Okay... innerspaceboy is proper angry. This is a rare circumstance. I'm going to have a little rant, and then I'm going to go lie down. Tonight I am PISSED.
The more I come to understand, the more astonished I am at the amount of power our society is willing to relinquish.
While I may be a media connoisseur of sorts, I have absolutely zero concept of what the world does for digital media
legally. Today I read that the two giants of the digital book market, both Kindle and Nook, openly use DRM on their content.
I learned that most Kindle books are locked from sharing (you know, like
REAL books?), are forever locked on your device, (you can't even move them to another shelf), and can be remotely deleted by Amazon (like they did with 1984.)
And staggeringly, Amazon still managed to sell roughly 20 million Kindles by 2013 for $3.9 billion in revenue and its user's stupidly shell out as much as $530 million a year for their crippled media.
The same applies for audio and video streaming services with DRM. Today I read that Apple actually had the audacity to charge users a
fee to upgrade from their boat-anchored media to their newer, DRM-free content. And any user submissive enough to use the iTunes market is just tossing the keys to Apple, who can add to and delete from "your" library at will.
Seriously, a culture that willingly accepts this sort of technology is effectively handing over all control of their content and setting themselves up for one
hell of a fall.
It's absolutely appalling.
/rant
