The Digital Enforcement - The Trouble with DRM and Other Such ̶c̶r̶a̶p̶

As I've discussed already when analyzing the future of licensing, corporate interest has been running the show, to disastrous results. It might be time to make licensing and other rights' restriction schemes outright illegal. One such system is Digital Rights Restriction Management, which is a "technology" created by digital publishers in the 90s to make sure that, if governments didn't play by their rules (which they mostly did, either by extending copyright again and again or by allowing them to play their shenanigans with End User License Agreements) they would simply take matters into their own hands and make sure their own definition of the rules was followed, by force.

DRM comes in many different forms - CSS, which was one of the first such schemes and was used to encrypt DVDs, uses a cipher that makes reading a movie stream impossible without the key. Obtaining the key is a jump-through-hoops process where the player needs to have a key (which was paid for in form of a license) to decrypt a key (which is physically present in the disc) which is then used to decrypt yet another key which they allows the system to read the actual bits and bytes of the movie stream.

If it sounds overly complicated and stupid, then you've understood DRM and my job is done.

One of the many things that CSS ignores is one tiny little thing called Inalienable Human Rights like the right to Free Speech and the right to make Fair Use of copyrighted works, which is fine for evil corporations because fuck Human Rights, right? But as governments let corporations play their dirty game they get more and more daring and DRM gets more brazen. Nowadays it's common practice to keep part of the DRM process physically separate from the rest, so you need internet access (either prior or constant) to have access to content you paid for and rightfully own (at least as far as the law goes).

Nowadays such shenanigans have been having lots of backlash, especially from consumers buying music from online stores (most if not all migrated away from DRM because of negative customer feedback) and from players being locked away from games because of draconian DRM (as #GamerGate has taught us, Hell hath no fury like a gamer scorned), so hopefully sometime soon there will be a shift in legislation that either seriously restricts DRM and EULAs or outright eliminates them.

One can dream, right?

The World of Proprietary Software or How could the software licensing landscape look like in 2020

So it's undeniable that proprietary software has a place in the market - we're long past the age where all software came free as part of a hardware sale and way too early in the evolution of the media to have all software be free/libre for good and, most of all, there are billions (maybe trillions) of dollars behind proprietary software models right now that won't easily shift to better formats anytime soon, so we better learn to deal with it. But if current trends in proprietary software aren't curbed soon, the licensing landscape can look very ugly in a few years, as I wish to explore in this text.

First comes the "pig in a bag" issue (or "gato por lebre" in my native Portuguese) where what you buy and what you get can be completely different things. The fact that End User License Agreements have never been tested in court and are so far regarded to be valid from the moment you click "Install" has been breeding constant contractions of user rights, some which would be outright illegal if analysed by any sane optic. Buying software used to mean you owned it and therefore could resell it or move it to a new computer once the one you're using to read this blog post on goes South or whatever, but a cursory glance on an EULA these days will show you otherwise - you're merely a licensee and that copy of Windows or Photoshop you paid for still belongs to the publisher. Not only that, but it's probably restricted to one install, to the current machine you own. Not only that, but it's perfectly legal for the publisher to test your hardware and, should it ever change, accuse you of having moved it to a different machine and disabling your license. Not only that, but you might have to ping a licensing server every few days (during such visit they'll probably pull some usage information "for marketing purposes") so you can remain licensed - just ask Adobe Creative Suite users what it feels like when Adobe goes offline and they can't use Photoshop. Not only that, but it might be simply impossible to use your software without internet connection, even if there's no need for you to be online at all - many videogame publishers have seen the online gaming experience as a nice way to curb piracy and now think it's fair to stop you from playing offline even if it's a single player game.

So what's next? Subscription is already a thing - Microsoft Office and Creative Suite are now available in a yearly version along with the "bought" version (which with every restriction they add gets shittier until it finally feels like paying for a subscription is no longer such a stupid deal). Digital Rights Restriction Management already makes pirating games easier than playing the version you paid for and for every new restriction they get away with, they'll come up with a more outlandish one, so soon you'll be jumping through extra hoops to use proprietary software that you paid for. But there's a silver lining, which is mobile software. Mobile users (especially Android users) are profoundly less tolerant to bullshit pricing schemes and they expect the software they bought for their phone to run on their tablet or their next phone and so on, so it's entirely possible that, as mobile becomes more important than workstations, proprietary software vendors get pushed back harder and come up with saner licensing schemes, and with Chromebooks and convertibles and etc the category as a whole may well cease to exist and everything we call mobile may simply be the personal computers of the future.

Time will tell.

helpmefixit - Poster and Demo

Working on the feedback from last session, here's a new poster we've come up with (right-click and select Open link on a new tab to view in original size):

Also, please visit the following link for a demo: http://marvl.in/1jbe3j

Field research project outline - Ethnographic study of a team prior to toolset migration

The objective of this study is to understand Company A’s usage of their current Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool to better prepare for the transition to a new web-based CRM tool. This study is necessary because Company A has put a lot of Engineering effort into integrating their current CRM tool into their own systems, as well as built years of workflow around the tools feature set

Of all departments in Company A, three departments have direct contact with the CRM tool - Customer Support (CS for short), with over 80 employees whose workflow is entirely centered around the tool and its integration into the Internal System (known internally as Ninjas), Operations, who have their own toolset (mostly developed in-house) but use the CRM tool to communicate with CS, who then act as a buffer between operations and customers themselves and Compliance, who, like Operations, have their own toolsets but make use of the CRM tool to communicate with CS and, sometimes, to customers themselves.

As the new CRM tool possesses all features of the current one (either a direct equivalent or an analogue feature that achieves the same results) and lots of new features, this ethnographic investigation’s short-term goal are:

1. To understand how each team relates to the CRM tool
2. To catalog all features used by each team
3. To understand if the same workflows are approached differently by each team

To achieve this goal we intend to employ shadowing: the researcher will shadow one member of each concerned team during one hour of work. No information will be shared with the subjects on what the goals of the study are and they'll be asked to work normally and pay no regard to the researcher. The researcher will make notes during this time of every single action taken during the completion of their tasks, what tools are used and how information is conveyed between different tools.

The longer-term goals are to use this information to:

1. Draft a migration plan that focuses Engineering resources on critical features first
2. Ensure that the new CRM tool is configured to make workflow migration (as) seamless (as possible)
3. Understand how to make better use of features not yet available in the current CRM tool to improve the current workflow once the new tool is available
4. Draft training material for current and new team members on using the new tool