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DRM — It's Not Really About Piracy
shadowmage13 writes "Hollywood privately admits that DRM is not really about piracy. From the article: 'In a nutshell: DRM's sole purpose is to maximize revenues by minimizing your rights so that they can sell them back to you... Like all lies, there comes a point when the gig is up; the ruse is busted. For the movie studios, it's the moment they have to admit that it's not the piracy that worries them, but business models which don't squeeze every last cent out of customers.' You can take action on Digital Restrictions Management at DefectiveByDesign of the Free Software Foundation, Digital Freedom, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation."
It never was about piracy. It has always been about controling your customer. The industry knows that they dont lose nearly as much through piracy as they do by not controlling their consumers. Remember a consumer is a customer with no choice.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Because THAT worked wonders for release timing, content control and market restrictions, didn't it.*
*Though having a decent TV that can handle PAL and NTSC helps, in the UK they're 6 bob a throw i can tell ye!
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
... "Tobacco industry privately admits smoking actually not very healthy at all."
"Hollywood privately admits that DRM is not really about piracy. From the article:
I just read the article - there is no cited evidence that anyone from Hollywood has ever said this. It may be true, yes, and I agree with the conclusions of the article itself, but this isn't some sort of sensational scoop.
MPAA executives have never admitted that piracy isn't the motivation for DRM. The current generation will never admit that: piracy is their excuse and they will stick to it. DRM is part of their business model and it won't go anywhere until it results in a shareholder-awakening loss of money.
If people prefer to pirate stuff, that means the DRM is not restrictive enough to stop them. That is the only thing they'll ever tell you, and the only thing you'll hear from the media outlets that they own.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
It's no news that a bunch of 15yo with P2P clients and MySpace profiles are able to do a better job at promoting and distributing music than the publishing companies. The answer? Make the distribution of the digital content difficult again! That reminds me of that time when my countrymen tried to make rivers run uphill.
Oh my god! They're so right! How come nobody on slashdot ever figured any of this out? Good thing I caught this story, I'm so logging off the net right now and writing to my congressman!
"His user rules just scare the heck out of us"
Now, it's entirely possible that DRM is about exactly what they say it's about. What's not true however is that Hollywood is admitting this. The article is forcing you to accept the journalists bias hoping you don't exercise your critical thinking skills and question it. Whether it's true or not - the journalist needs to get his act together and get better sources than some other journalists dodgy source.
Now somebody might argue: "well we know they're doing it, what does it matter if the journalist exaggerates a quote from an unnamed source". I think it matters a great deal. When you're right you should be able to prove it very easily. Otherwise you have to accept that no matter how you feel on the matter you may be wrong, or there's just not enough evidence to imply anything.
DRM is meant to prevent interoperability, raise barriers for entry to markets and force "upgrades" of your media when playback devices are upgraded.
Just look at iTunes; you can burn the music to CDs and rip to mp3. This is no copy protection - only a mild barrier to make it more likely that the average customer does _not_ buy another brand of mp3 player.
As others have pointed out, the article headline is misleading. Hollywood won't admit any such thing.
I Read The F***ing Articles Linked In The F***ing Article, and there is still no such admission from anyone.
I do, however, also agree with the articles conclusion that DRM isn't about piracy, if only because it's so ineffective to be laughable. It's always been, and obviously so, to make the people who do spend, spend more than they should.
Why chase people who won't buy jack, when you can shaft the people who do for more? It's less effort.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
They want to sell you the DVD version, the PSP version, the special edition, the remastered edition, the directors cut, the laser disc version, the VHS version. Next will be the HD-DVD, and Blueray versions. Followed by the hologram version, err, maybe. If anyone has been most successful at this, its George Lucas, how many of us own more than one version of the first Star Wars trilogy?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
The real risks of DRM come into play when consumers lose control of the devices they legitimately assume will have traditional functionality. Why on earth should my cellphone, a digital communication device be unable to share MY data freely with other networks? So I have to PAY for a ringtone or PAY to upload a picture I just took? Why should my wifi-enabled Zune not be able to "squirt" MY data to any nearby Zune?
That's bad enough, but the most dangerous outcome here is when I can no longer wipe and then reinstall a free operating system onto a general purpose computing device. The people might be forced to pay the microsoft tax, but we will not give up our free software.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Ars Technica's Ken Fisher adds: " It's not piracy that's the concern, it's their ability to control how you use the content you purchase."
It seems to me that is a reasonable interpretation of the "unnamed executive's" comment that the DRM is "too lax", because if "piracy" were a major reason for Hollywood's wanting DRM then its relative stringency or laxity would not be such an important issue for Hollywood. However, if what they are really after is the maximum possible control over users then the relative laxity of a DRM standard *will* bother them - because, for example, they mightn't want a customer to enjoy the content on more than one device without purchasing more than one copy.
Therefore, the summary by shaowmage13 -
The comment from the "unnamed executive" _is_ as good as an admission of that, as has been shown above. The headline Slashdot used "DRM - it's not really about piracy" doesn't directly comment on what anyone has said - privately or not - but states an opinion on what DRM is "about". It's an opinion that is reasonably substantiated by the Ars Technica article.
As for the British gutter press you'd find far more offensive and dishonest articles there than at Slashdot. At least Slashdot sticks to technology and related matters and hasn't, so far as I know, been involved in concealing Stalin's purges from the reading public, as the British newspaper the Guardian was.
They used to have fits about tapes and vinyl copying too. It's always happened. Their main problem is that selling media in any form will always be a business which experiences lots of unauthorised copying of its products if you use their traditional distribution method (being monolithic companies selling media at high price through a limited number of channels)
The problem they have is that faced with this undeniable fact they have decided to focus on an unrealistic solution, being drm. The plain fact is that drm will only cause problems for legitimate users, not unauthorised copiers.
Circumvention being illegal is no problem. There will always be someone, somewhere who figures it out, and finding that person in time to stop dissemination of their solution is a game that will be lost before they start, every time.
DRM then is so they can continue to attract investors. It gives them something to say in pitches. 'We have solution x to this problem that will ensure a return on your investment' and so on. The fact that historically such solutions have a 100% faliure rate isn't something they can even think about, so they're trapped.
Looking at this from an evolutionary standpoint, they're screwed, and heading to extinction. Simply demanding that the world be other than it is can only have that result. What system will emerge in its place I don't know, but I strongly suspect that the current crop of p2p companies/products will form the basis of a new media empire.
The current media industries are trying to get into this feild, but for years all they've been doing is trying to stop it, whilst the p2p producers have been innovating like crazy. That means the p2p guys are already ahead in the next wave of media production/distribution, and very likely to stay there.
Imagine an idiot posts something he or she later regrets to the web. It's foreseable that some of them would wish to recall/revoke/delete what they posted to the Internet. Today there is no way to put the "genie" back inthe bottle. If there were a total artist control type of rights management this idiot could retrieve (forever extinghuish the existence) the now-regrettable work posted to the Internet.
Let's say that the audience never had ownership but simply could make micropayments (in the case of for profit works --not the stuff posted to the internet for free --that would still be free but still bound by the total rights management system) to listen or see content. That could be say for a one-off experience of for a bulk experience. What would be wrong with such a scenario? (that is if controlled by each artist themselves?) No industry to deride and loathe. Only artists with infinite control over their works. If the artist were to die then it could be had that all their content die too.
Would that be too much control in the artists' hands? It'd be like it was before technology, in the sense that the artist'd control all aspects of their fruits. Their fruits lived and died with them. the audience never had ownership of the artists' work. They only had the pleasure and priviledge to listen, see and enjoy in the moment.
I could further imagine that an artist could forgo their rights if they so desired. Or the rights to work not recalled/revoked could pass into public domain, etc. There could be a great number of permutations
an idea....is partaking in this and pushing for DRM everywhere and lose of fair rights. It use to be the dems who pushed this. But anymore these days, the neo-cons (who are the majority of the republicans) are also behind it. It seems to be that rather than fight each and every one of these initiivies, we need to cut the beast off at the knees. The only way that I can think to do that is to prevent money flow from lobbyist to congress reps. And the only way to prevent all of the is to implement Joel Hefley's ideas on corruption prevention. All in all, if we want America to be the land of the people, and by the people, and for the people, we are going to have pony up the funding of the election process. Otherwise, this will remain the land of the high bidder, of the highest bidder, and for the highest bidder.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
TFA - It's Not Really About What It Says In The Title
It seems to me that DRM is about piracy, about pirating users' rights to sell them back to the users.
I'd say RMD is piracy, DRM is theft.
Unless ALL of these things come to pass, DRM is an unworkable mess and will cause the companies involved in it to fail miserably.
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
It was about real piracy, by the media industry and government, to rape human rights and pillage bank accounts of the unrepresented pitiful defenseless public.
OK more spin for US, EU, UN them; All megalomania persons in industry, government, and religion demand a semiliterate servile exploitable public or at least an oppressed fearful culture of hostages suffering with mass-hysteria Stockholm syndrome (identifying with the oppressors as good, fair, and reasonable).
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?