[patrec]

This battle is lost and the reality is already much worse than just DRM. It is increasingly impossible to actually own digital content and all content is moving to digital. You only lease at the revocable pleasure of some multi-billion dollar corporation. No resale, no inheritance, no right of refusal of obnoxious TOS changes if you want continued access.

Yes, for some technical books it is still possible to buy a DRM free pdf and have something approximating ownership rights, including resale -- for example http://shop.oreilly.com/category/customer-service/ebooks.do.

But as far as I can tell that's only true for a tiny techical niche -- if there is an alternative to kindle, amazon etc. that actually has a reasonable selection and true ownership I'd love to hear about it.

[pdkl95]

Yes, you might have to do without some things.

This is why some of us were making a lot of noise about this problem 20+ years ago, when sending the message that "leasing"/DRM isn't acceptable didn't require a significant sacrifice. Unfortunately everyone - including engineers that should have known better - was more interested in the media industry's shiny baubles than investing their future property rights.

So now that same fight will probably require some amount of sacrifice. Are you willing to pay that cost now? Or do you want to wait while this transfer of rights to continues? This cost will only increase the more we allow DRM to spread.

[patrec]

You seem to imply I have a moral obligation to make sacrifices for the cause of consumer rights, but realistically any call to collective action that imposes comparatively large costs to the individual for very slim chances of success is doomed to failure and a misdirection of energies that would better be spent elsewhere.

I will continue to seek out and prefer non-DRM, non-leased content where available at acceptable cost, but consumers voting with their wallets is not going to solve this.

[TeMPOraL]

Well, we had Stallman saying those things for decades, and everyone in tech mocked and ignored him instead.

[patrec]

Stallman does deserve credit for his farsightedness. At the same time, he never provided a realistic alternative (the FSF tithing hardware manufacturers to centrally plan us some Lisp machine bootstrapped on Unix software utopia is not).