OT: Fair use, DRM and rootkits

[Alan Dayley]

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I saw to things tonight that made me glad I don't trust DRM (Digital
Rights Management).

First off, my 6th grade son has a report due tomorrow.  The report is a
musical auto-biography.  He had to write up songs he likes or that are
important to him and why.  Part of the report is an oral presentation
that has to include the actual audio of 3 of the songs in the report.
The teacher will play some or all of each song on a CD player during the
student's presentation.

Rather than send him off with 3 different CDs, I ripped the specific
song from each and burned all three to another CD.  As I understand it,
this is legal under fair use for educational purposes.  Nice to enjoy
that bit of freedom.

Secondly, earlier in the day I saw this article:

http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html

It's long but impressive both in the knowledge of the guy writing it and
the results he found.

It is a very detailed account of how one of the SysInternals guys
discovered a rootkit on one of his computers, how he tracked it and what
it took to remove it.  Turns out it was installed as part of the DRM
software on a music CD he had recently purchased.  By the way, when this
program's components were removed by a normal process of deleting the
files, it rendered access to the CD drive broken.  He, being a very
driver savvy, knew how to recover but normal consumers would be stuck
without a CD drive.  Wow!

So here this guy was decoding this invasive program installed without
his consent on his computer.  A program that I assume would prevent the
fair use I had just enjoyed to further my son's education efforts.

Food for thought.  DRM: Exactly whose rights does it benefit?

Alan
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