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Criminalizing The Consumer - Where DRM Went Wrong
][nTrUdEr writes "The Economist has posted an editorial on how DRM has gone wrong. What ostensibly began as a tool to ensure artists received due compensation for their work has been turned, and now criminalizes the consumer for wanting to use what they have purchased. 'Despite the number of iTunes downloaded for a fee, Apple would be in trouble if people were prevented from transferring legitimately owned CDs to their iPods. The software Apple gives away to iPod customers is designed to let them do just that. Most people think it ludicrous that they can't do the same with the DVDs they own. Now it seems, despite squeals from the movie industry, the law is finally moving in the video fan's favour. The issue in the recent case was whether Kaleidescape, a maker of digital "jukeboxes" that store a person's video and music collections and distribute the entertainment around the home, had breached the terms of the DVD Content Control Association's CSS (content scrambling system) license.'"
When I buy an album or a movie, I am not buying a "license." I am not agreeing to anything. I am not bending to the will of anyone's "license," I am not signing anything, I am not entering a contract, I am not forfeiting anything, waiving anything, and I am not compromising anything. I am buying a copy of some physical medium for my own enjoyment, and at that point I own that copy of that medium. I have already entered into a "license" for this media through a little thing called copyright law. Anything beyond the application of this copyright law, which includes fair use clauses for a very good reason, is bullshit. Pure and simple.
Yep. That's why companies like Grooveshark have a chance to break into the music industry.
Trust consumers, eliminate DRM and sue the pants off of illegal file sharers. Yes, that means college students, nine-year-olds, cancer patients, single mothers and everyone else. Yes, that means some small percentage of erroneous accusations.
That's the solution, not some goofball schemes to turn the whole entertainment industry into street mimes.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
This is what annoys me about pretty much all forms of DRM - the anti-piracy measures ultimately make the pirated version simply better than the legal version.
With Windows, the pirated version removed the annoying "phone home" feature that Microsoft uses to ensure the product is legit. With computer games, it prevents the stupid "CD in the drive" requirement just to play a game that's using 8GB of hard drive space. With movies, it allows watchers to skip the stupid previews and FBI warning and jump straight to the actual content.
Ultimately DRM punishes those who would purchase the media legally, and makes the pirated version just that much more attractive. Why should I pay $20 for a DVD when a free rip offers better usability?
I'm more than willing to pay for content. I just don't want to have to put up with all the brain-dead restrictions placed on it solely because I'm foolish enough to actually attempt to support the content creators. For the love of common sense, make the legal product at the very least almost as good as the pirated version, instead of substantially worse!
And please, please stop demanding that people who paid for the game have to use the CD in PC games. That alone is enough to push me to find the no-CD cracks. I shouldn't have to turn to pirates to make my purchases worthwhile!
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
This is an advertorial for the folks at the Economist, I'm a subscriber and its easily been the most useful journal I've ever subscribed to, it gives a clear business view of what is going on, so even when they get technology wrong you can see how the business will get it wrong too.
Put it this way, if you are arguing with the business and can say "The economist said" its going to be a million times better that wired/slashdot/any computing mag you can think of.
Politically its "liberal" in the traditional sense of the word (i.e. slightly right wing and think the government should keep out of our lives)
Mark me up, mark me down, its a class magazine.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Why not use clean-room reverse-engineering and reimplementation? If a 15-year old can do it, then surely a big software company can afford to do it too. This way they are not bound by the CCA contract.
Some More of DRM's Greatest Mistakes, Well That About Wraps It Up for DRM, and What Is This DRM Shit Anyway?
Just as we have been clamoring for geek involvement in patent review, we should be clamoring for geek involvement in legislation review. Geeks can a) forsee future applications of technology and b) find potential bugs due to the similarity of rigidity and logic between law and code (see comments such as mine attached to Source Control For Bills In Congress?).
9 years. 9 years of prosecution. 9 years of our EFF dollars wasted having to fight this.
It would be nice to believe that since Kaleidescape won their lawsuit, that iTunes, Windows Media Player, and all the other media products out there will be able to let the users rip their own DVDs. But I don't think that'll be the case anytime soon (no matter how badly I want it to be that way). Kaleidescape won their lawsuit because they had previously licensed CSS decryption, probably before the DVDCCA really caught on to what they were planning on doing with it. Had the DVDCCA known what the Kaleidescape system would be, they never would have granted the license.
Which is funny, because it's probably one of the most locked down, secured DVD movie servers out there. Other similar servers use DeCSS (they just tell the end users where to download it, so the manufacturer isn't doing anything *illegal*), and they have their movies stored in Windows folders that can easily be accessed and shared with anyone on the network. That's right, they went after the company that had the most MPAA/DVDCCA friendly product possible, and let the other guys with lesser products get by on "illegal" software.
I usually explain the current problem with reconciling creative incentive with no natural scarcities as a fable. Imagine a berry bush that has very, very tasty berries, but is excruciatingly difficult to grow. The farmer has to spend hundreds of man hours raising the bush, and cannot hold another job while doing so. The owner of the bush decides to hire 5 armed men to guard the bush, and sell baskets of berries for 5 dollars a piece, until they are gone. We call this capitalism. The owner pays for the cost of raising the bush and the guards, and profit goes towards his livelihood. If there were no guards, and looting of the bush happened, the owner is out of a bush, economic opportunity, and probably a livelihood. Looting causes an inefficient distribution of resources. Communism would look similarly, but the farmer would have doled out the berries equally to who wanted them, for the cost of a generally collected (taxed) stipend, from everyone who did and did not want them.
Now, imagine if that bush never ran out of berries. Sure, people might get tired of the berries, or they might not like berries. But you get two interesting problems. First, if the farmer keeps selling berries, he makes unlimited money. That drops his costs to nearly zero. Second, if he's looted, he is not out of berries to sell. He is only out of the opportunity to sell the berries. Capitalism doesn't protect your demand, only the physical property you have to sell. Sure, eating gobs and gobs of berries means that those people are now full on berries and have no interest in buying, but maybe everyone didn't anyway. Law does not regulate demand.
The farmer who owns the unlimited berry bush does not need guards to prevent the stealing of property, he needs them to protect his demand. If he left the bush unattended overnight, he does not lose property, he only loses demand. If modern capitalism is to be remodeled to include protection of demand, you quickly find that you can't write a negative review of a product, or change your tastes, as well as similar problems, since you have damaged demand for a creators product.
And this is the problem with DRM. DRM are the armed guards at the unlimited berry bush. This is NOT the most efficient method of distribution. The most efficient method would collect enough money for farmers to have incentive to grow a bush, but would not prevent the widest distribution of berries possible (everyone who wants one). Plain and simple, no current economic model satisfies perfectly.
You can make arguments that theater seats are a scarcity now, and good movie experiences can be used to generate profit and motivation. But when the day comes of very, very cheap home theaters, you have to shift the model again. Concerts are better, and could save the music model, but apart from plays, this is really a difficult problem for big-budget movies. Not allowing unlimited distribution is very inefficient, as is not compensating the creator. Truly, it's a curse of riches.
There, you get a class lecture for free, without DRM.
Somebody wake me up when: a) I can use the (preferrably DRM free) iTunes store on my Linux boxen, and b) I can distribute deCSS legally.
Jobs argument is actually coherent, although the actual points he made was never reported in the Mainstream Moron Media. Jobs argues the biggest failings of DRM is:
* It doesn't work.
* It's too easily cracked, and patching the DRM software to stop cracks is a losing battle.
* The RIAA sell the very same music unprotected on CDs anyway(!!!!!!)
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/
Anything that causes Macrovision stock to crash has to be a good thing.
It's just data. No one has any right to tell anyone else what data they may or may not have.
It's a good explanation of the economics.
the officers in charge of them are more interested in maximizing financial return on the products they sell to the public, by changing the business model from a universal media purchase, to one of individual device rights.
The problem with this is it does not maximize profits. By requiring people to pay for every item they want to play music or movies on they are discouraging people from buying to begin with. I used to buy a lot of music however I rarely even listen to it now. Lately though I've been thinking of getting a new turntable and reel-to-reel tape deck but I wanted to see if I'd be able to buy new vinyl records, and reels of tape. Now I've found two stores that do sale and will order if they don't carry a record.
Actually at one of the stores I went through to see what new albums they had and right then and there I was ready to get a turntable because they had an album by Otis Reading which had his song "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay" .
FalconShould there be a Law?
even when they sold a DRM infected CD the Beastie Boys the 5 Boroughs for example.
The lable at the same time released it in 12" vinyl DRM free !!!!!
Seems silly to have used DRM on the disk in the end.
Why don't they just say that? Stupid phrases like "criminalizes the consumer for wanting to use what they have purchased" are besides the point.
The consumer isnt criminalized if they buy the music. When you buy music you but the media, not the content. You dont own the song, you never did. When you buy a CD, you dont get free LPs and cassettes.
Whether or not piracy is a real economic impact, people are still "booleging" music.
You people need to stop rewriting history. If any has been criminalized its the rightful owners of the music.
No. The problem is a loss of demand. Theft occurs when the finite berries are taken. Loss of demand happens when the infinite berries are taken. It's analogous to entering a saturated market- don't expect windfall profits.
Isn't that exactly the problem as described? If there is no way to model the scarcity, there really is no optimum method of distribution. No one will bother to grow the bush (make labor-intensive content) if they can't figure out a compensation model. And people will notice the bush has infinite berries, and will take a dim view that the creator is guarding what is an infinite resource. Imagine if you had to pay an air tax to breathe under penalty of law. There would be riots and revolution.
I argued that capitalism doesn't model an infinite resource perfectly, and that it is not incompatible with unlimited distribution. A good example would be to have copyright over movies for say, 2 years. Nearly all movies make most of their profit in the first two years (and offers good incentive to produce content). After which, the movie enters the public domain (enriches the public through unlimited distribution). The next trick would be to find a good point for other mediums.
You didn't read what I wrote. At all. My entire point was that the abolition of scarcity can mean that progress will stop. But you aren't taking advanced economics like externalities, so I won't jump your case. It's not like I can fail you.
The root of the problem is with positive and negative free riders. And every content creator will argue every free rider is negative, as you are. This is not the case. Society will want positive free riders. Creators will want control over all free riders. The former is a much more efficient solution than the latter. Take for instance the Star Wars prequels. Someone OTHER than Lucas could have done a much better job than he did. He got to capture the free rider benefits of his first movies (characters, themes, story, etc). But, by many estimations, he did a poor job. If we had let him compete with others, and had many different versions of the prequels, we would have more total economic benefit, and more people willing to create content. Nothing is stopping someone from seeing more than one version of the prequels. But the current situation does not allow that. Law and DRM prevent novel uses and derivative works, to the detriment of capitalism.
Scarcity works on more than one dimension, and I think you understand that. That's why if a widget can be infinitely duplicated, it's different than if Van Gogh's Sunflowers can be infinitely duplicated. But then again, Van Gogh died near penniless and unappreciated. It didn't stop him from making many masterpieces whose prints garner my walls. If you want to know more, email me and I can give you a good reading list and some ideas to start.
The framers of the US Constitution thought this was so important, that they put it right into the document. This is one of the few enumerated purposes of Congress, and yet this power has ended up in other hands.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Good points, but I want to address Firefly. That was certainly a failure of the market, but not due to piracy. Everyone I know, including my geriatric parents, my wife, and my kid, adore the show. Most everyone bought a copy of the boxed set. However, they only found out after the show was canceled (and a few years at that). That was a failure to capture a market. However, the market wasn't turning to piracy at the time, it was because nobody knew about the show.
Marketing at Fox is abysmal. The Tick live action show was about the funniest thing I've ever seen. I own it. However, the show was slated to be canceled before the first episode aired, and didn't have any advertising. Piracy didn't kill Family Guy, as it did over 3 times better in the ratings on Adult Swim. That is was a failure at Fox to understand their demographics and viewing habits. After renewing the show a couple of years later, they took a clue from Cartoon Network and managed to capture their market. It's now one of their most popular shows.
Not really. Copyright didn't actually STOP people from stealing from the bush. Government enforcement meant that the guards would occasionally smack someone on the head if they took too many berries, or tried to resell the berries right in front of them. Technically you are right, copyright enforcement was supposed to stop copying like DRM is, however it did not function that way in reality. I'd love to do research on models as we'd like them to happen, not as how they really do happen.
However you do show a good understanding of why we have copyright (to promote arts). However, the pressures to loot the bush are very, very high, and the crowd is very, very large. If looting the bush required a massive investment such as a printing press circa 1880, then copyright enforcement works fine, and there is not much incentive to loot the bush. However, as the costs to looting come down, there is more incentive to do so.
And extra credit for realizing "We the People" set the policies that benefit us most. As my favorite professor said years ago, "We are a country, not an economy." If the economic policies we have do not benefit us, then it is our imperative to make those that do. But, I was taught that back before everyone in business school was a Randian Objectivist.
http://playlistmag.com/news/2007/04/02/drmfree/ind ex.php
An interesting development. But does the lack of DRM really mean that people can buy the music, instead of obtaining it through iTMS contract?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.