> Rental of digital goods doesn't make sense for me (explained above).
You mean "stated above". You never adequately responded to my comment, instead drifting off into the weeds of railing against DRM.
> Unethical nature of it makes it inherently bad.
You're taking it as a given that it's unethical. You haven't proved that yet, you merely made an analogy to a police state.
> treating all users as potential criminals by default
The perfect DRM would enforce the IP rights without interfering with legitimate use. Such a perfect DRM would not, in fact, treat users as potential criminals. Certainly not any more than, say, merchandise tags in retail stores. I doubt you rail against those.
What does treat all users as potential criminals is those unskippable FBI warnings at the start of movies. But that's not DRM.
Granted, DRM implementations in general are flawed, and those flaws do impact legitimate users. But that's not always true. For example, I wouldn't say that the DRM iTunes uses for movies/TV is crippling otherwise-legitimate uses. Which is to say, it's never stopped me from enjoying my movies or TV shows the way I wanted to. Granted, I've never wanted to watch my TV shows on, say, an Android device, but the ability to view iTunes content on an Android device is not something I purchased the rights to in the first place.
> Why not? Ethics has its logic.
And yet you haven't even attempted to use logic to defend your claim that it's unethical. You've just made sweeping generalizations and analogies, with the expectation that I would agree with you.
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In any case, I did say I'm not interested in debating DRM, and I'll say that again. If you want to try to make an argument for why rentals don't make sense, using some justification other than "because rentals require DRM and I believe that DRM is unethical", go ahead (but you should go back and reply to my original comment, not this thread). But you don't really seem interested in defending that statement, instead you just want to talk about DRM. And I would rather not.
Which one? About no bearing (I didn't see what to respond there), or about risk of users downloading the whole catalog at once? I responded to that (the service can charge some fee per file to prevent such thing). Or you mean about that Netflix has to negotiate something? The discussion wasn't about what is handed to Netflix by the publishers, it was about the concept of renting of digital goods which I find to be illogical. So please point me to the comment you want me to answer to, because I'm not sure which one that is.
> You're taking it as a given that it's unethical.
For me it is. I can expect that some people have different view and find it normal. After all some people find extreme Orwellian policing of society acceptable. It's not normal for me and never would be.
> The perfect DRM would enforce the IP rights without interfering with legitimate use.
Perfect policing system would prevent all crime without interfering with legitimate activity and without suspecting innocent people. I doubt such thing can exist. Increasing policing to extreme levels of total surveillance is not perfect policing because it equals to suspicion by default and it clearly interferes with legitimate activity. That's what DRM is. Overreaching preemptive policing.
I.e. the logic of DRM goes like this:
1. All users are potential thieves.
2. We need to prevent all of them from doing anything that is not authorized.
3. Let's build some technical measures and deploy them on users' systems and devices (since there is on other way to achieve the goals of #2).
4. Let's enjoy piracy free world.
They eagerly do #3, while #4 obviously utterly fails (it doesn't stop them from doing #3 for some reason as we discussed above). Now, I see huge problems with 1-3. Firstly, all users are assumed criminals. It's insulting and disgusting and it's not comparable to a lock on a store or tags like you said. Because of #3 - i.e. users' private digital space is invaded for the sake of deploying the enforcement of all these policies.
Imagine some police claiming, that all people in the country are potential criminals, so they need to invade all people's houses with police cameras to prevent any potential crime. That's what DRM does in essence. House is one's private area. One's computer / system / program one uses is one's digital private area. Invading it with preemptive policing measures is unethical and overreaching and prone to all kind of abuse.
> And yet you haven't even attempted to use logic to defend your claim that it's unethical.
See above, I expanded on my previous brief explanations which I assumed were sufficient.
You mean "stated above". You never adequately responded to my comment, instead drifting off into the weeds of railing against DRM.
> Unethical nature of it makes it inherently bad.
You're taking it as a given that it's unethical. You haven't proved that yet, you merely made an analogy to a police state.
> treating all users as potential criminals by default
The perfect DRM would enforce the IP rights without interfering with legitimate use. Such a perfect DRM would not, in fact, treat users as potential criminals. Certainly not any more than, say, merchandise tags in retail stores. I doubt you rail against those.
What does treat all users as potential criminals is those unskippable FBI warnings at the start of movies. But that's not DRM.
Granted, DRM implementations in general are flawed, and those flaws do impact legitimate users. But that's not always true. For example, I wouldn't say that the DRM iTunes uses for movies/TV is crippling otherwise-legitimate uses. Which is to say, it's never stopped me from enjoying my movies or TV shows the way I wanted to. Granted, I've never wanted to watch my TV shows on, say, an Android device, but the ability to view iTunes content on an Android device is not something I purchased the rights to in the first place.
> Why not? Ethics has its logic.
And yet you haven't even attempted to use logic to defend your claim that it's unethical. You've just made sweeping generalizations and analogies, with the expectation that I would agree with you.
---
In any case, I did say I'm not interested in debating DRM, and I'll say that again. If you want to try to make an argument for why rentals don't make sense, using some justification other than "because rentals require DRM and I believe that DRM is unethical", go ahead (but you should go back and reply to my original comment, not this thread). But you don't really seem interested in defending that statement, instead you just want to talk about DRM. And I would rather not.