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Solving DRM in the BitTorrent Age
An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad has a new article on DRM in the BitTorrent Age. They argue that the movie industry looking for "perfect DRM" should aim for the printed book model (people still buy books even though they can read them for free at Barnes & Noble). They argue that the missing element is that screenwriters are not marketed by Hollywood in the same way the book industry markets its authors."
In the 1960s, auteurs like Bergman and Antonioni created films with a highly personal stamp, but while their films had some measure of popular success at the time, people today are no longer interested and films mainly function as simple mindless entertainment. I don't think that the average movie-goer cares about screenwriters--and studios often subject a script to rewrites that take it far away from the screenwriter's original intent--they just want a few laughs, the proverbial roller-coaster ride of suspense, or a heartwarming love story, and why pay for that if it's on Bittorrent?
You can print out the free book from the net...but its on Printer paper, it's 250 - 400 sheets, and you have to fold and bind it.
Copying a movie or music onto a disk and playing it on your home theatre, stereo, computer, is exactly what you would be doing if you paid for it.
Interesting thought - but not a valid comparison.
Solving DRM in the BitTorrent Age
The only DRM that works is having movies that are large enough, that most people won't want to spend the time downloading them. (i.e. 24gb HD-DVDs.)
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This article ignores the detail that the people who get their hands on cracking tools, or get their hands on drm-free versions of movies are enjoying a higher quality user experience than those people using legally purchased movies/music. I've heard several accounts of having to fiddle with the connections, or turning the power off and back on again just to get the player to handshake correctly with the TV or to reset the correct in-memory keys. There are also frequent issues with players/tv downsampling video even if everything should be working at the highest possible quality. The article really misses the point that DRM is becoming a cause for piracy rather than a side effect of it.
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Sorry, if people were pirating PS2 games, Sony lost revenue, the publishers lost revenue, the developers lost revenue, and everyone in the distribution chain lost revenue. Saying otherwise is attempting a semantic argument to justify the desire to have free entertainment. Free entertainment, for god's sake. Very justifiable - I can see how it's moral to be able to play a game without compensating the enormous number of people who worked to make it. Obviously they deserve nothing because they work in a digital medium.
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1. Screenplays are fundamentally different animals than novels. They're written to be the blueprint for a movie, not something to be enjoyed in their own right. This isn't to say that a screenplay can't be enjoyable to read, but you're never* going to read a screenplay for enjoyment unless you've already seen the movie it was made into -- because if a screenplay was good enough to sell copies of it to the public, then it was more or less by definition already made into a movie.
2. Screenwriters can't be marketed by Hollywood the same way novel authors are marketed -- for one thing, the screenwriter is one of dozens, maybe hundreds of people involved in the movie's production. Even if you just consider the 10 or 15 most important people -- director, a few stars, a producer or two, writer, DP -- the money is going to focus on promoting the biggest names, and that's the stars (and maybe the director). Stars are always the most well-known people involved with a movie, and that's not just because that's who the studio markets; it's because you stare at their faces for 2 hours.
An author, by contrast, is one of only a very few people involved with the creative aspects of a novel -- even if you take an editor or two into account, the author is still responsible for 99% of what you read. So there's a single, obvious focus for the marketing effort.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Magic? Enjoy? The books should have been digitized like 30 years ago, and e-books are at least 5 years overdue. Thanks to copyright being infinity minus one day, some books are almost impossible to find. My personal grudge is that many great old textbooks are prohibitively expensive simply because they are rare. No one is printing them anymore, and no one is allowed to digitize them either. Enjoy? I don't think so.
And for the love of me, I have no idea how to comment on his screenwriter theme. Yeah, there are other people working behind the curtains. But if movie people themselves think that the most important and creative part is done by the actors and the director, are they going to lie to the rest of us? That makes no sense at all.
"Let's make movies hard to copy like books are hard to copy, because you don't see much piracy in books, do ya?"
One day, hopefully soon, this whole concept of scarcity of information will just vanish.
No, that's not how it works. Even if you're selling consoles at a loss, you're still better off selling them than letting them gather dust on the shelves.
The cost is incurred when you manufacture the consoles, not when you sell them. If you spend $500 to make the console and sell it for $200, you lose $300. But if you spend $500 to make the console and then don't sell it, you lose the whole $500.
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A nice fat book will keep you company on the commute for a week or more, and if it's any good, keep you thinking long after that.
A DVD will give you two hours of mindless entertainment then merely take up shelf space.
A book costs about the same, or less than a DVD.
No contest.
Software patents delenda est.
Firstly, as far as I can tell the PS2 were not stolen, were not copied with cheap tawainess ship, they were bought from Sony. So.... This revenue WOULD NOT HAVE existed at all without the piracy boom in Brazil.
What they lost is a POTENTIAL sale of game. If people pirate 20 games, buy 3, it is still 3 bought AND NOT 20 LOSS. If people were going in supermarket and hammering/stealing/crushing those 20 PS2 game this would be a loss. But what you describe isn't that. There has been NO REAL LOSS FOR SONY. Hammer that in your head. A copyright infringement is at best a POTENTIAL LOSS, but not a real. CAse in point, if everybody on earth was copying FFIX and sony would still have done the same sale in the past, then they would STILL BE WRITING THE SAME NUMBER AT THE END OF THEIR FISCAL Q.
I do not condone copyright infrigement, but NEITHER DO I CONDONE BAD RETHORIC ON "FANTASY LOSSES".
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but, why is it when anyone mentions free reading, it's never about libraries anymore? It's all about Borders/Barnes & Noble/etc.
Break out of the marketing and go to a library where, for once, you can't buy anything.
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I read a lot of books on my smartphone. The screen is bright & crisp, even in daylight, the text is well-defined, and I can read for hours with no hint of headaches or eye fatigue. The "page" is small, but flipping pages is effortless with the scrollwheel under my thumb.
However, what convinced me to prefer it over paper are the things books can't match:
Sure it's not for everyone. There are disadvantages as well of course (expensive, relatively fragile, gotta keep it charged), but since I'm copping all that for the smartphone anyway, it's no extra inconvenience.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
What makes DRM so worthless isn't some technical, legal, or user experience problem. The problem with DRM is that it addresses the wrong issue altogether. DRM tries to answer the question, "how can I stop LOSING money because of copying?" The right question should be, "how can I start MAKING money using copying?"
People are going to be making digital copies of stuff with the Internet because that is what the Internet is: a vast digitial distribution machine. Copying and hyperlinking aren't "problems" to be solved, they are facts of online life. How can artists and distributors and publishers use these facts to their advantage?
Google has certainly shown one way to make money from the web. And no, it's not by advertising. That's merely one way of making money. The real mother lode is in LINKING. Google makes money by bringing buyers together with sellers right at the point where the buyer has pre-qualified themselves. Any time you can do that, you can make money -- lots of it.
Things to note here:
1. It is in Google's interest to provide real value to the customer in clear exchange for the right to lead them to a commercial link.
2. It is in Google's interest to be completely up-front about which links are commercial and which ones are not.
3. It is in Google's interest to only offer commercial links that are as closely-related as possible to what the customer appears to be looking for.
Let's apply these lessons to the music industry. Imagine a large copyright holder having every song in its catalog available on a web site. Visitors can listen to samples of each and every track -- good samples that give a true feel for the music, not just some arbitrary clip such as the first 30 seconds. A search engine helps people find not just the big, popular numbers, but other interesting pieces that are related. "If you like this artist, have you tried these three others? People who have listened to this track have listened to these 10 others. Here is a list of every track of every album that features this drummer."
Every opportunity to share information about music, artists, and compilations is an opportunity to offer a tangible product or service to sell. The web site has clearly marked commercial links to buy physical media, purchase the track, add the track to a mix CD, purchase concert tickets, get a t-shirt, subscribe to a download service. It also has non-commercial links to share what the user has discovered with others. "Hey, listen to this track. It's awesome."
There is a lot of money to be made here. DRM is a distraction. It's leaving money on the table, and one of these days some smart music exec is going to wake up and leave the rest of the competition in the dust.
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At the moment, typical home-bandwith is perhaps 1Mbps. Typical home-storage is perhaps 300GB. Which means (order of magnitude-estimates)
Which means for most people, bandwith and storage is a limiting factor for the last few of these options. (depending on patience) High-def movies migth add another order of magnitude size, so we're up to a week of downloading and you can store like 5-10 of them, which is definitely way into impractical-land.
But that's all today. Bandwith and storage grows exponentially, and though 1Mbps may be *typical* even today a significant (and rapidly growing) part of the population has a lot more.
Lyse, my ISP have stopped *offering* speeds lower than 6Mbps. Their top offering currently is 50Mbps. Which brings the high-def movie in original (blueray/HD-DVD) quality back down from a week and to 4 hours.
I expect 100Mbps to be the norm in my neighbourhood before the decade is out. The infrastructure is certianly already there, the only reason it's not the norm today is that few care for it. For 99% of the users today, 6Mbps (symetrical, same upload!) is adequate enough that they have no interest even in the "premium" 50Mbps offered for a modestly higher price.
Already today, people are downloading albums rathe than songs. And to some degree complete discographies rather than albums. And books are tiny compared to music.
We're only a short way away from being able to in effect say: "Screw it, I don't know yet what I want to read on the plane, let's just download 'all_books_published_in_the_usa_this_decade.zip' and put it on the reader, that's only a few TB anyway."
Just how large would "all_movies_ever_shown_in_an_american_theatre-dvdr ip.zip" be anyway ? How many years away from being able to download that in say a day are we ? How are the *AAs going to deal with it ?
We live in interesting times.
I don't agree though. Most devices I've seen also suffer from one or more of the following:
Ok, so maybe these don't matter to you, and are all trumped by bookmarks. But I'd be willing to pay quite a bit for a device without these problems, and I *have* been deliberately searching, with no luck whatsoever this far.
And here I was just starting to feel satisfied paying $5 for a DVD that came out 20 years ago. A copy of "Spaceballs" shouldn't cost more than that. And it doesn't. There is a bargain bin at most stores.. which as the average consumer, is all I can afford to buy. RIAA hasn't seen my money for a long time. $15 for a CD that's 20 years old? The movie cost a lot more to make. Why would I pay more for a cd? I had the tape cassette once. Long since lost. And now this. A potentially degraded/unuseable "locked down" version of DVD's? I will go out and search about these "pirate" methods. I will google for the word "torrent" and find this thing known as a "client" ... I will learn about my "router" and how to "enable ports" .. along the way I will undoubtedly learn what this "spyware" issue is. Then I will come here at this place called "slashdot" ...
*I* am the average consumer. And *I* am here. And *I* am not paying for these ridiculous new movie formats.
Which corporate salesman will get fired over these ideas when they don't work?
You feel obliged to be more careful with it. There's a cost to having to be careful with something that people just don't want to pay.
There are other cost issues, as well. A $10 book provides more entertainment hours per dollar than a $20 DVD, and further you can buy it on a whim and use it immediately, without any other devices.