Comments on: Free Software enforcing DRM?!

By: gjv

gjv — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:50:28 +0000

The point you have been attempting to make has not been missed. It is however a technicality in light of how our current copyright laws are broken. I would encourage anyone who does not understand what is at stake to review the video at the website link provided. Beleaguering these types of “DRM as a feature” types of issues may actually in the end work against the principles you seem to want to uphold vis a vis the rights of the content creator.

By: foo

foo — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 09:53:02 +0000

It’s a good thing that the default is turned on (and now I explain why). The only problem, is that the app should teach you how to disable restrictions inmediately, which I don’t remember if it does.

Why DRM on by default is important? Because otherwise you could download or buy a PDF with DRM, open it with okular to read it, print it and copy text from it without problems, but when you bring the file to a computer you don’t own and only has Acrobat, now, when maybe it’s too late, you realise you can’t do that anymore.

I think that is pretty important to allow users to bypass DRM, but also to make them well aware that some authors or publishers are encouraging stupid limitations on their rights. That way users will be better informed of which authors/publishers should be avoided.

By: Michael "RAND" Howell

Michael "RAND" Howell — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:34:56 +0000

@rjc: “PDF is an ISO standard.”
So is OOXML…

More importantly, and to the point, ISO does not require submitted specifications to be open specs. They merely require that they be licensed reasonably and non-descriminatorily (is that a word?). Requiring implementors to do DRM is (controversially) reasonable, and it is definitely non-discriminatory (applies to everyone).

By: rjc

rjc — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:51:59 +0000

PDF is an ISO standard.

By: Tom DuBuisson

Tom DuBuisson — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:12:40 +0000

Kurt,
This point was raised before – see the above conversation between John and Foo. It boils down to copy/pasting data, even from a copyrighted file, being fair use – which any University student who has presented a paper should know.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:08:00 +0000

I do not respect the wishes of a content creator that seeks to remove my freedom. Period. It was unethical of them to do so, and there is nothing unethical about me doing something perfectly legal with the file.

By: Kurt Häusler

Kurt Häusler — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 09:59:27 +0000

“Why are people intentionally adding code to KDE to remove my freedom? This is crazy and nuts. Nobody should be doing this, least of all in Free Software!”

Actually, before you did not have the freedom to avoid breaching the wishes of the content creator. The decision was hidden from you and made on your behalf.

Now the power to think about, and make the decision thoughtfully, consciously and mindfully of the moral consequences has been returned to you.

By: Kurt Häusler

Kurt Häusler — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 09:55:53 +0000

I can understand why a distro like debian would leave this option switched on by default, it is similar to the way semi or non free repositories also have to manually enabled.

It is to protect the user from unknowingly breaking or contradicting the wishes of content creators, who are not always “big evil corporations”, as well as helping to ensure not only a legally, but a morally clean system.

Debian users in particular realise how important voluntary acceptance and compliance of licenses like the GPL is, and go to great lengths to avoid breaching such terms, it seems to me that enabling this option by default is in accordance with the same spirit of respecting the wishes of people who generously contributed content, but still wish to apply certain restrictions.

Basically the decision to act in a way opposing the wishes of someone else should be deliberate rather than accidental.

By: Michael "Licensing" Howell

Michael "Licensing" Howell — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:12:56 +0000

@John Goerzen: “I don’t understand how Adobe can require him to adhere to it.”
I think that Adobe has patents on the PDF specification, and licenses it the same way a copyright license can be put on software. You either work under the Adobe license, which allows you to implement under restriction, or regular patent law, which doesn’t let you implement at all.

By: Anon

Anon — Sun, 31 May 2009 19:29:32 +0000

Except that it doesn’t! Debian defaults to GNOME, not KDE. If you use GNOME it doesn’t, because GNOME uses a different PDF reader (evince instead of Okular).

11!eleven1one!!~

By: xian

xian — Sun, 31 May 2009 14:18:17 +0000

The default does not really bother me one way or the other. However, if you were in a company that locked in the use of drm, it would be lame if ocular displayed a message saying “you can’t due this activity due to drm, uncheck the drm box in the options” only to have the option disabled by your administrator. Basically, I can see the use case for why the drm functionality is there, and I can see why it would be a whole lot of work to build various error messages for all kinds of scenarios when I don’t really think it is a big problem. I look at it as if you had windows on your desk with acrobat, and it gets replaced with KDE and ocular that acts the same way, life is plain easier for you.

None of this is to say that I like drm or anything, but I can see why it acts the way it acts. Also we get the checkbox to disable it, yay.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Sun, 31 May 2009 14:12:16 +0000

Again, it has nothing to do with it.

Copyright law says that I can make copies of it under certain fair use permissions. Whether or not I can cut and paste, or must retype, is completely orthogonal to the issue.

By: foo

foo — Sun, 31 May 2009 13:46:02 +0000

Both your responses are technicalities.

My question could perhaps be rewritten as follows to allow you to understand it better:

You respect copyright (and authors rights) on freely licensed and distributed works but not on proprietary works?

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Sun, 31 May 2009 13:38:33 +0000

There is no license that we’re talking about; it’s just a bit.

And anyway, software can’t violate licenses; only humans can.

By: Ana’s blog » Blog Archive » The freedom to choose

Ana’s blog » Blog Archive » The freedom to choose — Sun, 31 May 2009 09:29:14 +0000

[...] John, no need to be so alarmist, this is KDE, look at the options: [...]

By: foo

foo — Sun, 31 May 2009 06:30:35 +0000

So, you respect Free Software licenses but don’t want to respect the ‘license’ of the PDF you are looking at?

By: Jeff Schroeder

Jeff Schroeder — Sun, 31 May 2009 05:31:03 +0000

fyi: Gnome’s PDF browser, evince, does NOT exhibit this problem for the same reason you mention.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Sun, 31 May 2009 03:38:39 +0000

I don’t understand how Adobe can require him to adhere to it. It’s an ISO standard; it’s not as if he has to have Adobe’s permission to write xpdf or anything. There’s nothing illegal about software violating specs. My goodness, if there were, Microsoft would have gone out of business long ago.

That is quite possible that Debian may have patched out the DRM in xpdf.

By: basic

basic — Sun, 31 May 2009 03:29:31 +0000

believe it or not xpdf (the code which almost all free software PDF viewers are based on) has been doing this for years (and it’s shipped enabled by default). My guess is that they are following xpdf.

The rational the xpdf author give can be found here http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/cracking.html

My guess is that your pdftotext (which uses the same xpdf code I believe) has the DRM disabled by your distro?

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Sun, 31 May 2009 02:37:43 +0000

In that case, they should at least ship it disabled by default, and make it clear from the error message where to go to tweak it. It is not at all intuitive to go looking for a “disable DRM” option in some config panel.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Sun, 31 May 2009 02:36:45 +0000

I don’t believe it for one second. Nobody is forcing you to be SMTP compliant, and this is no different. It’s not like it’s a circumvention device under DMCA. If you don’t implement the feature that honors this flag, you simply haven’t implemented a feature.

By: xian

xian — Sun, 31 May 2009 02:21:56 +0000

As I recall there was also debate about it in KDE when first developed. It was argued that some companies might require drm pdf compliance to be able to use the software. Having the option there allows regular users to turn it off, but could be forced on for a corporate desktop (yay KDE’s kiosk framework). If there was no option for drm companies might not even be able to deploy a KDE desktop.

By: Adeodato Simó

Adeodato Simó — Sun, 31 May 2009 01:34:46 +0000

I don’t think it’s particularly lame not to think such thing could be
disabled via the preferences dialog. You can stay tuned to
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/05/msg00879.html, we may get
an answer why that option exists and why it defaults to obeying DRM
restrictions.

By: Michael "Fast" Howell

Michael "Fast" Howell — Sun, 31 May 2009 01:32:36 +0000

@anon: “they are forced to implement those restrictions under penalty of legal action”
Way to reply quickly… I wonder if allowing one to disable it invalidates their compliance.

By: anon

anon — Sun, 31 May 2009 01:31:05 +0000

actually, as per the pdf spec, they are forced to implement those restrictions under penalty of legal action

By: Michael "Why enable by default?" Howell

Michael "Why enable by default?" Howell — Sun, 31 May 2009 01:30:57 +0000

Why is it enabled by default? More importantly, isn’t it useless to have it at all if it’s possible to turn it off?

The whole point of DRM is that you cannot turn it off….

By: Tim

Tim — Sun, 31 May 2009 01:06:13 +0000

Debian ships software with DRM enabled !!111eleven!!

And I write lots of words before I check the first config window!!

Huzzah for lameness!

By: jim

jim — Sun, 31 May 2009 00:48:47 +0000

Just go to the preferences and turn off the “Obey DRM” option.