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

indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Couple of weeks ago I bought a movie online, which turned out to be DRM infected so I could not play it under Linux. I had to use Windows and FairPlay stripped the DRM from it to access the AVI inside.

Do you think I care this movie is now being copied by my friends?

He's got it right...

[dmayle]

I bought XIII and had to pirate it to play it in my laptop (without the CD)

I wanted to buy KT Tunstall's CD, but since I listen to my music on the computer, I had to pirate it (it's copy-protected)

My wife and I have a collection of some 200 CD's, all of which are ripped to my computer, but we haven't bought a new CD in almost a year.

There's a limit as to when we start pushing our customers too far, and they start to push back

Sounds Familiar

[cfvgcfvg]

It sure sounds alot like the reversed cause and effect of the "War on Drugs" or "War on Terrorism". Will the government ever learn to back off and let the free market guide itself? And yes, I know the *AA's are the ones pushing for more laws and arrests, but they wouldn't be succeeding without the blessing of the government.

Re:Sounds Familiar

[ajs318]

That was what I was thinking -- it's just the same as the War On Some Drugs. Although most recreational drugs theoretically should cost pennies per dose (poppies, cannabis, hallucinogenic mushrooms and cacti, coca and valerian all grow wild, and they're just the ones I can think off off the top of my head), the very fact that they are illegal introduces artificial scarcity and allows dealers to control prices. And such "legal" ways of getting high as there are, are a PITB. There are medicines you can buy from a pharmacy that will get you off your tits (e.g. Paramol {Paracetamol and Dihydrocodeine}; Benylin Chesty Coughs -- two drugs in one really, Original {Diphenhydramine} is a downer, Non-Drowsy {Guaifenesin} is a mild upper; Night Nurse {diphenhydramine, same ingredient as Benylin Original} and the perennial standby, Kaolin and Morphine mixture -- worth faking a tummy ache to be given a dose of) if you take enough of them, and of course there's booze ..... but getting p!$$&d really isn't quite the same thing. It's too dirty a "high". There are legal plant extracts but the reason that most of them haven't been banned is that they aren't really much cop (though Sida Cordifolia isn't bad ..... name's a bit off-putting if you speak French though).

Most of the crime is created in response to the problem of illegality. Junkies steal to buy heroin because it's sold at vastly inflated prices by dealers, they daren't seek help for fear of dropping their mates in the s#!t, and anyway they're already criminals just for having a toot so what's a bit of thieving between friends? Tobacco is more addictive than heroin (to the extent you can compare an illegal drug with a legal one), yet smokers are generally law-abiding. Apart from the ones who are bleeding the National Health Service dry by buying tobacco abroad ..... we should send them to Belgium to get treated if they get cancer ..... but I digress.

Re:Sounds Familiar

[ShieldW0lf]

The war on drugs is about ensuring that citizens are addicted to indigenous drugs, and that the profits are centrally controlled.

That's why it's OK for Americans to be addicted to cigarettes and alcohol but not cocaine or crystal meth.

Having everyone addicted to cocaine is a threat to national sovereignty.

Having them addicted to meth is a threat to profits.

The free market would have everyone buying cheap meth or homemade shine, or addicted to foreign produced coke.

As it stands now, they're buying whiskey, cigarettes and cough syrup, which is just the way those on top like it.

The war on terror, on the other hand, is easy to fix.

Keep your military and your CIA at home, and there will be no terrorism.

The terrorists are after vengence because they have been and continue to be systematically wronged. By Americans.

Well, it might be too late now. I imagine there are a lot of orphaned children who aren't going to forget what was done to them.

Yeah... come to think of it... I think you guys are fucked.

Re:Sounds Familiar

[maxume]

FlySafe airlines would have to compete with FlyCheap airlines. Individuals could make their own choices about how much security they thought they needed in the air. A bunch of people would die, and FlyCheap's assets would be bought out by FlySafeEnough airlines.

(what percentage of people interact with 'the war on terror' anywhere else?)

It all depends on what value you assign to the lives of the various other people on the planet; if you use the apparent acceptable rate of car accident deaths(~1/10000 a year in the US), we are spending way too much on anti terror measures(the death rate due to terrorism is way lower than that for US citizens, even if you include 9/11 and soldiers dying in Iraq and so forth). Basically, the free market would ignore it and move on, much to the chagrin of the dead, but to the profit of the living.

Re:Sounds Familiar

[britneys 9th husband]

The problem is, when FlyCheap Airlines has one of its planes hijacked and flown into a skyscraper somewhere, that's a negative externality. The people in the building never got to choose how much security they needed. Should we allow the CheapNukes Power Plant to store nuclear materials in an unlocked building on the side of the road?

Re:Commodification

[Quantam]

No. Bad analogy. Sexuality is simple evolutionary psychology. Given enough females, a male could produce perhaps 150 children a year, while a female could at most produce 1 (assuming no twins or other such anomalies). But for men to pass on their genes they require women. Thus, female sexuality IS a scarce commodity; there's nothing artificial about it.

Re:Nonsense

[El Cubano]

1) Legal content can be easily found online.

Only if you use their choice of OS, their choice of browser, their choice of media player, their choice of hardware, etc.

2) DRM-protected content is cheap - cheaper than their physical equivalents.

I'm not to familiar with music, but ebooks sure don't follow this. I've often seen paper books for $60 and their electronic equivalents for $50. Only $10? I don't think so. Publishers claim that the majority of the cost of a book is printing, binding and shipping. All of those costs are gone with ebooks. Now you have server costs (much smaller than distribution costs for real books). So, it may cost slightly less, but is certainly not cheaper considering what you are giving up. Of course, you still have to be using their choice of software (OS, reader, etc), as few outfits provide unencumbered ebooks in PDF format or something.

3) Users who know what to expect will not be dissappointed. I know I am a happy iTunes + iPod user. Then again I do not spend my time inventing all sorts of scenarios how this model could be limiting my life when it is not.

Users expect to be able to use and move their stuff around. That is sadly not always possible. iTunes may be the exception, but I don't know not having used it personally.

Laws == Crime

[sinistre]

The more laws you have - the more crime you'll see.

dvds

[Pompatus]

It's true for me that the quality of downloaded movies is better than the dvd I can rent at blockbuster. I couldn't beleive all the CRAP that goes on DVDs now. It was an inconvenience before that I had to click play a couple of times through menus to watch the movie, but now there are COMMERCIALS!!! WTF!!! Scroll through a list of movies, double click on a file and have the movie start, vs keeping track of disks (I wont even mention scratched disks), navigating through menu systems, watching 10 minutes of commercials and previews I dont care about. Hmmm. Tough choice.

Re:Isn't that what they want? Not Quite!

[Nom du Keyboard]

Frankly, I don't think it's really the ads that ticked people off -

Not so fast here. The ads may not have ticked you off the first time you played the disc. But what about the second time? After all, nobody buys a DVD to only play once.

However

[Mateo_LeFou]

I have bad news for the author: information still wants to be free

"There are some people out there, possessed by the firm delusion that "information wants to be free"--as if bits of data had legs and went walking about on their own..."

This is a strawman, and dumb. The contention that "information wants to be free" is a catchy way of saying "the properties of digital goods are such that their natural marginal cost is zero or practically indistinguishable from zero."

Bad news for most people who would like to marginalize/otherwise dismiss the free culture argument: the economic basis for the contention that "information wants to be free" is rock solid. Scientific. To escape it you have to resort to name-calling etc., as here.

Re:However

[Kadin2048]

Bad news for most people who would like to marginalize/otherwise dismiss the free culture argument: the economic basis for the contention that "information wants to be free" is rock solid. Scientific. To escape it you have to resort to name-calling etc., as here.

Moreover, there is an information-theory perspective as well, involving the inherent nonconservative nature of information in its most basic forms. Digitization brings "information" closer to that basic form, by detaching it more thoroughly from physical media (books, tapes, etc.) and allows its basic attributes to come forward.

There's nothing you can do to put that genie back in the bottle.

Re:However

[bit01]

it takes energy to set it in a meaningful pattern that enables all those free copies.

And that energy, when amortized over 6,578,462,507 people approaches zero, a fact that copyright fanatics like to ignore.

With copyright law as it currently stands the cost of pretty much any mass market information is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of production. In other words, highly inefficient production with massive losses in marketing, controlling distribution and policing.

I don't know what the complete answer is but I do know that the people who claim that copyright law as it is currently implemented is the only possible way information creators can benefit are fanatics, very likely entrenched interests and middlemen who know full well that they add no value. Parasites in other words.

Intellectual property law is a pure product of the mind and can be anything that we want it to be. Even something as simple as discussing what the correct copyright period should be, right down to zero, should be discussed and scientifically justified rather than the hand waving like "nobody will create without copyright" (that's nonsense) or "copyright is the only option" (that's also nonsense).

---

Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.

Re:However

[StrongAxe]

And that energy, when amortized over 6,578,462,507 [census.gov] people approaches zero, a fact that copyright fanatics like to ignore.

So, next time you want to make a $6 million dollar movie, you can distribute it for free as long as you can get everyone on the planet to mail you 1/10 of a cent up front to help you produce it. Good luck with that.

Re:However

[Digital Vomit]

I'd be willing to pay my share plus the shares of nine other people to fund a movie that sounds interesting.

Re:However

[mrchaotica]

Second, you're missing the point. "Real property" and "intellectual property" are different

Ah, I see. So when I wrote "The consequences of taking someone else's property are different in the two cases of course", which part of that point was I missing?

You were missing the point that it makes no sense to speak of "taking someone else's property" in the context of "Intellectual Property," because it makes the false presumption that "Intellectual Property" is actually property. In other words, you're saying "P implies Q," but failing to realize that P is false.

Please read up on basic economics. I would be happy to debate this subject with you, but until you have at least an elementary understanding of that field and how today's intellectual property laws fit into it, I do not see how I can illustrate the hole in your argument logically.

My argument is one based on the physical reality of the universe; economics is irrelevant to it. In addition, you can't use "today's intellectual property laws" to justify themselves; that's a circular argument.

As a starting point, consider that any time and money spend creating a work has an opportunity cost associated with it.

Yep, I completely agree.

Then consider that just because someone shares some information without themselves profiting from doing so, the act may still damage the commercial value of that information to others.

I agree here too.

Combine these two basic ideas and you start to build a more detailed economic picture that shows how a copyright holder can indeed be damaged by others sharing their work without compensating them, even if they still have a copy of the work themselves.

If we first postulate that a "copyright holder" exists, then yes, I can indeed see how he can be damaged, economically. Now, here's the problem: it doesn't make sense, physically speaking, for any such "copyright holder" to exist in the first place!

Your entire argument seems to be based on the presumptions that copyright exists and that it's possible to enforce. You then argue that, from those presumptions, that copyright infringement has negative consequences for the copyright holder, etc. In addition, you explain how copyright is desirable in terms of ethics (e.g. by giving authors fair credit for their work). That's all fine and dandy; I'm not disagreeing with any of it.

All I'm disagreeing with is your claim that "intellectual property" is the same thing as "real property." If we had Star Trek-style replicators, then I'd agree with you (and, of course, extend my claims to include "real property" as well). But we don't, so the fact that "intellectual property" is inherently copyable while "real property" isn't causes them to be different in a very significant way. The consequence of that fact -- which is a feature of physical reality, not economics -- is that your postulates (that copyright can exist and be enforced) are false and the whole argument is moot. In other words, yes, P -> Q, but ~P, so you have (so far) failed to prove Q!

For someone so clued up about logical fallacies, you're very quick to use an appeal to the masses. In fact, your final claim is demonstrably false, given that I am a counterexample. The recent success of legal on-line music services suggests that I am not the only one.

My "final claim" wasn't a claim. Or at least, it wasn't a claim made for the purpose of justifying the rest of my argument. Still, you're right that I overstated it when I said "everyone" (which I meant in a colloquial sense).

Also, which "success[ful] online music services" are you referring to? The ones that don't use DRM (e.g. eMusic, AllOfMP3), the ones that aren't actually successful (e.g. PlaysForSu

Re:However

[nine-times]

I've also been thinking about all this recently from the standpoint of the expense of resources. The use of natural resources, the expense of pollution, the expense of the distribution chain, internet bandwidth, and even hard drive space. It's odd to think about in these terms, since it's usually painted as an issue of consumer rights vs. corporate profitability, or as the desires of the audience vs. the needs of the consumer.

However, the pictures changes if, for a moment, we re-imagine it as a problem for society to solve: how do we efficiently manage the distribution of recorded arts? For the sake of argument, lets disregard the other concerns, such as managing who is authorized to view what, or financial reimbursements to artists. Just think of the problem of distribution of information, as though it's assumed that the information is free.

Suddenly it becomes clear that physical distribution, in this day and age, is *stupid*. We have this huge network at our fingertips, and we're going to waste materials on manufacturing millions of CDs? Many of those CDs are going to ripped to MP3 and then sit on a shelf. For what purpose? We use land and materials to build physical record stores (and Best Buy), we use the materials for the actual media, we pay people to search/maintain the inventory, there's the trucks and the shipping, and all that crap. Think of all the man-time and materials wasted.

Also, users needing to rely on the hard drives in their home computer to store a specific copy of a top-40 hit or a Hollywood movie is nonsense. Right now, the top movie on iTMS is "The Prestige". Consider for a moment if I had bought that movie from iTunes 20 minutes before my hard drive died. Now, why should I need to keep a copy on my local hard drive? The movie has already been ripped, and the data exists elsewhere on the Internet. In order for me to download the movie again would only cost in used bandwidth, but those costs can be mitigated, ironically, by the sheer number of people downloading it. I'm sure that it's obvious to everyone here that the solution is P2P (bittorrent).

It's become clear to me that for a society concerned with using resources efficiently, sharing information via P2P networks is a solution that's almost too good to be true. I'm not just talking about hippy-talk "conservation" in the environmentalist sense. I'm talking about the human resources, the expense of intellectual thought, and the money spent. Overall, those resources, too, would be more efficiently managed through P2P distribution.

Now, some people would complain that jobs would be lost, but that's inherent in using human resources efficiently. Some of the human resources currently spent on these distribution issues are being spent unnecessarily. That we don't break windows makes less work for the window-makers, but breaking windows does not generate wealth. (Yes, I guess I'm suggesting that the MPAA/RIAA have become an example of the broken-window fallacy, and therefore create a net-loss for society)

Re:If DRM causes piracy...

[Thangodin]

This reminds me of the old days of the Commodore 64, when the copy protection schemes sent the disk drive head skating over to track 0. The C64 had no sensor to keep the head in bounds, so it would slam against a hard stop, throwing the head out of alignment, quickly ruining the drive (constant realignment gradually made the drive unusable.) Even if you bought a legit copy of software, you had to use a cracked version or you would destroy your drive. Eventually most people gave up on buying the software altogether.

In fact, the reason that most of the people I know didn't buy a copy of XP, and won't buy Vista, is the heavy handed DRM attached to it, which requires you to get permission from Microsoft to run your computer after 5 hardware changes. I can make 5 hardware changes in 5 minutes when I'm testing hardware. There is no way that I am going to spend half the night on the phone calling Microsoft. If I'm having a problem with hardware, I don't need the additional aggravation. I have a legit copy on my laptop--which never changes hardware--but I'll never install one on my desktop machine.

Reductionism rules!

[Infonaut]

The war on drugs is about ensuring that citizens are addicted to indigenous drugs, and that the profits are centrally controlled.

That doesn't explain why the US government has so aggressively gone after marijuana cultivation here in the US. It also doesn't explain why the extremely powerful tobacco lobby keeps losing in court battles, or how these profits are "centrally controlled."

That's why it's OK for Americans to be addicted to cigarettes and alcohol but not cocaine or crystal meth.

Umm... you do know that crystal meth is produced in the United States, right? You seem to also imply that the only reason cocaine is illegal almost everywhere stems from the fact that coca leaves don't come from the United States. Perhaps that's right, if you assume that cocaine is a benign substance, and there's a globe-spanning conspiracy to keep this beneficial substance from citizens everywhere.

Having everyone addicted to cocaine is a threat to national sovereignty.

By that logic, the fact that so many Americans can't do without coffee should be serious cause for alarm. Time to crank up the Blackhawks, bring the SEALs down to Columbia, and lets take control of those coffee fields!

Having them addicted to meth is a threat to profits.

Is that because meth-addicted people will buy less alcohol and cigarettes?

The free market would have everyone buying cheap meth or homemade shine, or addicted to foreign produced coke.

That would be swell. I like that idea. More addiction for everyone!

As it stands now, they're buying whiskey, cigarettes and cough syrup, which is just the way those on top like it.

Yes, because The Sinister Cabal that runs America has made it so. The tobacco lobby is totally unrelated to the fact that in many southern states, the biggest cash crop is tobacco. Voters there probably don't want to promote the interests of tobacco growers. They've been forced to do so by The Man. Likewise, the alchohol distributors have effectively maintained a monopoly by keeping foreign-supplied beer, wine, whiskey, and every other form of alchohol out of America. Oh, wait. They haven't.

The war on terror, on the other hand, is easy to fix.

Of course it is. Whenever the world is binary, the solution is obvious.

Keep your military and your CIA at home, and there will be no terrorism.

Absolutely right. It wasn't until the US pulled out of Northern Ireland that the terrorism there and in the UK stopped. The Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction were terrorizing Italy and Germany until the US military left Europe. The Basque ETA. The Pakistani groups operating in India. Abu Sayyaf. All of these groups obviously will disappear as soon as the CIA disappears and the US military ends all its foreign presence.

The terrorists are after vengence because they have been and continue to be systematically wronged. By Americans.

Again, you see through the nuance quite clearly. There are no opportunists in the world of terrorism. These are all idealogically committed individuals, ready to give their lives for higher principles. Certainly none of them are using terrorism as a vehicle to further profiteering or mere power grabs. I think we can all agree that any problems that occur anywhere in the world are the result of America's negative influence.

Well, it might be too late now. I imagine there are a lot of orphaned children who aren't going to forget what was done to them.

You're right. All of the Shia children whose parents were killed by Sunnis, and all the Sunni children whose parents

THAT IS NOT PIRACY

[SmallFurryCreature]

I know what you are trying to say but you are playing right into the hands of the MPAA and RIAA and the like with these statements.

Ripping a CD you bought to put the music on your mp3 player is NOT piracy. Yes the RIAA likes to call it that, wich is why they want to add a tax on mp3 players and want to force you to rebuy a track for each piece of equipment you buy it on.

That CD you play on your stereo, a itunes track for your PC, the ring tone version for your phone and so on.

HOWEVER that is NOT what you are legally required to do.

As far as downloading a crack to run software that you bought, in free countries were politicians are not in the pocket of industry, this is 100% legal. Imagine it would be illegal for you to take the tape out of a cassette player and put it on a spindle player instead. For that matter, imagine the police tried to arrest you for breaking into your own car.

The actions you claim to have done DO NOT fall under piracy (well unless you did them whole boarding a vessel with a cutlass between your teeth), they are fair use actions that your a perfectly entitled to do.

To even call this piracy is to give the RIAA and MPAA exactly what they want, that consumers think that limits can be put on what can be done with products you own.

Protecting our interests...

[shmlco]

"The sole mistake Americans make is by automatically assuming that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". All other mistakes including sending the military and the CIA are a mere consequence of this one."

Actually, the major mstake we make, as a country, is assuming we have the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. This is usually done to protect our "interests", which in turn is code for protecting the interests of our various companies and corporations. Read "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq" and you'll see the same patterns repeated again and again and again.

Not wrong, just possibly flawed.

[Kadin2048]

This is perfectly fair, however, what's happening is that the at-risk business model really isn't practical anymore. Once the movie is made, it's difficult to monetize it, because copying it is trivial.

I don't really have any problem with people trying to make movies, or even to make money by making movies. That's a legitimate occupation in my book.

What I have a problem with, is when they try to alter the economic and technological landscape in order to make it easier for them to use a particular business model. That's where I draw the line. I could think of a lot of ways that I could change the world that would make it easier for me to make money, but that's just not how it works. The rest of us basically have to work within reality as it's presented to us, and we have to figure out ways of making money and otherwise surviving within that.

The content producers want to, and are petitioning (read: bribing) government for, is to entrench their business model at the expense of other possibilities, and at the expense of a whole lot of other things besides (not least of which is my freedom to do whatever the hell I want with the equipment I've purchased).

There's nothing inherently wrong with their business model, it just may not work. They're welcome to try, but if it doesn't work, I expect them to pick up and go back to the drawing board and figure out another way to finance movies, if making movies is what they want to do. For them to instead pour a ton of cash into, and generally mess up and corrupt, government, in order to keep a flawed business model around, is unacceptable.

Re:Statement: Insightful. Sarcasm: overrated

[DavidTC]

The really fun thing about any copyright discussion here is watching one set of people arguing 'What is needed', namely, how we 'need' copyright law, against people who say that copyright law is a violation of their rights, past people who are arguing 'What is true', that copyright law used to rely on a level of inconvenience that is now gone and thus is almost totally unenforceable.

We may, indeed, need copyright law to continue to encourage content producers. That is totally orthagontal to whether or not enforcing copyright law is possible in a digital world.

If you fall out of an airplane without a parachute, you can argue that you 'need' to reduce your speed before you hit the ground, and you'd be correct. You could argue that free-falling is kinda fun, and you'd be right too. Or you could argue that you have no way to do the first thing, and you'd also be correct. Sometimes there is not actually a 'correct' solution.

We may, indeed, smash into the ground so hard we destroy quite a lot of produced content. Arguing that we 'shouldn't' do that is rather surreal, considering we already jumped from the plane.

If everyone works together, they might be able to invent, at least, a hang glider or at least aim for a lake. But we have way too many people arguing about what 'should' happen, without considering that there is absolutely no way to do what they think 'should' happen so perhaps they should aim for something a bit more likely.