This my homepage. My old homepage is still available. However, I switched to Neocities for two reasons:
Proprietary/Closed software and DRM(Digital Restrictions Management) are means of restricting users. The digital revolution left a bit of a hopelessness for copy protection, as the Internet was primarily designed as an information anarchy. Industry proponents of DRM and proprietary software call them copy protection, theft protection, and ways of protecting trade secrets.
However, if any of these were true, they would be pointless.
As technology improves, all methods of security are broken one way or another. Soon, with quantum computing, it may be impossible for DRM to work. Proprietary/Closed software has already been broken beyond working for this purpose without DRM - reverse engineers have creater decompilers for their work.
The real purpose of proprietary software and DRM is restriction for profit.
It is not in corporate interest to collaborate on innovation, to build on top of each other. It is not in corporate interest to allow sharing. So if corporate interest was the only rule to go by, the science community would no longer be a community, but rather a group of antisocial people suing each other for pointing out flaws in their theories, sharing alternative hypotheses, and giving evidence to prove their theories.
Software is scientific too; it innovates faster when people can work together. When it’s proprietary, developers are forced to reinvent the wheel every time they want to compete.
To prevent this from happening, all software should be libre - it should allow people to share, study, and derive from works. Only with these freedoms can we ensure healthy, sciencelike cooperation between software developers.
There is and will likely always be a number of clauses in our copyright law bringing exceptions to the law to copyright restrictions, such as fair use, educational use, and library reproduction. However, there is also currently a badly written clause preventing the circumvention of DRM.
As I said earlier, industry proponents of DRM call it copy protection. However, if that was true, DRM would be pointless. The more technology advances, the more DRM will be broken.
DRM is restriction for profit and it exploits technology to make fair use, educational use, and library production inconvenient. Industry proponents of DRM know that DRM is not good copy protection. However, it is the only way to restrict fair use.
For this reason, DRM itself should be banned, and not its circumvention.
To support the case against DRM, see my campaign to distribute the source code of the DVD decrypter, LibDVDCSS.
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