Fight DRM While There's Still Time

ageor writes "It seems (not only) to me that DRM is about far more than intellectual property. It's also about monopoly and freedom of choice. It's one of those cases where we, the consumers, must decide against accepting the new industry's rules, which care only about control and making money. The whole matter is very well put in DRM, Vista and your rights, where you can follow the subject as deeply as you like through the numerous relevant links."

Comments

Change from the Top Down

[P(0)(!P(k) P(k 1))]

“Fight DRM,” like “fight breast cancer” or “stamp out racism,” are noble sentiments; such sentiments, I believe, share one thing in common: they suffer from a false sense of sovereignty; and are more autistic than realistic.

In the case of DRM,* the worthiest undertaking may be to climb the corporate ladder; and effect change from the top down.

_____________
* Or in the case of cancer: medical school, etc.

Re:Change from the Top Down

[caitriona81]

In the case of DRM, theres one very strong way to fight it - with your wallet. Use alternatives where possible. Spread the word about products that contain oppressive DRM. Encourage others to do the same.

Re:Change from the Top Down

[P(0)(!P(k) P(k 1))]

. . . [H]ow do you stamp out racism without going to the grass roots anyway?

The Bolsheviki tried the top-down approach, actually; it involved weeding the gene-pool of potential racists. (That they accidently liquidated the industrious and free-thinking is by the by.)

Re:Change from the Top Down

[JesseMcDonald]

Right, and in the case of racism, there's a very stong way to fight it: don't be racist. And has that worked? Go ask your local redneck.

I would say that the approach in question has worked at least as well as any other that does not itself involve actions which are themselves worse than racism.

Re:Change from the Top Down

[Aladrin]

Yeah, kill all the rednecks!

Er, make it illegal to be a redneck!

Er, boycott redneck products!

Wait, what was your argument again? I think you forgot the references to Nazis and Hitler. Throw in some other completely unrelated emotion-jerking things, too.

The way to fight DRM is not just to 'not use it', it's to show all your friends how cool it is NOT to be DRM-infested. See what I can do?
*drags music files to a blank CD on the desktop and the CD burns*
Neat, huh?
*drags video to an portable video player and it auto-resamples it, then shows that same video can be shown on the TV in the living room without any extra work*
Neat, huh?

When they realize they can't do half the neat stuff with their DRM-infested files, they'll consider that each and every time they make a purchase in the future. Until then, you cannot make the common consumer care.

Re:Change from the Top Down

[Deskpoet]

In the case of DRM, the worthiest undertaking may be to climb the corporate ladder; and effect change from the top down.

Corporations are the *originators* of these policies; they do so to PROTECT SHAREHOLDER INTEREST. As long there is value in artificial scarcity, DRM and its ilk (yes, copyrights, patents and every other government-sponsored legalistic chokehold on information) will thrive--and necessarily exist. If anyone "on the inside" sought to change these policies, they would be rightly seen as acting outside of their shareholder mandate and would be FIRED. (You could argue that such individuals could make convincing arguments that there is MORE shareholder value to be had by being open with information, but *any* initiative that appears as though it might impinge on future profits would quickly die a flaming death.)

How this comment was modded up is beyond me.....

It is simple

[someone1234]

Don't buy stuff with DRM. I can do it, i did it so far. But i doubt more than 20% of people who yap against DRM will stay away from it.

Fight it how?

[cjackson0]

The article goes into arguments we've all read, and probably made before. The main point missing from this relatively well organized and civil rant is what to do about it. It's always easier to point out he problems than the answers.

Re:Fight it how?

[radtea]

The basic problem DRM tries to solve is really simple - we want professionals to produce high quality 'creative works' despite us having technology that can replicate such an item for zero cost. The free market really can't cope with that at all, because it makes "supply" in the economic sense infinite therefore price becomes zero, implying that something has no value. That's clearly rubbish, and quality creative works definitely have value to millions of people.

This contains a couple of errors.

1) The problem DRM tries to solve is the preservation of a particular business model that allows content packagerss and distributors to use their position in between artists and their audience to keep the largest slice of the creative-works pie for themselves. This model once served everyone well, because the marketing power of the packagers and distributors made it possible for creators to reach a much wider audience than they would have otherwise, and people got the opporuntity to buy creative works from artists they might not ever have heard of. On the other hand, there is no evidence at all that cheap copying has stemmed the flow of professional creative works. Show me one musician, one author, one director anywhere who has said, "I thought about making this album/book/movie but decided not to because it could be copied too easily." One suspects that the claim there would be no professional creative works without DRM is just made up.

2) What is this "the" free market of which you speak, and how does it relate to the huge diversity of actual free markets in the real world, which vary in their legal and economic structure enormously? If we replace your incorrect usage with the correct usage, and say, "we want professionals to produce high quality 'creative works' despite us having technology that can replicate such an item for zero cost. A free market really can't cope with that at all..." it becomes clear that here too you are making stuff up. You are claiming that no possible free market whatsoever, out of the infinite possible market machines that we might invent, is capable of dealing with goods that are expensive to create and easy to copy (note that "cheap" isn't really the issue--stamping albums is cheap, downloading tunes is easy.) This is an incredibly strong claim, backed by...nothing.

When somebody can give me a sound, scalable, generic and implementable economic design for goods that cost money to build the first time but are free to copy from then on, I might start to protest against DRM, because I'd actually have an answer to the question of "If not DRM then what?". Until then I'll continue to argue the case for it, use it despite the inconvenience and who knows, maybe even implement it in future.

I guess I could just link to Baen Books here, or to any number of bands like the Barenaked Ladies who oppose DRM and have somehow managed to make an oodle of cash. If examples don't convince you, then you should think about the theoretical persepective that file sharing is nothing more than advertising for the work in question.

While I'm on advertising, there is always the possibility of ad-supported art. Product placement ads have never been been huge, but that may be just because there were easier ways of doing it.

The one thing we can be certain of is that DRM is nothing more than an attempt to save a obsolete business model, and history tells us it will be a failure. The only open question is: will it be an expensive failure, or a cheap one? It looks like it is going to be very expensive for studios and some publishers, and relatively cheap for everyone else.

Re:Fight it how?

[cpt kangarooski]

The basic problem DRM tries to solve is really simple - we want professionals to produce high quality 'creative works' despite us having technology that can replicate such an item for zero cost.

Perhaps, but that's not the problem I'm interested in having solved, or that the public is interested in having solved. That problem is that we want as many creative works created and published as possible, and that we also want just as much for those works to be available to everyone who wants them, without restriction, and for the least cost possible, if any.

I don't care if someone is a professional or not. And since there's no objective measure of quality in the field of creative works, we can only try to encourage quantity. (Though there is a rule of thumb that only a small, fixed fraction of all works are good, so the way to get more good works is to have more works overall, so it all works out anyway)

So taking into consideration the actual problem, rather than what you'd like to distract us with, DRM is simply unacceptable. Here's why:

Let's suppose we had a world without copyright, a world with moderate copyright, and a world with excessive copyright. In the first world, some original works are created (as we know will happen from historical example and the fact that other motives exist for artists besides copyright-derived revenue), but probably not a whole lot. This produces some public benefit, but not a great deal. Let's arbitrarily call it 5%. OTOH, there is total freedom with regard to those works, so everyone can have their own personal universal library, everyone can use whatever works they want in creating their own derivative works, without even so much as a transactional cost, and this produces a very large public benefit. Let's arbitrarily call this 44% (34% from the freedom, and 10% from the derivative works created, which will likely outnumber the original works, as we also know from history). The net public good is 49%

In the second world, there is some copyright, but not too much. This produces a substantial incentive to authors and doesn't reduce their other incentives. This results in a large public benefit. Let's say 30%, since we know that copyright is an economic incentive, and we know that the vast majority of revenue from copyrighted works is made within a few years, tops. (Often a few months or even weeks, depending on the particular medium and market). There is some, but not total, freedom with regard to those works for a little while -- long enough for that revenue to get made -- at which point there is total freedom. So while eventually there is just as much freedom as before, there is much less in the short run. Let's call this 29% (24% from the freedom, and 5% from the derivatives, of which there will be far, far fewer). The net public good is 59%.

In the third world, there is a very large amount of copyright. This produces only slightly more of an incentive to authors without reducing their other incentives. This results in pretty nearly the same public benefit as before, since the artists were already getting pretty much all the money possible out of their works, and now they're only getting a few pennies more. This isn't much of an increased incentive to create, but it's about the same as before. Let's say 33%, which is the max. There is little freedom during the copyright, and now it lasts much, much longer before there is total freedom. Let's call this 7% (5% for the limited freedom during copyright, 1% for the freedom when a work expires, which almost never happens, and 1% for the very small number of derivatives that get created). The net public good is 40%.

Since we want to get the greatest net public good, the answer is clear: no copyright is good, but not maximally good, and too much copyright is worse than none at all. The best thing is to have some, but not too much copyright.

DRM is an attempt to have permanent copyrights which are very very limited, and which are implemented privately so that the public and the gover

Re:Fight it how?

[mgv]

As it happens, that's really hard. Computers copy information, that's what they do, and unfortunately people can't be trusted to just follow the rules of the system left to their own devices. Instead people do a cost:benefit analysis and think, well, it's not likely I'll be caught, so I'll go ahead and break the law. Who cares, everybody else does it anyway. So it has to be enforced at the technology level, otherwise we just screw ourselves over in the long run when content production just becomes economically unsupportable.

Currently DRM forces me to double my downloads... Once off the iTunes store for the TV shows I want to watch, then a second time to get them DRM free for long term archive.

If they came DRM free I wouldn't have to do the second download.

Please explain to me what economic model describes how DRM is protecting the revenue of content creators here.

I think its simple:

The content creators are too nervous to try and sell stuff without DRM.

Which is actually amazing - in all the history of recorded music, TV and film, until about 10 years ago nothing had significant DRM. You could tape music off the radio, video off the TV.

And yet sales of these products brought great wealth to the content producers. According to what you espouse, they should have all gone bankrupt as everyone pirated all the content.

In reality, people don't do this. Yes, they copy stuff. Always did. But they buy stuff too. And they always will, even if the DRM is removed.

Its happening now - there isn't a reason for virtually any sales of music CD's - just copy them off the internet.

But people still buy music CD's.

More importantly, the fallacy in the argument is that someone who gets music off the internet will somehow pay more money to these companies if the music isn't available. In fact, they may not have the money to spend, or the will to spend it that way.

Whilst someone like me is holding back on purchases when because I want to get it free of DRM also.

So in order to get people (who may never buy stuff) to not copy content, they are screwing around with people like me (who are more than willing to pay for content) by giving me the inferior product.

I get stuff from iTunes movies because its available quickly, and the quality is good. The stuff I get on the internet takes longer to download. For the shows I want to watch (eg Heroes, BSG, Stargate) I'm more than happy to pay to know that I'll get the content as fast as I can.

Bear in mind I live in Australia, and have to get the iTunes gift vouchers from the US to see this stuff.

But no way could the music industry or video industry view someone like me as being their target market. No, its the 12 year old kids with no disposable income who they are interested in forcing into the market? Right.

I'm probably the extreme example, but the general case is valid. Those with disposable income to spend on content will spend it. The competition is for how I spend my dollar. The content produces need to produce good content, and the money will come. Locking in bad content is not the winning formula here.

Michael

Jeesh

[amplusquem]

How many DRM articles do we have to have on Slashdot? I mean I get it, I hate DRM just as much as the next guy and think it's ridiculous, but it seems like we are getting a new article on Slashdot about DRM everyday. The same type of comments are modded insightful every time to the point where they're no longer insightful.

Re:Jeesh

[caitriona81]

This is almost trolling, but just far enough away from it that I'll entertain it with a reply. The more bad press DRM gets, the more chance the average consumer will reject it.
Granted, speaking out against it on /. is like preaching to the choir, but the word needs to get out unless we are to be stuck under the cloud of it forever.
It would have far more value for us to push for these kind of stories where they are more likely to be seen by regular consumers - write letters to the editor at your favorite newspaper, send letters to congresspeople, etc... those kind of things have far more reach than Slashdot does, at least where this is concerned.

Re:Jeesh

[TheRaven64]

Articles like the one linked, however, do not really help. They tell those of us who already understand the problem about it, but the linked article is too long to forward to people who might not, and contains stupid errors like confusing AAC with FairPlay. I have a few thousand AACs with no DRM on them, but the article makes it sound like AAC must contain DRM.

If you want to explain DRM to people outside Slashdot, let them read something like this article or Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots.

DRM will fail on its own

[nightfire-unique]

DRM will fail on its own, because it is anti-consumer, and impossible (cryptographically speaking) to implement securely. We live in a (mostly) free market society. As publishing firms continue to push DRM, new markets will open and will eventually replace the DRM firms, by offering superior products.

In the meantime, fight it, because it is a good thing to fight.

But fight even harder against legislation that enshrines and codifies their right to monopolize above and beyond encrypting their content. The most important tool we have in protecting art and the public domain is our freedom to innovate, create, analyze and discuss. These freedoms are being threatened every day - not just in the United States. Even my own country (Canada) is under attack by the various recording companies and individuals with a stake the game.

The DMCA is bad, but it can get even worse. While the market can currently fend off corporate greed and attacks on fair-use and information exchange, it cannot do so if we allow corrupt legislators to override the individual decisions we all make every day.

Just my $0.02.

Re:DRM will fail on its own

[Midnight Thunder]

Companies always scream 'let the market decide', yet they manage to pressure politicians into passing laws which are anything but the market deciding. I don't live in the USA, so normally this shouldn't bother me but it does. It bothers me because the USA in turn manages to pressure members of international trade to establish the same laws, or risk being excluded from international trade. It is disgusting, but that's what seem to be happening. While I hold out hope for the customer to win this one, it won't be easy since the media industry has so much more money to influence the powers that be. At least having their security systems bypassed makes them think about the money the invested in these stupid systems.

On the other hand we have some companies, such as Disney, who recognise that piracy is another business model and that if this business model is succeeding then something is going wrong in their own business model. In many ways they have got passed the point of denial and started recognising maybe they should be taking another approach. Unfortunately this is not true for the rest of the large media companies. Two of the issues I see are pricing and availability:

- Pricing: If you look at the DVD series of Star Trek and Farscape, then you are looking at around $140 USD+TAX per season. This sort of pricing stinks of price gauging and targets the core fans. Anyone else who is interested, yet doesn't want to pony up that sort of cash, in acquiring the series either pirates or goes without. On other hand when you see a series such as 'Stargate SG-1' retailing at $30 CAD+TAX, you are tempted into making a purchase.

- Availability: What do I do if I want to buy some music not available in my country? Sometimes if you hunt down hard enough you may find some willing to order it for you, but it isn't easy. Now that there are online stores, such as iTunes, you would have thought you would finally be able to buy music from anywhere easily: wrong, since the music industries still impose their outdated distribution limitations on online stores.

Although I did mention two, DRM makes buying online music inconvenient and also makes it hard to explain to your parents why they can't do what they want with their music. For me technology is all about making the difficult easy, yet DRM is all the opposite: making the easy difficult and makes listening to my legally bought music akin to trying to deal with government. I still buy CDs because they are free of DRM and easy to use because of it.

Bah why fight it?

[tomstdenis]

I got my stash of mp3s and dvds already. I'd rather sit back and watch society slowly destroy itself.

It isn't like people really take the hippie goals of OSS and FSF [and the like] to heart anyways. The vast majority of OSS users tend to be commercial shops that use it just because it's cheap, not because it's libre. Worse yet, they use it to support the development of proprietary software/hardware (example: IBM uses it to develop DB2 which is proprietary).

Frankly I think society as a whole is a lost cause. I suggest folk just get a comfy lawn chair and watch the ensuing madness.

Tom

Re:it can't be fought

[Chandon Seldon]

DRM absolutely *can* be fought. Just tell everyone about the free & superior compeditor to Netflix: The Pirate Bay.

Seriously, this is a simple issue of competiton: Netflix is easy to use, costs money, and provides moderate quality DRM-encumbered files. TPB is slightly more complex, free, and provides decent quality DRM-free files. If Netflix sucked it up and provided high quality DRM-free files, they'd have 2 out of 3 and be compeditive with TPB again.

The only way to fight DRM is to point out one simple fact: DRM *encourages* piracy, because it's hard to get guilt tripped when the pirates are providing a strictly better product.

Re:Right "rights".

[Anonymous Coward]

Fair use is definitely not in the US Constitution, and I doubt it's in any others. It just gives the Congress the right to issue copyrights, patents, etc, for a "limited time". Unfortunately it does not specify any other limits on this power, nor does it spell out how long a "limited time" should be.

Congress has the power to make all fair use null and void, and to extend patents and copyrights to 3.2 billion centuries from the date of issue. That's legal.

The US economy was built on patent infringement, though. Once we "pirated" enough to get a leg up on the Europeans, we erected intellectual property walls to hold our advantage.

The US is now, intellectual property-wise, in the position of 19th century Europe. High legal barriers protecting old, wealthy, stagnant industries. China is in the position of the US in the 19th century--nominal legal barriers and lax enforcement. And unfortunately for us, the result will likely be the same.

Re:This isn't about freedom

[bmo]

"I am quite worried by DRM, because I see a significant potential for backlash against copyright holders when the public realises that we are not keeping up our end of the bargain."

"We"? Who is "We"?

If you are indeed in the industry, please read my previous messages to the OP of this thread.

UMG has ceased to treat me as a customer. Instead, they have treated me as a potential thief. I have ceased to treat them as something to respect. I could just start downloading UMG content off the 'net out of spite, but I won't, because I won't sink to the level that they expect me to.

--
BMO

The fault, dear Brutus, is not the iPod but iTunes

[internic]

Dragging files to arbitrary directories is not condusive to indexing as the iPod would then have to store file names up to 255 characters and do all the indexing itself instead of the host computer. A 2GHz PC can do the indexing and file organization a lot faster than an 80MHz iPod.

My Sansa e260 does exactly this with no problem. The indexing doesn't even take long. Now, granted, my player only has 4GB of flash memory (expandable), so this doesn't necessarily apply to the HD-based iPods, but it does seem to suggest the Nanos could do the same. Given that an equivalent iPod nano costs considerably more than the Sansa, I'd guess it would have all least comparable system resources.

More generally, though, I agree that the lack of drag and drop doesn't mean the iPod is defective by design. It doesn't really even have to do with the iPod (beyond the fact that the iPod indexes songs). What is shows is that iTunes is defective by design.

ars technica post by Ken Fisher on the topic

[6350']

This is probably an appropriate place to mention Ken Fisher's post on Ars Technica, where he opines on the topic. In a nutshell, he notes:

DRM's sole purpose is to maximize revenues by minimizing your rights so that they can sell them back to you.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070115-8616 .html

Re:Avoid defective by design

[xdotx]

If you want drop [sic] and drop support stop complaining about the iPod and [...]
load rockbox http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/WhyRock box?

My, now "old", 4G iPod has absolutely no problem handling this crazy drag and drop. I can browse the drive using "folders" that are a built in feature of the FAT32 FS. Or, just ask it to index all my songs (with their gaint strings), and it does so without any noticeable trouble.

Although the parent's main point is completely correct.

There's no physical or logical lockouts on music on an iPod.
That would be like saying you can't browse the web efficiently because IE doesn't let you.

See, like most of life's problems, this one can be solved with free, open source technologies. :)

and OSX?

[danielk1982]

Vista is getting (rightfully) a lot of bad press because of DRM, but where is OSX in this debate? As far as I can tell, Apple will be/and probably already is, going down the same route as Microsoft. OSX will support HDCP and the protected path from OS to video source, just like Vista. I think we should be a little fair here and burn them both?

Your computer is an extension of your home

[HermMunster]

If you think about your computer, your possession and then you think about your home you'll see that your computer is just an extension of your home. No more would you let advertisers paste advertisements onto the walls of your home (unless you do it for them) then you would let advertisers take over your computer. You would not let Microsoft employees or agents enter your home to search it so you should see that allowing DRM to exist on your computer is the same as doing just that.

Your computer is an extension like your filing cabinet. It is like your CD collection. It is like your games collection. If you consider all legal and part of your home you would never allow a company such as Microsoft to enter it to inspect your filing cabinet, your CDs, nor your games collection, even if they claim they would never look at anything other than those things. It is a violation of your privacy to not fight against such a thing while watching it happen.

We don't allow private companies to make and enforce their own laws. Just as everyone would love to own their own bank we know every large corporate entity would love to own their own bank, to grant them loans, to set their own interest rates, etc, to collect income off their own interest rates. We don't allow corporate entities to make nor enforce the laws. We elect government to do just that. We know that corporate entities would greatly abuse you. There's no standards of conduct on them set by the law. If we let them make their own laws and enforce them in your home I'd feel that we'd be sanctioning the likes of HP pretexting employees.

You see, the big thing about what happened with HP was that they felt they could do what they wanted and that they could get away with it if only those ordering it were given plausible deny-ability. What really was bad about this wasn't that they violated the rights of free speech and the freedom of the press nor that they participated in illegal acts (in some states), but that they told every single employee that they were subjects (in their personal lives) of the business they worked for. This told every employee that they had no rights when it came to the employer.

This abuse is only an example of what is happening with DRM and content rights management. It tells you that you are subservient to the content provider and that they have the right to enter your home to investigate you and to take action against you even if you were never even in violation.

You need just understand that your computer is an extension of your home.

Think about someone using their vehicle to steal from some business. The way DRM and CRM works is that the owners of those materials can search your car without your permission and can boot your car so that you can't do anything of the sort with it again, even if this inhibits legitimate use of your vehicle for other purposes. Even law enforcement agencies can't search your car without evidence and a warrant while the car is located on your premises. They can't open a door, they can't search through the trunk, they can't do anything to it. While on your property probable cause would be extremely difficult to prove.

Your computer is an extension of your home.

CRM and DRM are the equivalent of allowing companies to make and enforce their own laws and to violate your rights and your privacy. It allows them to do this without the true legal system (with all its procedures and policies, without selective training and strict adherence to the rules of law) having even taken part.

When you can come to grips with the fact that your computer is an extension of your home you'll understand why you can't let DRM/CRM exist in any form. It should be your responsibility to ensure that your children's future is free of private laws created by private companies which are not designed to protect you as an individual (instead giving priority over the company and content rights holder).

Everything that is done in the computer would can be equated to the world we move in. You need only think about it as part of the real world instead of some cyber-world where you can give or take what happens.