Captain Beef?

[levi]

DRM and 'collected data sent without consent' are pretty much the same thing in modern parlance, I think. The term 'DRM' coves the whole panoply of technology from traditional offline copy protection to modern network negotiation and plaintext messaging protocols, especially when used to track the use of copyrighted software. In this case, the sending of data being DRM depends on what's done with the data received, but it exposes the possibility of it being used for DRM at least.

 

[Caine]

DRM and 'collected data sent without consent' are pretty much the same thing in modern parlance, I think.

I disagree. DRM is about access control, data collection is just about data mining.

For example, when you go offline (or block the traffic with a firewall), data collection will fail to transmit, but it will not prohibit usage of the product. For online DRM doing the same will prevent you from using the product entirely. For offline and hybrid DRM (e.g. verify periodically) rules are a bit different.

Naturally both of these can be (and are) combined into a single product, but they are fundamentally different things.

From an ethical perspective, DRM can be easily justified. Although many implementations of them go WAY to far and thus become unethical (e.g. compromising the host OS, mixing with data collection).

I have a very hard time to ethically justify data mining without consent.

For the record, I am not a proponent of DRM and boycott all DRM'ed products.

 

[ible]

captain roast of beef?