DRM: How To Boil A Frog

symbolic writes "This article on the Register explains their experience with Creative's first attempt at supporting DRM, and also reviews a sneaky little technique for 'easing' DRM into peoples' lives via a free Costello preview CD. Two of the tracks are free from any DRM, but for the two that are DRM-enabled, you have to activate the right to listen to them (up to four times), by accessing a central server via the net. For those in the know, the doublespeak used to inform users of any actions they need to take to enable their DRM rights might be quite amusing. To wit: 'The content you are accessing requires an additional level of security. In order to play it, you will need to update your Digital Rights Management Installation.' Others, however, will think they're getting something, when they're actually having something taken away from them. It's a matter of time to see if consumers will flat-out reject this new 'enabling' technology, or let it seep into and infect their lives like the disease that it is."

Comments

Re:Rights?

[unoengborg]

Who do you think you are! So you think you have rights! If you wan't rights, you have to buy them like everyone else. Contact your favourite policians and find out their going rates.

Re:sorry creative...

[wirelessbuzzers]

parent should have been modded flamebait. +4 insightful instead, so I'll bite.

Note: I am strongly against DRM, but IP is not the antichrist, it just has its places. Don't mod me troll, this is actually my opinion.

I will agree that technology is inherently iterative. Nobody has a completely new idea, ever, with the emphasis on completely. Suppose you have a useful idea, perhaps not completely new, but useful nonetheless.

Perhaps you have invented a data-exchange protocol that will allow for faster transmissions. This is not an easy thing to do, and requires substantial effort and a fairly complex lab. Now, what are you going to do with it? Are you going to email IBM and tell them about it so they can sell it, refusing to patent the idea yourself? Probably not, because there is substantial development cost. Maybe your idea wasn't original, and maybe a thousand people had it first, but you put the effort and the money into getting it implemented. How are you going to recoup your development costs? You aren't, unless you patent the device to stop IBM (say) from selling for less, because they have economy of scale and a better marketing department than you. If you are a large company, you might put the technology out for free to further your good name, but if you put a lot of money and effort into developing something, you are going to want a return on that money. Businesses would go broke otherwise.

This is especially noticeable in the (admittedly somewhat bloated) pharmaceuticals industry. Drugs are expensive to develop taking millions of dollars and years to create, plus tens of millions and several more years to test, and therefore must be patented to keep drug companies in business. It is simply not possible to turn a profit if after your $200 million dollar, 10-year development process, every other company can make your drug for the same price.

Software can be the same way. Complicated systems take a long time to write, and unless the people writing them are already filthy rich, they need some incentive before they are going to put in a hundred thousand man-hours. In our capitilistic economy, it is just not possible to make a living writing software if you allow everyone to copy it freely. Perhaps if you request that people donate if they have the money ... but unless your software is insanely popular, you can't get by on that much money. People would only code in their spare time and provide no tech support. And certainly, if you wrote it in your spare time and don't need the money, open-source your software. But a guy has to eat something, not to mention pay for bandwidth and rack space...

I would say that music should be free. Groups should get their money through concerts, or maybe there should be some socialistic system that supports music. I am against DRM, but intellectual property is the way the economy works today.