g. copyright the preferred method of sending bytes down an HDMI cable?

I'm sympathetic to that perspective, but that would entail pushing an ideal upstream to where change isn't going to happen because there's far too much financial interest in copyrighting arrangements of bytes. So if the system's unfixable, then hacking it seems like the right approach.

Besides which, ignoring GPL, Creative Commons seems like a good license because creative works are more than logical arrangements of bytes (there are only so many useful ways of sending bytes down an HDMI cable, but many more ways to write a novel) and is probably the more appropriate license for social media content (at least assuming the author wants to apply that license to their content).

Yeah fair. My reading was that the intention is a technical solution to lock down public data. I do think a legal solution makes more sense.

This is the classic problem of assuming that people who share a few opinions with you share all your other opinions as well.

Yes, totally. But that is common because it is useful for understanding how aggregates of people behave. It's an estimation heuristic. It's bad to get caught thinking estimates are truly reality, but it's not bad to try to estimate things.

I do think there is a throughline between the ... techno-hippies? of my youth for whom DRM was a big concern, and those of today, for whom corporate concentration of social media is a big concern. But I know that's just a heuristic. Nevertheless, I think it's interesting to me that there is now some subset of the newer group who is arguing for something that seems very analogous to DRM for social media content.

I think you're probably right that it's totally different people, not the same people being inconsistent.

Because people who create decentralized networks usually also subscribe to the concept of free flowing information, hence the decentralized network.

One is their issues with a centralized service is control. Their issue with copyrighted material is control.

Of course not everyone holds the same beliefs

Hey well put! Your answer is both more succinct and better than mine :)

I'm such a negative person I can't tell if you are being sarcastic

Ha, sorry about that, not sarcastic at all.

Thanks for putting it succinctly.