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A DRM compromise?: "This is just a tentative idea, not a manifesto. Current DRM technology is “read-act”: every device that sees the DRM data has to act upon it for the DRM to work. Can I propose a “read-only” alternative? In this world, it would be illegal to modify author or copyright licensing data associated with the work. As with laws such as the DMCA or EUCD, distribution of tools or software that does such things is verboten. To be outlawed, it must be a contraption with a UI specificially tailored for tinkering with the metadata — we’re not outlawing the proverbial hacker 5V battery and piece of wire. You can still distribute the file itself, do things that the license disallows. You can augment it, re-mix it. Whatever. Ideally, we’d have rules and standards that would allow us to “mark up” content with rich meta-data. “This sample from 0:46 to 0:48 was ripped from this source, which in turn has this meta-data.” You can downsample to another format that doesn’t permit metadata — we’re not asking for the technically impossible. The advantages of this scheme are several. Firstly, it is morally and technically defensible. It’s just a variant on droit d’auteur rights that have long existed in many jurisdictions. The incentives line up: there’s little point in messing w"