blog

drm-definition.xml (3705B)

<!--
Copyright © 2014 Haelwenn (lanodan) Monnier
SPDX-License-Identifier: LAL-1.3
-->
<entry>
<title>On the definition of DRM</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://hacktivis.me/articles/drm-definition"/>
<id>https://hacktivis.me/articles/drm-definition</id>
<published>2023-11-10T09:04:13Z</published>
<updated>2023-11-10T09:05:13Z</updated>
<link rel="external replies" type="application/activity+json" href="https://queer.hacktivis.me/objects/75381fed-55e5-4428-9381-0b1183eecc7f" />
<link rel="external replies" type="text/html" href="https://queer.hacktivis.me/objects/75381fed-55e5-4428-9381-0b1183eecc7f" />
<content type="xhtml">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" class="h-entry">
<p>
	Warning: This is a rather thorny question, in the same style of debating if a particular product or software is under a <abbr title="Free Libre Open-Source Software">FLOSS</abbr> license or not.
	It's also deeply linked to laws, and I am not a lawyer, do not take this as legal advice.
</p>
<p>
	That aside here's how I define DRM as: A juridical backdoor which serves to restrict more or less fundamental rights like private copies, private modifications and effectively interoperability (which is one of the copyright exceptions in the European Union).<br />
	I see technical means as irrelevant or even a gigantic trap, PDF for example uses a bit flag to restrict printing, making it effectively non-existant if you're not following the PDF specification to the letter.
</p>
<ul>
	<li>What's the difference between a mere <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_modding">mod</a> (legal privately, redistributions of them are typically tolerated) and a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_cracking">crack</a> (illegal, always)? DRM.</li>
	<li>Is a software or network dependency a DRM? Not on itself, it becomes DRM if becomes illegal to circumvent it (Some of those dependencies are particularly annoying and ought to be avoided though).</li>
</ul>
<h2>Steam</h2>
<p>This is a rather controversial part, but I want to address it. My position on it is:</p>
<ul>
	<li>A lot of games rely on Steam (sometimes only for achievements): It becomes DRM if fixing the hard-dependency via mods or a shim is illegal;</li>
	<li>There's games on Steam ship with Denuvo and other DRM solutions, I don't remember if those are explicitly noted as such (edit: It seems like Steam is marking those, not sure if systemically done though);</li>
	<li>The main steam client (<code>steamcmd</code> even if official is excluded here) itself is a deeply annoying games installer with forced auto-updates, making usage of it offline a challenge. I'd call this a botnet, not DRM.</li>
</ul>
<p>Or said otherwise Steam is an unfortunate vector for DRM, quite like a CD player is with games trying to require physical copies of CDs to be present for playing. And just like the CD-era, it is hard to know if a particular game has DRM or not on Steam, much better to bet and support stores with a stance against DRM.</p>
<p>And personally I much favor games where I can get the art under whatever licensing/price and get the software part with source-code under a libre license (or be able to use third-party software), for example Quake 1&amp;2, Doom 1→3, and Visual Novels using a generic multimedia-player style of architecture like ones based on KiriKiri (GPL!) and DNML (RenPy would be there if it wouldn't use a language like Python in the scripts…). Effectively because I want to be able to play games regardless of what OS or CPU architecture I'm using (examples: {x86_64,aarch64}-linux-musl, Plan9, illumos, …).</p>
</div>
</content>
</entry>