> Technical restraints and legal remedies are not the same thing, and it's completely consistent to say that DRM should be unavailable to both proprietary and free works while legal remedies should be available to both.
"legal remedies should be available to both" was tried for media; that was the era where the studios were suing individuals for copyright violations. Needless to say, that proved to be impractical for a variety of reasons.
Unless your intent is to draft laws that specifically don't work for causes you don't like and works only for causes you do, i.e. negotiating in bad faith, you're going to have to admit that the existence of IP rights implies that that other IP rightsholders are permitted to build some mechanism that works to enforce their rights.
And, again, note I'm not defending DRM. I find it just as annoying and inconvenient as everyone else.
Your argument only works if technical restraints are (a) necessary and (b) effective. If they’re not necessary, i.e. rightsholders can profit without needing to “enforce their rights” either legally or technically, then the limited effectiveness of lawsuits against individuals is not the end of the world. (This doesn’t contradict a belief that legal relief should be available in principle, and in any case, it is available in practice against large-scale or commercial operations.) On the other hand, if technical restraints aren’t effective, then rightsholders gain little by imposing them, and lose little by removing them. Thus, even under the assumption that piracy is a huge cost and can’t be solved without technical restraints, it wouldn’t be inconsistent to advocate banning them, because piracy couldn’t be solved with them either!
In fact, there’s a good argument that DRM is neither necessary nor effective: the former as demonstrated by the music industry, the latter as demonstrated by the movie industry (where the availability of new releases on torrent sites is a matter of course, as it has been for many years). True, it’s more complicated than that, as both technical and market factors greatly affect the utility of DRM in any specific situation. But as a general principle…
First of all, you're moving the goalposts from a policy position being logically consistent to policy being practically equivalent.
Anyway, in practical terms, GPL and BSD license terms are violated all the time, and only a handful of the most egregious examples ever see a courtroom. I don't see how that's categorically different from the situation of works with other licenses.
> you're going to have to admit that the existence of IP rights implies that that other IP rightsholders are permitted to build some mechanism that works to enforce their rights.
Yes. And not one bit more. Show me a DRM system that would never overstep the legal boundaries of their legally enforcable rights, and your argument maybe makes some sense.
"legal remedies should be available to both" was tried for media; that was the era where the studios were suing individuals for copyright violations. Needless to say, that proved to be impractical for a variety of reasons.
Unless your intent is to draft laws that specifically don't work for causes you don't like and works only for causes you do, i.e. negotiating in bad faith, you're going to have to admit that the existence of IP rights implies that that other IP rightsholders are permitted to build some mechanism that works to enforce their rights.
And, again, note I'm not defending DRM. I find it just as annoying and inconvenient as everyone else.