Some musings on LiveJournal and a decentralized LiveJournal

[spc476]

When I first came across beckyzoole 's call for a content strike on the 21st, I gave some serious thought to moving my once yearly post to LiveJournal up a day, just to be cantakerous.

And the fact that it wasn't exactly clear what the strike was about. Was it for LiveJournal's overlords eliminating ad-free free accounts, or for LiveJournal's overlords

Comments

[novalis]

DRM and access control are different.

DRM involves what happens to bits when they are under a user's control.

Access control involves how they get there to the user.

[spc476]

I don't see much of a difference between “Alice and Bob are allowed to view this-no one else is” and “Alice and Bob are allowed to view but not copy this-no one else is.” Even the definition at Wikipedia allows this:

Digital rights management (DRM) is an umbrella term that refers to access control technologies used by publishers and copyright holders to limit usage of digital media or devices. It may also refer to restrictions associated with specific instances of digital works or devices.

The very act of writing conveys a copyright to the author, so automatically we have copyright holders. Alice writes a post with the intent of only Bob and Carol seeing the post. That's a restriction associazted with a specific instance of a digital work.

Unpleasant as that may seem, I still contend that LiveJournal gives users a form of DRM.

[novalis]

Only DRM can say "Alice and Bob are allowed to view this; no one else is." Other sorts of technologies say, "Alice and Bob are allowed to access this, and once they have copies, the cat is out of the bag." See Schneier: "Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet." Or Doctorow: "In DRM, the attacker is also the recipient. It’s not Alice and Bob and Carol, it’s just Alice and Bob."

[novalis]

I just realized a more charitable explanation of your comments:

Perhaps you believe that some LJ users either believe or wish that LJ friends-locking worked like magical DRM, in that if you tell your LJ friends that you have herpes, it will never make it back to your non-lj-using boyfriend because doing so would violate the sacred trust of a friends lock. Or, in an actual scenario, that flocking a post after someone has read it will prevent them from quoting it to show the world your views.

But LJ does not and cannot work that way, and people who believe it is likely to do not understand either human nature or software engineering.

[spc476]

That's about the size of it.

Also, if you could come and educate our customers that email is not instant messaging and there is no problem if the email is getting through (even if it does take two hours). I would appreciate it.