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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."
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.
The librarians of the world would like to teach the submitter something.
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.
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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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.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
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.