DRM Causes Piracy

igorsk recommends an essay by Eric Flint, editor at Baen Publishing and an author himself, over at Baen's online SF magazine, Baen Universe. In it Flint argues that, far from curbing piracy of copyrighted materials, DRM actually causes it. Quoting: "Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an 'economic epidemic' under certain conditions. Any one of the following: 1) The products they want... are hard to find, and thus valuable. 2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them. 3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with. Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they're the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises. And... Guess what? It's precisely those three conditions that DRM creates in the first place. So far from being an impediment to so-called 'online piracy,' it's DRM itself that keeps fueling it and driving it forward."

Comments

Sixth column of a series

[Robotech_Master]

Other editorials in the series include

Column #1
Column #2
Column #3
Column #4
Column #5

All of which are available in their entirety, despite the "1/3 to 1/2" thing.

Good reading.

Re:Nonsense

[flyingfsck]

Many Baen books are available on-line for free. They found that whenever they relesae a free book, sales of all books of that author increase and the sales of the free book takes off. The fact is that people like the value of a real book, while the online version gives them a chance to read some books in a series and evaluate the author.

So whether it makes sense or not is moot. Baen proved that free books increase sales enormously.

Re:Isn't that what they want?

[ViX44]

I've worked part-time in a video store, so I watch films, new disks and old, frequently. Trends I've noticed include:

  Fade-in/fade-out. Seems to be a decendant of the old Macrovision system. I've seen it happen a few times, notably when I popped The Fox and the Hound (not the most recent issue) in the store's DVD player. I've run other films, Disney and otherwise, that played properly. Amongst customers, I've received multiple independent complaints of the fading problem specifically on academy (4:3) aspect discs -- they try the widescreen and it plays normally, so this may be a move to extinct academy.
  Glitched chapters. I bought my father Dances with Wolves -- the complete cut with the pretty box -- but he said it wouldn't play correctly, getting stuck or glitching in particular scenes. I ran it on my computer and there it too glitched and faulted. Both my father's player and the DVD drive I used were Sony, so let the conspiracy theories abound. Physical damage can cause read errors of course, but DwW was bad out of the box. I've handled similar complaints at work. Even if a disk isn't brand new and has hairline scratches, that isn't enough to cause catastrophic playback errors, when I've seen perfect playback from disks that look like they were used for air hockey.

As for worn discs, my store's policy is if a disc receives two complaints it's pulled, but for old fims that we rent off for free 80% of the time anyway, there is no replacement of the title. New films we'll give the customer a different disc of the same title, but if that fails as well, and often it does, there's not much we can do about it since the whole run doesn't work in particular players.

Re:Mostly rubbish

[Robotech_Master]

Most "rare" materials aren't available in DRM form. What causes the copyright infringement isn't the DRM but the fact that you can't get it at all. If they're available with DRM, then the supply is large: just go pay for it and download it.

That's part of Flint's point. If there's no ebook version of it at all, a for-sale DRM-free ebook version of it is so "rare" as to be unavailable. But if it's available with DRM, then a for-sale DRM-free ebook version of it--which is, again, what people want--is also so rare as to be unavailable.

If I'm looking for an apple, and you offer me a cart full of oranges and say, "See, there's plenty of fruit," it's still not going to satisfy my desire for an apple.

What is DRMed and also "high-priced"? Songs are a buck on iTunes. Movies are twenty bucks on DVD. It may be more than you want to pay but it's not a vast amount of money.

Songs are the exception, and that's mainly because Steve Jobs bullied the music companies into going with the 99 cent price point. You can bet they'd raise the prices if they could. And even Steve Jobs doesn't like DRM any longer; neither does Bill Gates.

But look at some of the books on eReader. For instance, A March into Darkness by Robert Newcomb. $17.95 for the DRM'd ebook at eReader, $17.79 for the unprotected hardcover at Amazon. Granted, this probably isn't the best example because the list price for the hardcover is actually $26, and you can knock 10% off the eReader price by using their newsletter discount code, but it only took me two minutes of searching to find it. If I wanted to look longer, I could probably find a lot more egregious examples. And anyway, with Baen able to sell their ebooks profitably for $5 or less each without killing print book sales, even of their hardcovers, there's no earthly reason an ebook should cost $10, let alone $18, apart from the dual evils of pricey DRM (do you know how much eReader charges for their ebook services? People I know who've checked on it say it's quite a lot) and publishers not wanting ebooks to "cannibalize" print sales.

Re:In the beginning, there was...

[Robotech_Master]

RTFA. The submitter's blurb simplifies Flint's point to the point of incorrectness. DRM didn't and doesn't cause piracy--there would be piracy without it. But it does promote piracy--there is more piracy with it than there would be without it. Flint himself never claims that DRM "causes" piracy.

Re:Isn't that what they want?

[cptgrudge]

It's the fact that no one who pushes a button on a remote control wants to see a red X or Ø appear. They want action.

So true. So very true. Whenever I see that, I feel this icky, semi-irrational anger at the device that dares defy me, when I know that it is an artificial block to keep me watching a preview or whatever. My anger is partly directed at the device, partly at the manufacturer, and partly at the movie studio that made the movie.

It's frustrating because I can't actually do anything about it to effect a change. If I stop buying movies made by that particular studio, they'll have no idea why. They may figure that people dislike their movies, they may figure that piracy is hurting sales, or they may come up with with some other reason except the real one, because my reason is beyond what they think will cause consumers grief enough to stop buying.

Instead, they market the "removal" of the irritant as a "feature" of a new format and continue to keep me from convenient device shifting. This is BULLSHIT. I'm done with it, so take note, movie industry players, hardware and content alike. I will never buy one of the new format discs. I'll rent and rip, from Blockbuster or Netflix or whatever. My home media server is the end of the line for them. A post-DVD format disc will never be bought, let alone a dedicated player for the TV. They lose. I'll build a petabyte RAID array to dump ripped movies before I pay them another dime.

They give me an non-DRM alternative that I can download, and I'll return to being a paying customer.