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Empirical Study Shows DRM Encourages Infringement
Hucko writes "Ars Technica has a story about a study by Cambridge law professor Patricia Akester that suggests (declares?) that DRM and its ilk does persuade citizens to infringe copyright and circumvent authors' protections. The name of the study is 'Technological accommodation of conflicts between freedom of expression and DRM: the first empirical assessment.'" The study itself is available for download (PDF); there's also a distillation here.
What happens when steam goes bust? And don't give me the "we will patch authentication out if we go under" crap. If they are going under they will not be releasing patches to strip the authentication as noone will be getting paid to perfom such a job.
DRM is always evil.
I'll cite the much debated Steam argument again. Once I buy a game, DRM (positive DRM) allows me to redownload whenever I want, and to play it on any computer whenever and wherever I want.
I'll see your Steam and raise you a GOG.com. No DRM at all, ever, and you can redownload your games whenever you want. Sure their catalog is still small and contains older games (although some are only 2-3 years old), but I'm hoping they'll go from strength to strength and I'm supporting them with my dollars
I'm still hoping to see LucasArts back catalog on there one day.
The majority of users probably have no idea what DRM is and are thus unaffected.
I believe the sentiment of the study is that BECAUSE people aren't aware of DRM, they still do things that are illegal, according to the DRM. I don't believe most people go out of their way to infringe--they just do by the nature of using their content in the context of the current laws.
More like 5 minutes. You've obviously not had the misfortune of trying using a disney DVD when you miss the "fast menu" button window, before it goes into a ridiculous number of adverts that you cannot bypass.
I think you are putting way to much stock in how a few minutes of advertising can adversely affect your life. Just ignore them, fast forward, or hit the DVD Menu button and skip all that crap. Seriously the only way to avoid all of what you call "corporate propaganda" is to live in a cave, never buy anything and live a completely self-sufficient life, never have any contact with the outside world, never again read anything, listen to anything, or watch anything. Then you would truly be "free" of the corporate shackles. (As a bonus you could also realize that you've had people shouting in your ears their whole life and that you never realized how much your thinking had been muddled - in the silence of your cave.)
Ahh... now you're telling me it's impossible and/or impractical. Which is great, because it just so happens I already did it. As a matter of fact, I wrote a series of pieces for members of an eating disorder recovery group on how to avoid all the negative imagery and get healthier. It's on a private forum, so I'll just stick it in here.
--//--
How to avoid advertisements on the web:
If you're not using Firefox, you should be.
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Once you've got Firefox, you should install tools to protect you from advertising. First one is Adblock Plus
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865
This lets you block advertisements, and is configurable.
Next, if you want to block particular sites completely, you can use this tool, called BlockSite:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3145
After you've done all this, you can customize Google to remove certain items you don't want to see with the CustomizeGoogle add on.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/743
With this tool, you can remove advertisements, filter out sites you don't ever want to see in your search results, and remove google tracking. Which may screw up Muses website statistics tracking, but will prevent you from becoming a target for advertisements specifically related to eating disorders and dieting etc.
If you take the time to install and set up these tools, you will be amazed at the difference.
--//--
How to avoid advertisements in your mail:
First, install Thunderbird:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/
This mail reader has a built in spam blocker that learns how to identify spam as you mark things as spam/not spam. This will go a long way towards keeping your mailbox advertisement free.
Once you've got that installed, you want to be using it to read your web based mail, like Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, etc.
So you need to install the Webmail add on.
http://webmail.mozdev.org/
Once you've installed this, you'll be able to view your mail from all these websites without having to see their banners and other assorted crap.
After this is all done, you should set up folders for every piece of mail you expect to receive, and filters to automatically move them there. This will prefilter your pile, and your learning spam filters will also prefilter.
Between the two, you'll have an ever shrinking pile of messages that "might" be spam to wade through and mark as "is spam" or "is not spam".
--//--
How to avoid advertising in your multimedia:
Stop paying for cable television. Disconnect your service, and use the money you save to buy a DVD burner for backup, a video card for your computer that supports TV-Out, and a large external hard drive that you can use to carry files to and from your fr
-1 Uncomfortable Truth