Thanks for sharing, this was an interesting read. However, I failed to understand in how far this establishes a good use-case for DRM.
This story is about a US citizen who started a company in the EU (he chose UK), which was easy, but failed to open a local bank account there, no matter how hard he tried. He finally solved this problem via Bitcoin.
He wanted to operate in the EU because his new business concept was based on the very strict consumer protection law in Germany (in particular, the UsedSoft v Oracle ruling).
So from this story I learned:
1) that Bitcoin is very handy, and
2) that strict consumer protection laws are not only good for customers, but can also be good for business.
But I don't see how this story makes a good case for DRM. I merely see how DRM could be used to prevent his business model and to circumvent the German consumer protection laws (at least partly). Is it this what you meant?
Ahh, you missed the essential point. :-) The point is that that you can use the p2p ledger to publicly track rights, like a notary public without the notary. Normally, this is centralized in a few hands, vested in a trusted source (the government, or a third party). Property rights, titles, deeds, all are recorded by various government offices like the county clerks.
What makes the DRM issue really about power (and NOT about "freedom" or "consumer friendliness") is that current DRM schemes puts all the power into seller. The most vocal dissent against DRM, however, when examined, really about retaining the power that comes with cheap computing.
This is no way for society to function. We're not the Wild Wild West and I certainly do not want a tyrannical social order either. The solution is a decentralization of power. Being able to use an untrusted mediator is a big deal, of which a DRM method is one small application of this.
In this guy's case, he is selling used software in the EU. By being able to tie the DRM to the bitcoin transactions, it better allows for used software to be passed from one person to another in a fair and equitable way. It can be done in a way where the software owners have little to complain, that if you're going to resell the software and treat it like a tangible good, then at least that gets tracked.
Now, I've heard arguments that, software and other digital "goods" are not inherently tangible, and should have no scarcity restrictions on it. That any form of DRM is therefore arbitrary. However, that fails to consider two points. First, is that authorship and creative endeavor is itself not as easily replicable as the digital good. When you pay for a digital right, you're actually paying for the effort put into the creative endeavor -- although in practice, the owner and controller of a right often is not the creator. The second, is that all types of property are inherently arbitrary. There is nothing sacred about property, though a lot of people have deep, unexamined, emotional attachments to property.
I actually find it hilarious that people get angry about how arbitrary digital rights are ... and yet fail to consider that all property rights are inherently arbitrary. Who owns the water, the land? Who owns the air? Who owns the animals and other living beings on earth? We humans like to think we are the owns, but we not really. We draw arbitrary lines around land and other resources and trade pieces of paper designating ownership. Why not get angry about that?
