Amusing
I was just re-reading a whitepaper on DRM by Alex Alben. Alben notes that DRM is very controversial, but jokes in a footnote that at least "[a]ll the parties to the debate can agree that DRM stands for 'Digital Rights Management'".
Amusingly enough, Alben is wrong! Thousands of uses of the expansion "digital restrictions management" are attested, possibly inspired by the FSF's suggestion that we that phrase. Many copyright activists are concerned by the use of "rights" to mean "policies" (I am trying to avoid that usage in "How to Abuse Trusted Computing"). Among other things, this might be because "right" (and its equivalents in other languages) has connotations of "justice", and the enforcement of some policy might not have any connection to justice.
Of course, this usage might not have been created solely to polish the image of policies associated with documents by publishers -- since it's also true that "right" has come to mean "policy" in some parts of security engineering. But it always grates on me when somebody describes a way of transmitting or enforcing policies like copy-control policies as "rights expression", "rights management", "rights enforcement", etc. This usage seems especially common among DRM vendors and customers.
I just found it funny that the only thing Alben could find that everybody agreed on isn't actually agreed on at all.
- Links from other weblogs:
Sat Feb 24 11:35:09: XQhaYJuxJmVf from OjZiDBhFg
dqVmaWLmLuv MYJVkT [URL=http://xindnsy.com/]sjEhjmkM[/URL]
