Doctorow on DRM and Activism

Might E. Mouse writes "Cory Doctorow, co-editor of 'the world's most linked-to' blog, BoingBoing, spoke recently at an event in London, UK. Afterwords, he gave an interview with bit-tech discussing topics like DRM and the commercialization of podcasting. He was particularly scathing towards the BBC. From the article: 'If you're in the UK, hold the BBC to account. Why is it shipping the IMP, a DRM crippled player? Is there a point in the future where the BBC imagines that bits are going to get harder to copy? And that the IMP will solve its problem? Really, what the BBC is saying is that there's two ways you can get its content after it airs on the TV; one is that you can get it through the IMP and have a crippled experience, the other is that you can be a criminal.'"

Comments

There is no technical solution to a social problem

[Opportunist]

No social problem ever had a technical solution. Not a single one. You can use netnanny to keep your kids from watching "bad" pages, but the kid will eventually find a way around. You can copy protect your content, but your user will sooner or later find a way around it.

The problem is not that we enjoy being criminals. We don't do that out of spite. Not even because "content must be free" or similar rubbish. It's simply that we're used to listening to our music where we want, recording our favorite movies to watch them later, using our computers for the games we want to play, reading the news we want to read. That's what we want to do, that's what we enjoy doing.

And if you turn this ability off, people will develop a way to do it regardless.

Why was there a big outcry when CSS went onto Linux? Not because the CSS "encryption" was broken, but because the country codes were stripped together with it. And why were they stripped? Because we have no benefit from then, we don't want them, we don't need them, actually they did what we did NOT want to be done, so they were gone before they were implemented!

Face it. People will do what they want to do. The question whether they will buy or copy content can only be answered by its price. Make it affordable, make the value match the price and people will rather buy than copy. Whether it's copy protected or not will only decide whether you piss off the buying customer and create another copyer, not whether you will sell or not.