Information Feudalism

The concept of Information Feudalism, implied in Jeremy Rifkin's Age of Access, is that we are entering a regime where the freedom of property makes place for the unfreedom of licensing, which places limits on what we can do with the things we purchase, a new kind of capitalist serfhood.

Digital Rights Management as Information Feudalism

"What you need to know is that DRM can be, and has proven to be, a Trojan horse. In a back and forth thread of e-mails, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's John Gilmore described to me how DRM technology basically allows those who sit at the controls of it to arbitrarily change the rules. For example, one day, with Apple's iTunes, we were able to burn the same playlist as many as ten times. A day later, it was seven. Unlike before, when we could take our vinyl records and CDs and do pretty much anything we wanted with them (to facilitate our personal use) or even sell them (or will them to family members), the "R" in DRM is much less about what we have the right to do and more about the Restrictions that can be arbitrarily and remotely asserted over something we paid good money for. So far, the best suggestion I've heard to dodge the CRM bullet is seek used CDs. It may not be a la carte song buying. But it's not a premium price for a bunch of music you may not want anyway." (http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1952)