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