Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
I don't think you understood what he said - by all means, the Economist is "liberal" in the traditional (or European) meaning of that word, it is hardly the same thing as what "liberal" means in the U.S.
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.