The battle is quite a bit broader than that - this is the battle of people that are just now figuring out the full implications of "Turing Complete", and how no, you
cannot make an "applicance" that runs all the useful software but none of the software that you find distasteful.
In case anybody hasn't seen Doctorow's amazing talks on this subject, well... you should. He gets right to the heart of what will be the biggest "disruption" in social structures since the industrial revolution.
His first talk that he gave at 28C3, "The Coming War on General Computation"[1], received a lot of press, but the 2nd talk given about a year later at DEFCON 20, "Beyond the War on General Purpose Computing: What's Inside the Box?"[2], didn't seem to get as much notoriety. This is really unfortunate, because the 2nd talk is far more important: it extends the problem into a lot of other areas of "normal life". DRM in movies is generally only "annoying". DRM in some medical device you rely on is a very different situation.
This suggests that we need to start winning against stuff like DRM and the MPAA trying to censor websites. While movies are really not that important, setting precedent is important, or it will be a lot harder to fight the real problems later on.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqkU1y0AYc
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nypRYpVKc5Y
In case anybody hasn't seen Doctorow's amazing talks on this subject, well... you should. He gets right to the heart of what will be the biggest "disruption" in social structures since the industrial revolution.
His first talk that he gave at 28C3, "The Coming War on General Computation"[1], received a lot of press, but the 2nd talk given about a year later at DEFCON 20, "Beyond the War on General Purpose Computing: What's Inside the Box?"[2], didn't seem to get as much notoriety. This is really unfortunate, because the 2nd talk is far more important: it extends the problem into a lot of other areas of "normal life". DRM in movies is generally only "annoying". DRM in some medical device you rely on is a very different situation.
This suggests that we need to start winning against stuff like DRM and the MPAA trying to censor websites. While movies are really not that important, setting precedent is important, or it will be a lot harder to fight the real problems later on.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqkU1y0AYc
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nypRYpVKc5Y