Big Brother

When I was a kid and saw the film 1984 based on George Orwell's novel, I found it horrific. The all-seeing eye that watched you. The grimy day-to-day reality of people whose lives were totally controlled by a hierarchy whose values were obviously anti-people was frightening.

But this is the reality that the corporate world bring us with DRM (digital rights management).

Here's a video that looks at a lot of the issues:



For me, the one part that is most upsetting is the story by Jeremy Teplinsky, a lawyer who bought a Sony CD and discovered that the act of trying to "play the music" in fact started a process of reconfiguring his computer to (a) load software onto his machine without requesting permission and (b) create security holes in the operating system that made his computer insecure. This is outrageous. A corporation completely trampled the rights of its customers in a supposed effort to protect the property rights of the corporation. Nutty. And scary.