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Jeremy Allison On Why DRM Will Never Work
eldavojohn writes "At the ZDNet site, Jeremy Allison (a well-known employee of the Google corporation) goes on a hilarious rant against Digital Rights Management. He compares the access restriction technology with underwear gnomes & Star Trek while ending with: 'Believing in a DRM business model is like joining Star Fleet security, putting on your red shirt, and volunteering to beam down to the new unexplored planet with Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Someone will be coming back from that mission, it's just not likely to be the security guard. Always a true engineer, Scotty had the good sense to stay safely on board the ship.'"
When Scotty did go down to the planet in Wolf in the Fold (for strippers, as a good engineer should), he was accused of murder. Lesson learned!
Pretty bad when you are a failure as a nerd. Is there anything left for you?
The largest problem with DRM as I see it (except the impossibility issue) is that the paying customer gets worse service then the pirate.
Customer goes and pays $10 dollars for his album and notices the can't play it on any machine except the ones approved by the company that sold the album and he can't backup the album in case it breaks so he has to buy it all over again if it does.
The pirate on the other hand happily buys a cheap cd for $1, goes online and downloads the album, burns it to cd and now has a cd that can be played on any machine and be backupped easily.
The basic idea of successfully selling anything is to provide better service then you can get for free.
When it comes to music/movies/games bought online I propose that you let people download the items as many times they want at high speeds. This means that it will be alot faster/comfier then doing it illegally through the relatively slow pirate networks.
I'm currently enjoying this to a great extent with games I've bought through EA. After a format or whatever I just need to tell the EA downloader to download the game for me instead of me having to hunt down the bloody cd that is forgotten in some bookcase somewhere.
I think downloaded music/movies should do it similarly so I easily can move my collection between computers without any fuzz at all making all my movies/music basically immortal. Good service at a good price is better then pirating.
Why is it the editors never seem to notice what they're posting. I mean... just put in the summary that this is Jeremy Allison of the Samba team... not just Joe Blow Google Employee #3248 writing the article... sheesh.
Oh, never mind it was Zonk.
Which would be a good point if all Mr. Allison was saying was "DRM is evil". However, that isn't his point. What he is saying is that it can't work, it's never going to work, and that trying build a business model (or an economy) found on DRM is a deeply irrational act.
The problem is that for DRM to work you have to hand the customer the encrypted data, the encryption algorithm and the encryption key. If you don't the DRMed work cannot be accessed. However, if you do, they have everything they need to circumvent the DRM.
But if the DRM has a fundamental logical flow, then the problem is DRM. That's the point.
A lot of people would agree with that. The two main approaches offered seem to be either move to a gift economy, or indoctrinate school kids to believe that copyright infringement is a Great Evil on a par with Rape, Murder, Genocide, and Britney Spears. Personally, I can see problems with both those strategies.
In the meantime, DRM still isn't going to work any time soon, and any exec who proposes spending serious money on it wants his arse kicking. Not for Being Evil, but for Being Stupid.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
You know that Google has an inordinate amount of pull on Slashdot when an article summary like this comes out:
"a Google employee goes on"
A "Google employee"? Really? He has a name... it's Jeremy Allison. You know, the same Jeremy Allison that was described as "The legendary Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame)" when he resigned from Novell.
Hell, he was still Jeremy Allison only a couple of months ago when he wrote an advice piece for young programmers.
Now? He's a Google employee.
Yeesh.
First of all, why criticize DRM and not the consumer practices that necessitate its use?
... zip. Nada. No music. It was one of those dreaded CDs that don't play everywhere, because they don't conform with the standard.
Let me tell you a quick story about a friend of mine. It was the Summer of 01 or 02, and he bought a CD. Like he used to do. He didn't know much about the 'net and he didn't download songs, he went to his local store and bought CDs. Simply because he didn't want to deal with P2P, considered it a hassle and didn't even want to look into it. What for? He bought a CD every few months, who cared that they costed 20 bucks? He can afford that.
He slipped his brand new CD into his car-hifi and
To say the least, he was pissed. He came to me and asked me what to do. Now, I didn't have any idea how to copy the "protected" CD to a CDR so he could play it in his car, but I knew that there are services where he could download what he bought. Funny enough, that was legal here back then, he had the "right" to "own" that music by buying that CD.
So he went and installed some P2P software. Was surprised how easy it is and within a few hours he had his CD on the computer, burning it to a CDR that works in his car was trivial.
From then on, he started using P2P more often and buy CDs less often, if he only found one good song on the disc, which is pretty much common today.
Conclusio: DRM was what turned him into one of those pesky pirates. He didn't (and still doesn't) care about the 20 bucks such a CD would cost him. What he does care about, though, is that the content works the way HE wants it. He doesn't want to distribute it, or remix it, or anything else the content industry fears so much. He just wants to listen to it. He just wants it to "work" as intended. That's his primary goal when it comes to content, being able to use it the way it's meant to be used.
He didn't care about DRM until this moment when his CD didn't work anymore as expected. They don't want me to copy? Cool with me. Don't wanna copy anyway. But what he wants is to be able to use his content. Such is the vicious cycle. DRM is deemed necessary because of the consumer actions caused by DRM.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not that you need an example, but here I go anyway. I have been downloading Southpark for years (I don't have cable, and Southpark isn't worth $100/month). iTunes started offering it, which is great because I value my time and think that $2 is money well spent. HOWEVER, I can't watch the episodes on my stinking TV! With P2P I could just burn them to a CD and watch the AVI on my $25 DVD player. So now I'm left with the situation where I can buy the episode for $2 and watch it on my monitor, or download it for free and watch it anywhere I like. Not to mention that the free version is higher-quality!
Tell me how restricting the paying customer is a sound business strategy?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
That's simply not true at all. I have yet to meet a non-geek who thinks "it's locked therefore it must be wrong." This weekend I was asked these two questions from two different family members: "why do I get this error message on my PC trying to watch a DVD?" and "why can't I copy my iTunes music to my cell phone?"
All their experiences in the physical world have taught them that if they buy something, it's theirs. This is no different: they both assumed that because they bought the products that they had the right to use them. They see only that "the computer" is giving them error messages. They've never heard of DRM. They have zero assumption that they're doing anything wrong (which is good because they're not.) Yet the products are refusing to cooperate.
In this case, DRM itself is instilling the "mentality" of "this is a stupid computer bug I have to get around." At no point does "right vs wrong" enter into the thought process.
John
DRM is like Speeding Tickets. You can slow some people for awhile, but not forever. You can even get extra money out of them if they break the rules, but they'll view that as a small price to pay for doing what they want. You cause most good and safe people to slow down who could otherwise enjoy going faster and doing more.
But, in the end, everyone will see it for the profiteering racket that it really is.
libertarian: (n) socially liberal, financially conservative; neither left, nor right.
The big problem is that there is an entire generation of college kids that think everything digital is free for the taking unless it is properly secured, and if it is not properly secured then it is basically an invitation to take it.
Yes, but 40 years ago there was an entire generation of college kids that thought love and sex and drugs and rock and roll were free to be taken and shared, and now that generation packs mega churches and votes for George W. Bush. People change as they age.
I don't think it's appropriate to claim that a generation "has no honor" and thus will not use an honor-based system. Even if it is partially true at one point in time, it can change.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Very, very simply, here is the premise behind DRM.
1. I know a secret
2. I want to tell you the secret
3. I don't want you to tell anyone else the secret
4. I don't trust you
Perhaps you can see now why there's no solution to that scenario.