In Defence of CDs...
So I've listened to many CDs from the 90s lately (yes, they work fine after about 30 years!) and yesterday - for the second time this week - I saw press reports about environmentalists bemoaning the resurgence of CDs (for music) in South Korea.
They basically complain about plastic waste. Have they bothered to assess the cost of DRM? Like people 'buying' [sic] the same stuff over and over again? Or having to spend more power (CPU cycles) decrypting signals? Or having to buy a whole new PC that can handle decryption fast enough?
How about streaming? Not only does this waste CPU cycles; it also keeps routers and hubs - and sometimes satellites (lot of power to bring into orbit) - very busy. Have these environmentalists taken that into account?
Physical copies of something that a person purchases isn't a bad thing. Encryption should not be needed for public and mass-distributed material, either. There's nothing confidential or sensitive about someone's mainstream music track/s.
Let's say that some environmentalists focus only on visible things like plastics (CDs don't have to come in a box, a paper sleeve might do) and not much bigger culprits; moreover, these environmentalists may inadvertently help those seeking to eliminate any sense of ownership and restrict access based on "subscription" or some availability of some DRM server/s (spying), turning a media one can replicate or back up into something worse than rental (when you rented a movie over VHS you could typically pass it around or make copies).
We're not against environmentalists; we're against misguided positions or stances that are formed based on misunderstandings. █