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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?
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
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.
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
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."
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).
..... we should send them to Belgium to get treated if they get cancer ..... but I digress.
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
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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
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.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
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
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 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?