commit: 84dc606e3f287f9b99a68278008760c5376f42ef
parent ed7007e9cfb3afe388f7c3b928b1f38b4f683e52
Author: Haelwenn (lanodan) Monnier <contact@hacktivis.me>
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2023 11:08:48 +0100
articles/drm-definition: New article
Diffstat:
3 files changed, 43 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
diff --git a/articles/drm-definition.xml b/articles/drm-definition.xml
@@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
+<entry>
+<title>On the definition of DRM</title>
+<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="/articles/drm-definition"/>
+<id>https://hacktivis.me/articles/drm-definition</id>
+<published>2023-11-10T09:04:13Z</published>
+<updated>2023-11-10T09:04:13Z</updated>
+<!--
+<link rel="external replies" type="application/activity+json" href="https://queer.hacktivis.me/objects/50be9d37-dee6-4c69-818e-013fa3b010d0" />
+<link rel="external replies" type="text/html" href="https://queer.hacktivis.me/objects/50be9d37-dee6-4c69-818e-013fa3b010d0" />
+-->
+<content type="xhtml">
+<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" class="h-entry">
+<a href="/articles/drm-definition"><h1>On the definition of DRM</h1></a>
+<p>
+ Warning: This is a rather thorny question, in the same style of debating if a particular product or software is under a <abbr title="Free Libre Open-Source Software">FLOSS</abbr> license or not.
+ It's also deeply linked to laws, and I am not a lawyer, do not take this as legal advice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ That aside here's how I define DRM as: A juridical backdoor which serves to restrict more or less fundamental rights like private copies, private modifications and effectively interoperability (which is one of the copyright exceptions in the European Union).<br />
+ I see technical means as irrelevant or even a gigantic trap, PDF for example uses a bit flag to restrict printing, making it effectively non-existant if you're not following the PDF specification to the letter.
+</p>
+<ul>
+ <li>What's the difference between a mere <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_modding">mod</a> (legal privately, redistributions of them are typically tolerated) and a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_cracking">crack</a> (illegal, always)? DRM.</li>
+ <li>Is a software or network dependency a DRM? Not on itself, it becomes DRM if becomes illegal to circumvent it (Some of those dependencies are particularly annoying and ought to be avoided though).</li>
+</ul>
+
+<h2>Steam</h2>
+<p>This is a rather controversial part, but I want to address it. My position on it is:</p>
+<ul>
+ <li>A lot of games rely on Steam (sometimes only for achievements): It becomes DRM if fixing the hard-dependency via mods or a shim is illegal or not;</li>
+ <li>There's games on Steam ship with Denuvo and other DRM solutions, I don't remember if those are explicitly noted as such;</li>
+ <li>The main steam client (<code>steamcmd</code> even if official is excluded here) itself is a deeply annoying games installer with forced auto-updates, making usage of it offline a challenge. I'd call this a botnet, not DRM.</li>
+</ul>
+<p>Or said otherwise Steam is an unfortunate vector for DRM, quite like a CD player is with games trying to require physical copies of CDs to be present for playing. And just like the CD-era, it is hard to know if a particular game has DRM or not on Steam, much better to bet and support stores with a stance against DRM.</p>
+
+<p>And personally I much favor games where I can get the art under whatever licensing/price and get the software part with source-code under a libre license (or be able to use third-party software), for example Quake 1&2, Doom 1→3, and Visual Novels using a generic multimedia-player style of architecture like ones based on KiriKiri (GPL!) and DNML (RenPy would be there if it wouldn't use a language like Python in the scripts…). Effectively because I want to be able to play games regardless of what OS or CPU architecture I'm using (examples: {x86_64,aarch64}-linux-musl, Plan9, illumos, …).</p>
+
+</div>
+</content>
+</entry>
diff --git a/config.ninja b/config.ninja
@@ -11,6 +11,7 @@ build nginx_autoindex.xsl: xinclude nginx_autoindex.xsl.in | ./templates/head.xm
build articles/2022$ Summary.html: article entry.xsl articles/2022$ Summary.xml
build articles/Why$ I$ embraced$ Wayland.html: article entry.xsl articles/Why$ I$ embraced$ Wayland.xml
build articles/cve.org-disaster.html: article entry.xsl articles/cve.org-disaster.xml
+build articles/drm-definition.html: article entry.xsl articles/drm-definition.xml
build articles/firmware-broken-terminology.html: article entry.xsl articles/firmware-broken-terminology.xml
build articles/google-web-environment-integrity-illegal.html: article entry.xsl articles/google-web-environment-integrity-illegal.xml
build articles/self-hosting.html: article entry.xsl articles/self-hosting.xml
diff --git a/feed.atom.in b/feed.atom.in
@@ -10,6 +10,7 @@
<updated>2023-06-01T00:00:00Z</updated>
<!-- new.sh: new articles here -->
+<xi:include href="articles/drm-definition.xml"/>
<xi:include href="articles/google-web-environment-integrity-illegal.xml"/>
<xi:include href="articles/firmware-broken-terminology.xml"/>
<xi:include href="articles/2022%20Summary.xml"/>
