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Former Apple Exec Speaks Against DRM
Wysz writes "Mike Evangelist, former Director of Product Marketing for Apple's "Pro" applications, has blogged his thoughts about DRM. Like many of us, he is offended by the fact that the record labels and movie studios treat their customers like criminals.
While he notes in the comments section that iTunes is the best of the worst, he admits to using third-party tools to remove the DRM from iTunes tracks."
From his blog:
I agree. This has been my philosophy for a long time. Unfortunately, you can only find out after the fact you've bought something with crap built in. If there is any disclaimer at all on the packaging, it's microscopic (look at the recent Beastie Boys CD). The first thing I do with a new CD is rip it, verify it plays on all of my PC's, and all of my CD and DVD players. If it doesn't, I return it. (And, yes, I even erase the ripped music.)
Personal music copying is legit, and bought and paid for through media levies. Why would I ever buy from Apple/other DRM music provider for an extra 99 cents what I've already bought from my friends on BitTorrent. Faster, better selection, and a more flexible format.
What I really dislike about DRM is the general consensus that everything actually will have DRM in the future. Even many hardcore geeks at Slashdot seem to reason DRM is here to stay and, if anything, we should try to use the lesser of all the evils. Well, I don't agree (and I didn't vote for Bush either, *shrug*) and the sooner the consumers unite somehow and nicely tell the record- and movie industry we don't want their freaking DRM the better.
Microsoft, being a maker of software based DRM-solutions, plays along nicely by reinforcing the record/movie industry's "threat" that they are "forced" to use DRM if future content should be playable at all in the future. This is _untrue!_ Even if many content industries want DRM, it's not needed, and we shouldn't give up and let them have it that way. Think about it, if a CD can be played in a stereo, even if the stereo has some kind of DRM, any competent taiwanese manufacutrer should be able to create a player for the computer, regardless if RIAA, MPAA or Microsoft likes that or not. That's the way it should be.
I am worried someday, somewhere, some freaking moron political figures will rule the computer is an "entertainment device" and must be managed with DRM (think Vista, Trusted Computing etc). That's the day we are all fucked, even if don't actually listen to music or watch TV.
If people *can* steal something, they will. The honor system doesn't work. In the old days of vinyl and open reel tapes, sure people could still copy the media, but the distribution network did not exist. Then, if you started selling and advertising pirated media, you ran a big risk of being discovered and shut down. Today, it's nearly trivial to rip a cd or dvd and post a torrent and let anybody with access to google find and download it. They just can't allow that to happen and still expect to recover the costs of producing content worth recording, let along make big bucks doing it.
Mod me troll but that what I really think. DRM will be a fact of life someday, and customers will either go along or listen to scratchy old albums of "Uriah Heep" while everybody else is enjoying "Sexcapades: 2010!".
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
And I refuse to buy any CDs that won't fit in my tape deck!
I suppose it's interesting that a former Apple guy should be taking a stance against Apple's current policy, but this isn't a particularly well-reasoned article. He's basically fed up with format change, and he's ticked off that there are things he thinks he ought to be able to do with the new format (copy it freely to every digital device) that he can't do.
There's nothing new in this article. He's trotting out the usual complaints about DRM without addressing the usual responses. The usual responses may or may not be adequate, but the article is less "Here's a new argument against DRM from a guy who knows" and more "Yet another guy is pissed off."
Does the name George Orwell mean anything to you people. Wake up and smell the coffee! Big Brother is coming, and we need to stop it now before its too late. I'm serious...stop laughing dammit...ok now I'm ticked! Seriously though, we as Americans and citizens of other Free Nations need to stand up and say that "we will not allow corporations to take away our rights and freedom no matter what". Send a clear message to the RIAA, boycott their products, and spread the word that you can boycotting them and why. All that's needed to start a landslide is a single pebble. Are YOU that pebble? Think about it.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
It's like being offended that walmart has stolen goods detectors at the exits.
No. It would be more like if Walmart put a goods detector in your house to check to make sure you weren't bringing in competitor goods or in fact making use of your goods in ways they did not want in order for you to pay twice for them.
Oh noes! It looks like you just used the plunger to clean the bathroom upstairs and it clearly states in the EULA that the plunger you purchased at Walmart must be used only for the licensed bathroom downstairs!
In that scenario, I would be very offended.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Fortunately those tags are removed at the time of purchase. I would have no problem with DRM if it was removed by the seller at the time of purchase.
Reality has a liberal bias
"That's because their shirt can't instantly become six billion more shirts, which you can give away for free (or sell for next to nothing, like AllofMP3.com does) and take away any reason for anybody else to buy one from them."
By the same token you can not produce a shirt and then replicate for pennies while selling each one at $20.00.
What this points out is that music has been overpriced for years. The cost of production has kept going down without corresponding reduction in price.
the so called "piracy" is simply the market nomalizing itself.
evil is as evil does
If someone discovered a way to effortless create / duplicate food,
Already exists.
Step 1. Bury seed corn in the ground.
Step 2. Wait a few months.
It doesn't yield as much food as if you tend to it all year, but it works.
More to the point, food producers don't have any claim of intellectual property over the food they sell. If you can find a cheaper way to produce it, they must either adopt your method or go bankrupt. Even if there ever was a patent on soybeans, it ran out about 6,000 years ago.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The key is the title being "former" Apple exec. Current Apple execs have raging hard-ons for DRM, and are busy readying to force Trusted Computing down the throats of the consumer with their new x86-based Macs.
I've worked in retail. The stores say that employees steal more than anything. I've worked a place where a manager had to walk employees out to be sure they didn't snag something. So I'd just like to add evidence, from experience, that "everyone" does know that. At least everyone even remotely involved.
Actually, game copy protections are once again getting seriously intrusive.
I've purchased several games that have refused to run without a NOCD patch due to who-knows-why.
Yeah, way to treat your paying customers.
Sadly, all I can do is send a complaint to the company because copy protections aren't exactly printed on the packaging, and stores don't take returns.
At least the department store removes the tag after you buy it.
Lets take this a little bit further.
A department store decides to leaves the anti-theft tag on it's clothes permanently to prevent people from copying it's designs. You go to the store and buy a baseball cap. You take the cap home and your wife thinks it's cool too, but the tag jumps in the way and refused to let her put it on her head. Your daughter finds a hack to let her wear the cap, but the damn thing is watermarked so the store can tell it's "stolen". The store sees her wearing the cap and sues you.
You deal with the lawsuit and throw away the hacked cap, but you liked the cap so much you buy a second copy. You wear it regularly for a while then put it in a drawer and only wear it occasionally. When you decide to buy a new house and move, the cap refuses to let the movers take it out of the old house. It also refuses to let the new owners of the old house use it. It sits in the garage and is useless to anyone.
You still are pretty charmed by the cap so you buy a third copy. Since you've been going bald for a few years, it's nice to have your head covered up on summer days. After watching infomercials late at night, you decide the Hair Club for Men is the thing for you. You're really happy with your new "hair" but you still want some cover so you go to put on the cap. It refuses to go on your head.
You are PISSED! You've bought three copies of that F**KING cap and now you can't even use it, just cause you have new "hair". You swear to never buy another cap from that GOD D**NED company. But the cap really has a lot of sentimental value so you end up buying a fourth copy anyway.
Yep, DRM is just like those little tags
TW
If you don't like DRM, suggest another way for them to sell music.
Easy.
Q: How has the internet changed things?
A: The cost of distribution is now effectively zero.
No smart business will even try to charge for something that is free. Even if they have a 300% markup, 3 * 0 is still ZERO.
Q: What's left to charge a markup on?
A: Labor costs.
The cost to create the album, book, movie or video game is where there is still opportunity to charge a mark-up. So, forget all about copyright which is (primarily) about controlling distribution. There is no value in distribution any more.
Instead, sell all the creations as work-for-hire to the public domain. Yes, let the public pay for the cost of creation plus whatever premium you can milk from them. If it costs $500K to produce an album, then ask for $1M up front from the public at large. Let the people pay whatever they think such an album will be worth to them. Take all those payments, put them into an escrow account and when it hits $1M you get to work. When you are done, release the finished album to the public domain and collect your $1M in payment.
This can work for the same reason that the cost of distribution is now zero - the Internet. The cost of collecting payments from millions of people is approaching zero too. We still need the right financial infrastructure to do it efficiently, but technically all the pieces are already available.
Q: How does "work-for-hire to the public domain" benefit the content creators?
A: It substantially reduces their risks by guaranting the return on their investment up front.
Q: How does "work-for-hire to the public domain" benefit the consumers?
A1: They will actually own the results - no worries about breaking the law to share with friends.
A2: They have much more of a say into what kinds of entertainment get created - not advertisers, not studio execs, but the actual consumer gets to vote with his dollar before production which is far more effective than "voting" after the production is already finished.
Q: What if not enough money is collected to reach $1M?
A: Lower the asking price, or give up and return all the escrowed money or spend some money on hype to encourage more buyers. This is the epitomy of a free market, no government involvement required at all.
Totally in agreement with you on the general argument, but I'm not sure what the above means. The Federalist Society has only been around for 20 years, and it's mostly an organization of libertarians and "Eisenhower conservatives" who dislike the over-reaching of the federal government. I certainly wouldn't say that the expansion of federal copyright law is in any way something they'd condone.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
First of all, piracy does not equate to lost sales. The vast majority of people who consume pirated software/music/movies are people who couldn't/wouldn't pay the retail price in the first place. There's a simple reason that piracy is mostly rampant on college campuses: students are poor.
Secondly, since when did the purchase of a CD change from "owning a copy" to "being licensed to experience the content"? I haven't seen a licensing agreement printed in any of the CDs I've bought. When I buy a DRM-unencumbered CD, I am owning that copy of the content. I can (and will) do whatever I want with it. Just because iTunes comes along and starts "licensing" the content in DRM-encumbered form, that doesn't mean that the nature of purchasing a raw CD has suddenly changed.
Thirdly, the entire public debate about copyright law, DRM, the DMCA, piracy, etc, all really boils down to one simple thing: what is ethical is not the same as what is legal, and vice-versa. The government is supposed to serve the people by refining the law until it accurately reflects what is ethical. Unfortunately what we have right now is a body of law that is radically divergent from what is ethical. Throughout history, whenever the government and the law have gone against what is ethical, civil unrest has resulted and has in fact been the only way to set things right. Digital piracy is just the latest form of civil unrest. Since the government is clearly in the pockets of rich special interests, piracy is the only form of civil unrest and demonstration the public has left at its disposal. So from an ethical stance, piracy is a good thing because it is the only counter-force fighting to swing the law and government back toward what is ethical.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Get a hanky, tie and tie a knot in each corner and pull that on your head ;-). Welcome to the creative commons, set yourself and others free, share to be fair :).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
>No. I bought the music, the media it was recorded on, and the right to copy and >remix it any way I like.
Not exactly. These rights are held exclusively by the copyright owner (not the owner of a copy).
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
This means that you can't remix or share coppies with friends under federal copyright law. You purchased the right to use the copy that you bought under right of first sale, and to make one archival copy. you can't lend it, you can't remix it with out a specific liscence from the copyright owner saying that you can.
That being said, I'm listening to a mix CD right now. The laws simply haven't been able to catch up with technology, and the consumers are getting the short end of the stick because their generally complacent and willing to let the record labels do what they want, and they don't have a lobby in congress to express their views.
If you're asking questions like this, you're not understanding what's going on. That's likes saying at the dawn of the textile industry, "OK, so all the home-weavers just quit and the guild folds. Now all the factories with buggy prototype machines and no trained work force just have to somehow make a profit. Bet you're in favor of artificially high prices now!"
I'll explain the analogy. The current record labels are dinosaurs, and their time has come. The market can no longer support them. But this is a PROCESS. It's not like you can just hit a switch and say "OK industry, change" and expect an instant turn over. The record labels have the resources to stick around for a while, and the new business model that will replace them is not ready yet. This doesn't change the fact that the old business model won't work anymore.
And the artificially high prices, in this case, are going to be the result of DRM (if it succeeds). Consider diamonds. Until the 19th century they were very rare - and thus valuable. In the 19th century, however, vast diamond deposits were found - mostly in Africa. The DeBiers family realized that if diamonds were no longer rare, they would no longer be valuable as jewelry - and thus they bought up the vast majority of the diamonds and mines available and then released only a controlled amount to the public. So even though diamonds, as raw material, are relatively common they are rare on the marketplace. They have succeeded in maintaining this artificial scarcity for over a century. It only worked becuase they paired it with an equally successful marketing campaign.
Whenever a new diamond mine of sufficient size to threaten their contol is opened they can flood the market - temporarily dropping the prices and financially ruining their competitor - then buy up the mine once the owner is crippled. Then they restore prices to previous levels by drying up the supply lines.
DRM does effectively the same thing. I'm ignoring the issue about who a song belongs to for now. The question of price is related to scarcity. If music is scarce - meaning you have to go to a store and buy a CD to get one then the price stays high. It's like diamonds vs. cubic zirconium. The knock-off isn't as good. So as long as there is a difference in quality between the "real" thing (CDs) and copies (tapes of CDs) then the prices can remain high. (Plus tapes are not free either.)
But if suddenly there are EXACT copies (MP3s, CD burning with CDs getting really cheap) then the supply shoots through the roof. But if you managed to clamp down on that excess supply - via DRM - then you can drag it down to the original level and continue to charge the same price. So as far as the record labels are concerned DRM has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with "rights". It's about supply - as in supply and demand.
But of course DRM also has to do with "rights" and we can't ignore that side of it. Artists do create the songs, and thus they should have some ownership and control rights. At the very least, they should have a way to make money off of their music.
There are two approaches to this dileman. If you're a hard-core capitalist you say "tough luck. either the market's there, or it's not". I think that this is laregely true. If musicians suddenly couldn't make money or control their art and we had a mass exodus of musicians then people would realize they're going to have to pay more just to support the artists.
The thing is, we don't have to let the market work that way. We don't have to wait for musicians to all starve to death to realize that if we want good music we have to support musicians.
But the only reason to think that supporting musicians means supporting record labels is if we buy into the record label PR machine. Just like the diamond industry managed, in the space of a few short decades, to introduce a foreign tradition to Japan (diamond engagement rings after WWII) so successfully that the landscape of a culture was changed (the tradi
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