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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."
If there is no DRM, would people all of a sudden decide to go buy stuff instead of pirating it? Doesn't seem very likely to me.
And of course, you're completely mistaken. I remember back when PC's were brand new, in the late 70's - every single one of us had a pirated copy of Microsoft's "Flight Simulator" program. Guess what - enough people actually paid for it (it was a good program!), and Microsoft continued to push out new versions. The Flight Simulator division at MS is still alive and well today - despite all the piracy.
Your gut feeling flies into the face of the actual facts. But this is what we've been saying all along - "piracy actualy PROMOTES sales"...
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I got some coupons for free mp3 that came with chips I buy on regular basis. Big campaing, "free, legal MP3".
So I decided to "cash them in". So I login to the site described on the coupon. "Sorry, but this site requires Internet Explorer 6 or higher".
Then registration process, asking me for granny's dog's name and so on. Then confirmation email. Then it tells me to download their player. Then the files which are not MP3 but some of their own DRM'd format. And of course unplayable in anything but their crappy player. No way to use them in a portable mp3 player, no easy way of burning them to a CD (outside of ripping audio mixer channel) and of course no way of playing them on another computer, even with said player installed (need login). Ah, and no playback without network connection.
Thanks, no "Legal MP3", even for free, please.
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There's one important fact that the free culture argument tends to neglect. Sure, a copy of a movie costs effectively zero. But the original has a cost that's decidedly nonzero. Information doesn't grow on trees, it takes energy to set it in a meaningful pattern that enables all those free copies.
But the article asserts that DRM causes more piracy. The summary of the article in the blurb does great injustice to the article by implying that but for the existence of DRM, there would be no piracy. That is frankly false. Piracy has been a problem since well before DRM (that's why they created it), and it would probably be one if DRM ceased to exist.
Personally, I think the key issue with piracy is not DRM, but the fact that piracy and copyright infringement are becoming an acceptable to increasingly commit. The result of this is a situation where the laws of society are arguably out of sink with its values. Situations like this are hard to maintain because we depend as much on societal stigma as we do on criminal punishment to deter most crimes. When stigma is lacking or low, we often try to make up for this by adding criminal punishment to increase deterrence.
The problem with this, of course, is that it creates a paradoxical situation where we punish people more for crimes we care less about (another example, non-violent drug offenses). Thus you end up with a situation where people are morally outraged, even fearful, at the threat of having the book thrown at them for a crime they do not consider "bad" at all.
The biggest problem though for copyright infringement is that society normally deals with "lesser" crimes like these by imposing fines on the violator like with speeding for instance. People speed, and when they get caught they pay the fine, go to traffic school, and continue speeding. To most, the fine and traffic school are just the transactional cost of speeding to them.
However, infringement is inherently tough to solve with fines, because it is an economic crime, not a behavioral one. A reasonable fine, the cost of purchasing the infringed material, would have at best a neutral effect on infringement society-wide. People would just infringe, take their chances, and worst case pay up if they get caught. However setting fines too high, as the current system arguably has them, has an even worse effect though, since your average infringer will tend to infringe more than otherwise, the logic being that "if getting caught for a little infringement is going to bankrupt me, I might as well get my money's worth by infringing a lot." Unreasonably high fines also create a situation where the infringed party inherently knows that the infringer is likely judgment proof (cannot pay the fines), further pissing them off. At this point, society tries criminal penalties as well as fines, which leads us to the current system we have.
Obviously solving this problem is a toughy. We could kill copyright infringement as a crime, much as we repealed Prohibition, but that could create other problems, such as disincentivizing creativty, or encouraging tighter DRM, as creators deal with the ramifications. I offer no solutions, but this is the problem as I see it.
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
But DRM radically reduces the value of legally-acquired media, while raising the value of pirated ones. Furthermore, I think there is a strong philosophical argument against the bare concept of DRM, as the rules it imposes restrict our actions to such a large degree as to remove our liberty as moral agents, preventing us from acting as moral agents at all.
The first point is one of utility. Case in point: cleaning out my inbox today, I found a note from the iTunes store that the Good, the Bad and the Queen's album is only $8 for a limited time. I almost jumped at it, even clicked the "Buy this album..." button (I'm a big Albarn/Gorillaz fan), and then, filling in my password, I stopped to think. "This is only 128kbits," I thought to myself. "That sounds kinda chintzy on my headphones. I won't be able to send good tracks to my friends, or upload them to the poolhall jukebox at my school. I won't ever be able to play them on non-Apple DAPs without even more of a quality loss, or make them into ringtones for my friends' phones, or possibly be able to even listen to them at all once Apple gets over this DRM nonsense in 10 years. Shit, I don't even know if this album is any good, the free single was only so-so. I have food to buy. Huh."
The problem with DRM'ed media, and this leads into my second point, is that you don't actually buy anything. If I buy a CD, or download an album off the internet, it is my property: I have the right to use it and abuse it, as far as my own system of morality allows. (For me this includes making mix CDs for my friends, emailing them hott traxx, dropping cool songs on my friends' iPods, playing on my radio shows, and all the uses I described above.) By restricting my use of the things I buy to a predefined set of "correct" actions, DRM removes my freedom to act as a moral agent.
So I fired up Soulseek and—well, you know the rest of the story. I will happily agree that stealing the music is less moral than paying for it (though the profit split of $0.80 to Apple, $6.50 to the RIAA, and $0.70 to Damon Albarn seems a little off to me, as I would really like Damon Albarn to be as rich as he needs to be to keep making music—the people demand a new Gorillaz album!). But for the reasons above I think it's less immoral than what the RIAA and iTunes do to me when I buy into their DRM.
That's my call, as a human being and a moral agent, and I should be free to make it. DRM restricts my freedom to a rigid set of rules, predetermined by a cartel of people completely removed from my life and reasons for action. We get the old saw: everything not compulsory is forbidden; everything not forbidden is compulsory. It destroys the possibility of agency, and in turn the possibility of any kind of moral action.
I: just want to listen to music, where and how I want to. I'm happy to pay for it (and I do, more than I should), as long as my rights of property and agency are respected. They: want to destroy my personhood with an absolute and top-down system of "morality".
Who's the bad guy?
And why is copyright automatically trotted out as the best way of getting it paid for?
Copyright is extremely inefficient. It deters other innovation (generally by smaller and more creative people and firms) by making borrowing material very hard. Copyright sends many times (about 10x) more money to middlemen (CEOs, advertising, lawyers, trade groups, profits, retailers, etc) than to production. Copyright also leads to monopolies and censorship - both commercial and government. Copyright also leads to more advertising by restricting alternative distribution (compare TV via P2P and over the air), and advertising is a terrible way to raise money for anything.
Just about any other system, including having a free-for-all, is going to work better than the current system.
I would differentiate between intellectual property and property, because when someone takes your property you are deprived of it.
In the natural order of things, someone would need to physically take your property and deprive you of it, yet you can share intellectual property with as many people as you wish and still retain it yourself. Education is fundamental to society, and keeping information (which is all intellectual property really is) secret is detrimental to society as a whole... Imagine if the caveman who discovered fire hadn't told anyone else how to do it?
Societies and the human race have prospered and advanced due to sharing information, but that continued advancement is slowed by the greedy few who want to keep information secret for their own benefit at the cost of society as a whole.
As for scientifically justifying a copyright period, i would imagine by studying the relative pros and cons of each length of time, although it's very subjective depending on what information is being copyrighted.
About profiting off the back of someone else's work... What do you call fair compensation? Many large companies generate huge profits from people's works, while giving those people a miniscule cut. Also, do you think someone should be able to continue making ridiculous profits indefinately? Surely there's a point where it's no longer fair compensation, and now they;re just ripping people off.
Whatever system is used, it should be more consumer-friendly than the current copyright laws... The current laws allow copyright holders to charge anything they want, continue doing so for ridiculously long periods of time, and both restrict supply and discriminate as to who is allowed to buy copies and what they pay. (and yes, i consider media which costs far more in europe and comes out several months after the us to be racial discrimination)
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You "used Windows and FairPlay stripped the DRM from it to access the AVI inside"?
There are no DRM'd formats with an "AVI inside". "FairPlay" is a DRM system used by Apple. It is certainly not a thing you can use to "strip the DRM from it and access the AVI inside" anything. There used to be a tool named "FairPlay", which worked on music files and not video files, and has long since been abandoned.
So no, I do not think anybody cares that your imaginary friends are copying this imaginary file.
Imagine I'm holding a rock. The physical reality of the fact that I'm holding (i.e., owning) it prevents anyone else from holding (i.e., owning) it at the same time. Moreover, I can use that piece of property without having to give it to anyone else first (for example, I can tie it to the end of a stick and go kill an antelope with it). Moreover, I can only use it if I haven't given it to someone else.
Yes but society as a whole would benefit if anyone could take that rock the moment you put it down and you could take it back the moment he puts it down. Most tools are owned by many households despite being in actual use only for a short period of time. Society would greatly benefit if we would just have a number of tools that belong to society (a sufficiently large number, of course) that everyone can use if he needs them and overall we'd get by with less tools. Same for food, some people starve while others have more than they need. Why not make food property of society and give it to those who need it? Oh, wait, that's communism and people don't seem to like it.
For the same purpose it can be argued that a copyrighted work is no longer useful if it gets distributed freely among others because it no longer has a resale value. To a corporation there is no value in the notes Britney sings other than their resale value. Additionally, 99% or more of the copyrighted works wouldn't have an actual benefit to society even if freely available. The value to the creator as e.g. a story is pretty much nil since he knows the entirety of it the moment he wrote it. The author already has that information and no need to write it down and show it to others except for gains coming from that sharing (recognition, profit, etc) that he'd lose if copyright was no longer there.
Both physical and intellectual property exists because people have a way of thinking of both physical objects and ideas as theirs. Society's laws are formed around the ideas society holds about how the world should work. People think that others shouldn't be allowed to steal their ideas and implement it as a law, people later realize that means they can't steal other people's ideas either and complain.
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