[Windows Phone 7 General] Spike15:
People like you are the reason corporations are more and more "evil" nowadays.

You're content to just sit around and let the corporations do whatever they want to. In fact, you'll sit here and defend them even as they have the gall to charge you money for a product, and then restrict what you can do with that product once you've bought it.

The digital age has introduced a totally new paradigm, and through both ignorance and conditioning, companies are convincing the customer that it is okay to pay for digital products, and then have your usage of that digital products very tightly controlled.

If I sold you a car, and then visited your house the following week as you were about to drive out of your driveway, hauled you out of the car, took your keys, and said "What are you doing? You can't drive that car more than 3 times a week!" you would be outraged. But the digital age distributors have conditioned you to detach yourself from the real world paradigms to what they're doing, and conditioned you to believe that having your experiences tightly controlled is the norm.

I -- and people like me -- refuse to adhere to that. I have no problems paying for software, music, et cetera -- the hard works of other people -- I do have problems when they come along and tell me what I can and can't do with that product once I've purchased it.

Once I've purchased something I expect it to be mine. If I buy a song I expect to be able to put it on all my PCs, my laptop, my phone, my mp3 player, rip it to CDs to play in my car, whatever I feel like doing with it. I don't expect to buy a phone and to only be able to sync it to 5 PCs. I -- myself -- alone have 4 PCs that I would plausibly use for music playback: A laptop, a desktop, and two PCs at work, not to mention the fact that other people in my house have PCs, maybe I want to sync to those PCs? That's way over 5 PCs right there.

Bottom line: If Apple -- or Microsoft under this new WP7S scheme -- wants any money from me, they'll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands, because just as it's not acceptable to have a car dealership prevent you from driving your newly-bought car as much as you want, it's not acceptable for hardware or software manufacturers to tell you -- or enforce upon you -- what you can or cannot do with their hardware or software.

What is wrong with you?

I never said anything like that.

Maybe you should actually read what I say instead of making yourself sound like a

moron

.

There is no way to do it. Plain and simple, there is no way.

No matter what you do, people are going to just work around it.

I'll tell you what definitely isn't the way: What they're doing now.

I used to have this strong conviction in supporting works that I thoroughly enjoyed and which I believed were worth patronizing.

I did this with Oblivion, I did this with Morrowind, I did this with Crysis, et cetera.

So Watchmen -- the movie -- came out. Watchmen -- the comic -- I pirated, and subsequently enjoyed it so much that I went out and bought the graphic novel just to have sit on my shelf, because I felt that the author was owed deferred income from his work.

Long story short, I went for the most expensive Blu-Ray edition, the one that came in the cool metal case, the works. I get it home, and it won't play in my computer.

Why?

HDCP -- draconian copyright enforcement.

I take it back to the store and have a 30 minute yelling match with the store manager because I've purchased a crippled product -- that says nowhere on it that it won't play on my PC...doesn't even mention "HDCP" anywhere on the packaging.

There's something wrong with a world, where I can't enjoy content that I've acquired legally, solely because the manufacturer of that content seeks to protect their interests -- it's counter-productive to the consumer model. Corporations are supposed to be required to appease their customers and thereby win their customer's support and thereby win their customer's money.

But the modern customer is a sheep. An idiot. A fool. You are a modern customer Eagle Steve.

Modern customers think it's normal to be inconvenienced in purchasing content, and that's wrong.

After I got back from the store that day, I pirated a Watchmen Blu-Ray rip and enjoyed the movie in gorgeous HD with beautiful surround sound with no HDCP or DRM to speak of. That is how content should be enjoyed, and that's the one thing the FOSS movement has gotten right:

"Free" as in "Freedom"