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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."
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.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
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?
This article makes perfect sense on every aspect noted. This is exactly why MP3s are so heavily pirated. I must be honest though, I still purchase CDs when I find new music that I like, but I will never ever purchase MP3s with DRM protection.
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
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.
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.
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
Honestly, the response to the recent petition to the UK goverment to ban DRM almost sounded like it was produced for the goverment by the RIAA and Macrovision combined. The response in full:
Digital rights issues have been gaining increasing prominence as innovation accelerates, more and more digital media products and services come onto the market and the consumer wants to get access to digital content over different platforms. Many content providers have been embedding access and management tools to protect their rights and, for example, prevent illegal copying. We believe that they should be able to continue to protect their content in this way. However, DRM does not only act as a policeman through technical protection measures, it also enables content companies to offer the consumer unprecedented choice in terms of how they consume content, and the corresponding price they wish to pay.
It is clear though that the needs and rights of consumers must also be carefully safeguarded. It is reasonable for consumers to be informed what is actually being offered for sale, for example, and how and where the purchaser will be able to use the product, and any restrictions applied. While there is good reason to expect the market to reach a balance as these new markets develop, it is important that consumers' interests are maintained in the meantime.
Apart from the APIG (All Party Internet Group) report on DRM referred to in your petition, Digital Rights issues are an important component in other major HMG review strands on Intellectual Property, New Media and the Creative Economy. In particular, the independent Gowers Review of Intellectual Property commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, published its report on 6th December 2006 as part of the Chancellor's Pre-Budget Report. Recommendations include introducing a limited private copying exception by 2008 for format shifting for works published after the date that the law comes into effect. There should be no accompanying levies for consumers. Also making it easier for users to file notice of complaints procedures relating to Digital Rights Management tools by providing an accessible web interface on the Patent Office website by 2008 and that DTI should investigate the possibility of providing consumer guidance on DRM systems through a labelling convention without imposing unnecessary regulatory burdens.
Step 1: Complain about drop-in-the-ocean piracy for a decade.
...apparently the ads and menu page were snuck into the DVD ISO standard when we were sleeping.
Step 2: Get DMCA on your side so you can make a criminal out of anyone at will.
Step 3: Sell defective products. When people are compelled to pirate on a larger scale because the Disney DVD they rented for the kids keeps fading in and out visually and audiably, or skips and dies on a particular scene...
Step 4: Point at all the new, higher piracy figures and dance around singing about how the piracy problem is getting worse and how you need more DRM power.
Step 5: Wait for the sheep to get used to the new order.
Fortunately, it's unlikely this will work. Look at DVD advertisements. I recently popped in Joe's Apartment (it was free and I like bad films) and there was not trailers, commercials, or even a stop at the menu screen. Straight to reel one. A short while back I was watching a new release (I forget the title) and it was telling me all about how the new HD-DVD (or Blueray, I wasn't paying much attention) is going to be worth buying new hardware at shocking prices because the disc will play the film immediately.
Thus, the cycle is complete; the studios received just enough annoyed customer complaints about the previews, ads, and intro garbage that they started making them skipable, or at least fastforwardable, and now they're going to temporarily give us immediate play back. Aren't we loved?
Frankly, I don't think it's really the ads that ticked people off -- we've been tolerating them since '46. 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.
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.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Only if you use their choice of OS, their choice of browser, their choice of media player, their choice of hardware, etc.
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.
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.
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"...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The more laws you have - the more crime you'll see.
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.
----
Squirrel
Weren't you listening??? DRM protected content is much less useful than the physical equivalent. To some people it's worth nothing at all since they can't play it on their own preferred music player. So they look for content they actually use.
And while the music industry has yet to lose a sale from me because of illegal downloading, they're not producing much I want to hear these days either. Hip-Hop, and Rap Music (an oxymoron if there ever was one) are not on my playlists. The Beatles are, but they can't be bought on-line yet.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Only on Slashdot would this kind of tripe be regarded as 'Insightful'.
To the original poster - please explain to us how you 'decommoditize' sexual organs (are yours commodities too, assuming you have some?), and who the industry-Yids are, and what you mean by Yid? ?
To those who modded it insightful, I have to wonder what possible nugget of truth you feel could be hidden in this anti-semitic rant which seems to regard all females (and particularly wives?) as commodities??
Jim Baen died last summer, but Baen Books still gives away a huge number of books in completely unencrypted, un-DRM'd formats. I think I have bought well over $100 of their buyable e-books, because I can read them on anything I want, any time I want.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
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.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.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
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.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Bollocks,
What the GP has noted from a more social perspective is actually valid on the physiological level. IIRC all ova in a female are completely developed before she reaches sexual maturity and after that dormant. During each ovulation one (usually) undergoes the final stage in its development and is secreted. No new ova are created.
At the same time male spermatocites which divide to produce spermatosoids are produced constantly (albeit at a decreasing rate) until the males die. New sperm is created all the time.
So the female vs male sexuality note is actually valid all the way down to the physiological and biochemical level. As far as procreation is concerned male sexuality is not a scarce resource. Female is.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.
Principle 2: "The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them"
I can attest to this 100% - in a different, but similar area many are familiar with. My example is my experience with WindowsXP. When I lived in New Zealand, I could not afford the NZD$536 (USD$377) for XP home to keep my CS:S habit alive, so I used a 'less than legitimate' copy of XP. Anyway, when I moved to the US I thought I'd go legit only because after a visit to Frys i saw i could pick up XP off the shelf at (USD$199) - almost half the price. Even better I managed to get an OEM XP home for just over a hundred bucks.
Now there's no way I'm paying NZ$536 (USD$377) for an OS. No way. No way in hell. However, I was happy enough to part with a hundy for the OEM version. I didnt know of Linux at the time (now have 3 PC's on Ubuntu), but wanted XP to play CS:S and various other Windows games I'd paid for over the years (because they were well priced!!!)
So yeah, hopefully big business will wake up and smell the coffee one of these days.
How Many times...
Downloading pirated items is not Stealing! It's breaching a copyright. It is not depriving any party of their property. On top of that, your analogy is slightly off. DRM is not a lock on a door, it's a lock on your OWN door to make sure you don't go out and do bad stuff.
Publishers claim that the majority of the cost of a book is printing, binding and shipping. All of those costs are gone with ebooks.
Well, no. That may be true for certain types of books, but it is certainly not true for any that I'm familiar with. One type of book where I have hard data is upper-division physics textbooks (black and white). For those books, paper, printing, and binding (PPB) are about $10 a copy, whereas the price of the book is normally in the $50-100 range. One way to tell that PPB is not a big slice of the pie for textbooks in general is that the cost of college textbooks has gone up 62% in the last decade, whereas PPB definitely has not. Paper has gotten more expensive, but not enough to explain an increase in the cost of an organic chemistry textbook from $100 to $160. In some cases, PPB may be getting cheaper, because publishers are using POD in cases where it's economically advantageous. (A lot of fiction publishers are getting slower-selling titles produced by Lightning Source, for example, in small batches.)
For most types of books, PPB is not a very big chunk of the retail price. Important chunks include:
- editorial work
- design work, for illustrated books, such as textbooks
- licensing of photos (which is a per copy cost)
- distribution
- the bookstore's markup (typically 34% markup for a college bookstore)
- advertising
- financial costs incurred because you have to pay to produce the books, and then wait to sell them in order to get your money back
- returns (a huge negative in the publishing business)
I can't believe that shipping is a big hunk of the pie, especially if they're using media mail.Find free books.
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...
People decide to do things. "Piracy", in this case, is something a person decides to do. Each individual has the choice to act or not. DRM doesn't cause piracy. It probably creates incentives for piracy, but the choice still exists.
The whole [some factor] "causes" [some behavior] is simply an assault on free will and an invitation to elite social engineers to take away more freedom from people.
People behave the way they want to.
(Example: Did videogames "cause" the Columbine massacre, or did some kids decide to massacre some people?)
Thats exactly why I wouldn't. I know a friend who bought XP. He broke his soundcard so he replaced it. It stopped working after one hardware change. See, changing soundcards changes 5 or 6 hardware devices. Changes your game port, your mixer device, your wave out device, your MIDI device, your recording device, your legacy audio device. On top of that when he called Microsoft they refused to allow him to reactivate it, called him a pirate and hung up.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Whenever I read about piracy, I always remember this scene from Amazon Women on the Moon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I5dVBezF9k
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.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Baen proved that free books increase sales enormously.
The problem is that you can't necessarily apply the same lessons to other types of information besides books, or even to other types of books.
College textbooks. College textbooks are unlike science fiction books because they're extremely expensive, the target audience doesn't have any choice about whether to choose a particular book, and the same title typically sells steadily for many years. So for college textbook publishers, following the Baen model just won't work. If they wanted to make it work, they'd have to lower the price of a calculus textbook from $150 to more like $20. Baen's model depends on the idea that the electronic freebies help to keep the books popular; no such consideration applies to college textbooks, where the only concern is to keep the professor from adopting some other book.
Software. The Baen model depends on the fact that books are available in two forms, paper and electronic, and most people who are actually going to read a science fiction novel prefer paper. It doesn't really work that way with software, although you can certainly try to make two versions, or sell support, etc.
In both of these examples, information that has intentionally been set free by its authors really is a threat to the established industry -- and I think that's a good thing. (See my sig for numerous examples of free textbooks; not many of them are also available in print.)
Find free books.
But oddly enough, at least some people have found that free on-line editions of textbooks make the print versions sell better, too. See Flint's Prime Palaver #6.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
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."
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.
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!
Is that because meth-addicted people will buy less alcohol and cigarettes?
That would be swell. I like that idea. More addiction for everyone!
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.
Of course it is. Whenever the world is binary, the solution is obvious.
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.
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.
You're right. All of the Shia children whose parents were killed by Sunnis, and all the Sunni children whose parents
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"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.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
The only way your post makes any sense is if you completely misunderstood me. By "you only have so much sperm" I meant you can only produce sperm at so great a rate. And the optimal rate for fertility is sex 2-3 times per week, hence the 150 children a year statistic mentioned previously.
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
Even worse:
Uninstalling an OEM driver and running the Microsoft-shipped driver counts as one hardware change, then installing a new version of the OEM driver counts as a second hardware changed. I've had NIC drivers, sound card drivers, and video card drivers trigger re-activation, and forced to call the Craptivation support line.
F*** activation.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
You forgot a fourth reason, and the one which inspired this article in the first place:
4) The illegally obtained file is less restricted and more useful than its for-pay equivalent. In short, you're choosing between paying nothing for a better product and paying something for a more frustrating, restrictive product.
That's what they mean when they say, "DRM promotes piracy." If someone sells me an unencumbered file at a reasonable price, I'll accept it happily and move on. But if someone sells me a file that I'm allowed to play for a period no longer than five (5) years, on no more than two (2) authorized devices running our patented Music-N-Abled software... well, if I really, really feel that the artist deserves support, I might buy it before searching out an unencumbered file on BitTorrent. But either way, if I want it, I'm going to search out a file that does what I want, rather than waiting for the distributor to try and sell me the same product over and over again.
You seem to want to interpret the statement "DRM promotes piracy" in a completely different way, that makes DRM responsible for every instance of piracy. I'm going to chalk it up to poor reading comprehension.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Nice, take a slight at an ethno-religious group, play on a guy who chooses to voice his disgust at the remark that he felt was directed at his ethno-religious beliefs, and slight him even more by espousing you beliefs on a religious ceremony, by asking his to ponder your personal beliefs on circumcision. Nice...I applaud you...to bad I didn't have any mod points left to bring you even more off topic. Some things are personal choice, deal with it. Now if you were circumcised by your parents choice and don't like it, sorry. If you had a botched procedure and it caused you to lose normal function, I understand your reasonings here. But if you feel so strongly voice your opinion intellectually, don't just point us over to a site advocating making a procedure that is either a religious matter or a traditional matter illegal by law. That offends me personally. If you want it to change inform people, don't ask for more laws to invade my rights to carry on a religious or social tradition. The arguments your organization sites against circumcision just are not enough to justify mandating new laws. Laws just get in the way of living. I'm sorry that this bothers a small number of you, but I assure you you are not in the majority here.
;)
just my 10 bits
Now about DRM causing piracy... I can see that. Lets make a law banning DRM
A bit more details...
Baen has a "free library" on their website with a small, frequently changing collection of stuff. However, their hardcover books also come with a CD licensed for free redistribution that can be copied onto hard drives, etc. No DRM whatsoever.
A fellow running a (unrelated) site called TheFifthImperium has put the contents of every single one of these CDs up on his website at http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com. They can either be read online (as downloaded documents or HTML) or you can download the entire CDs. No idea of this site's ability to withstand Slashdotting, but it's well worth visiting. David Weber (of Honor Harrington fame, plus many other fine novels) and Eric Flint (author of this article and a vast number of superb sci-fi or fantasy books) feature heavily on these CDs, but there are books by quite a few BAEN authors included. If your local library has hardcover BAEN books, there's a good chance they'll have the CDs too (though the link above will get you to all the CDs, which is nice as no one CD has all the books they've distributed this way).
Even if reading on a computer doesn't appeal too much, it's worth checking them out just to learn a bit about the authors and their works.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You dumbass. The word 'anti-semitic' does, in fact, mean 'anti-jewish', or, more specifically, 'jew-hater'.
Why? Because that's what it was coined to mean, fairly recently, and that's what people use it to mean. You cannot deconstruct words into their root forms and argue that the roots mean the word means something different, language doesn't work that way.
In your universe, a 'light switch' is a misnomer because it's actually controlling electricity, not 'light', and an 'automobile' would include those subway trains that drive themselves, but not cars.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?