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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.
ARRRRR!
seriously who didn't know this was the case?
someone has to crack that DRM just for the sake of cracking it.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Good to see someone has taken a scientific approach to this for once instead of hyperbole, exaggeration and assumption like we normally see (from both sides I might add).
Also, it's funny how DRM has become automatically negative. The reasons are obvious, but as I've said before many times, DRM can be a positive thing. 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. There are some advantages to DRM but of course they're over-shadowed by the many drawbacks and disadvantages from DRM's restrictive aspects.
And can we please not turn this into a "Steam sucks!" - "No YOU suck!" debate again? It was just an example.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
The RIAA better discredit Dr. Akester before this gets pickup by a major news source.
Actually I take that back. Everybody knows that there is now room for science and research when it comes to lobbying!
What was I thinking?
Here are the conclusions of the study:
1) Although DRM has not impacted on many acts permitted by law,
certain permitted acts are being adversely affected by the use of
DRM;
2) This is in spite of the existence of technological solutions
(enabling partitioning and authentication of users) to
accommodate those permitted acts (privileged exceptions);
3) Beneficiaries of privileged exceptions who have been prevented
from carrying out those permitted acts (because of the
employment of DRM) have not used the complaints mechanism
set out in UK law;
4) Article 6(4) of the Information Society Directive put an onus on
content owners to accommodate privileged exceptions
voluntarily. Voluntary measures have emerged in the publishing
field, but not all content owners are ready to act unless they are
told to do so by regulatory authorities.
My commentary:
1) As far as I can tell, DRM for the most part also hasn't had a noticeable impact on the uses not permitted by law. In other words: DRM only harms the customers, not the pirates.
2) As the record has shown in various court cases, the media companies are a bunch of assholes. Of course they're not going to care if little Ms. Teacher wants to (fairly!) use some copyrighted piece of work in hear lessons. They have "Power!! Unlimited POWAH!!!!"
3) What, there's a complaints mechanism? That would have been pretty good if people knew about it and used it.
4) Wait, what??? The DRM control freaks are supposed to voluntarily give up control? That sounds like a misunderstanding of human psychology. Also, quote The Matrix 2 (too bad they never made any sequels): "[Oracle] What do all men with power want? [Neo] ... [Oracle] More power".
People prefer files that aren't troublesome to play and aren't tied to some publisher's good will, to files that are troublesome to play and tied to some publisher's good will. News at 11...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Last month I bought a new mid-spec laptop and went shopping for an "old" game that would run on it, and I settled on Civ4. After buying it, I discovered that it too uses SecuROM so I will not install it. Instead, I think it's morally (and legally?) acceptable to download a pirate copy without DRM.
Morally, yes. Legally? Forget it. The uploader violated the law by distributing illegal copies. You violated the law by downloading and burning, thereby making an illegal copy. Remember what copyright is: it's a legal right to copy, literally. Also, usnig a Alcohol to make an image of the DVD is probably also a violation of the law, though the Software Act of 1980 does allow for you to make a copy for archival purposes and as an essential step in executing the program. Whether imaging the DVD can be viewed as "an essential step" or not depends on how good your lawyer is. ;)
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Not to be a troll here or anything, but where's the correlationisnotcausation tag? ;-)
I pirated a piece of software just a week ago: it's a very specialized database application on steels that refuses to work if it doesn't find the original CD in the drive. Very useful indeed to use on a CD-less notebook... And I paid the damn thing almost $500!
Needless to say, a NOP has found its way into the executable. For the next version, I'll pay the license, but I'll download the ISO from emule, which not only doesn't require the CD, but also doesn't require the activation key.
This is the strange world of software and movies: when you're honest, you're hassled. If you pirate, your life suddenly becomes a lot easier.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
This is the strange world of software and movies: when you're honest, you're hassled. If you pirate, your life suddenly becomes a lot easier.
That's exactly the problem with DRM. It only hurts paying customers. If you don't want to get hurt, you need to get the cracked version. They're driving honest customers away.
Your coffee cup is a container. The implication of "content" is that a CD, DVD, etc. is a container also. When you buy it, you're not after the container, you're after the content.
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Do the pirates put that warning on there? No.
So the only ones seeing it are the ones who are paying.
And 10 seconds to the five year old who wants Spongebob Squarepants NOW!!!! IS a big deal.
But everyone honors the honor system. Well, at least honest people. But as long as you can catch and reprimand the few crooks out there, then you've got a pretty good system going.
Frankly, I don't know why watermarking isn't in higher use. It could even add an element of personalization ("This album / movie expressly prepared for John Q. Smith") and help communities self-police themselves so we're not wasting government money on DRM enforcement / investigation etc. If the studios find out who's redistributing their work, it's a simple matter to report and disable their account.
"DRM and its ilk does persuade citizens to infringe copyright "
Is this infringing on copyright? If what they want to do is covered by fair use, I don't see how it is. What is being done is violating DMCA by cracking DRM. They are separate issues, right?
What authors have put DRM on their music? I have only found record labels. You know, those guys that get all the money and do none of the work and threaten artists who even try to take the work directly to the masses.
So much of life was captured eloquently by Smythe's Andy Capp cartoons -- most of which are too impolitic to run in today's newspapers. (Smoking, drinking, thumping and getting thumped by your wife... oh my.)
In one of the classics, Andy sums up the entire public's reaction to DRM; After being berated by Flo for the transgression of having some unauthorized fun, he says to her: "Treat me like I'm a dog, and I'll treat you like I'm a dog." ...And proceeds to bite her waggling finger.
Ain't that the damn truth.
I think not...(*poof*)
Reading her bio is enlightening. Seems to me she is anti-DRM and anti-IP. So, an anti-DRM, anti-IP law professor does a study and concludes that DRM is bad. Big surprise.
By the way, "interviewing dozens of lecturers, end users, government officials, rightsholders, and DRM developers to find how DRM and anticircumvention laws affected actual use" is not necessarily empirical. I would bet that the methodology used was guaranteed to get the result she wanted.
If this had been a study by the .*AA, there would have been dozens of posts calling it bullshit, but because it goes with the beliefs of so many unethical slashdotters, it's ok. I am never surprised by the depths of slashdot hypocrisy.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
>It's easier not to pay taxes than to pay taxes
It is? You'll need to tell my employer that, because they take the money out of my paycheque. Sure, I could fill out form and other paperwork to not pay taxes, but that would take time. I then have to spend the rest of my life evading uncle sam. I'm also almost guaranteed to spend time in prison for it and everyone will think I deserve every minute of it. Barrier to entry: Completing special paperwork and having the skills to evade being caught (for life).
Barriers to entry for doing your taxes properly: Visiting an accountant with your incomplete paperwork. This can be had for free if you don't make enough money.
>It's easier to steal your DVD than to wait in line for the cashier
It is? I have find the item I want, then I have to wait until nobody is looking, I have to wear a coat that will easily fit (at least) the entire disc into the pocket (something that tends to be hard to do) or maybe even the whole case if I really want to do it right. I then have to exit the store without anyone figuring out that the bulge in my pocket is a DVD. Barrier to entry: Getting to the store, owning a jacket with the ability to fit the DVD, and having the skills to evade being caught.
And I'm not including undoing security cases and things to set off the stolen merchandise beepers. Both of those are security measures that, when the store does things right (It is the exception when they do it wrong), don't impact the purchaser and once they're deactivated/removed (which should happen before you ever use the product), don't impact the use of the goods whatsoever and are permanently gone.
Heck, even if I buy the stuff from the back of a truck, I have to find said truck, I have to hope there's no cops watching the buy, and I have to have cold hard cash (in small bills since people like that don't give change). I then have to drag whatever it is with me to my car without the assistance of a cart or a clerk. Then I need to scratch off all the serials. And if it breaks, I get to keep the pieces.
At a B&M store, I ask a clerk where what I want is. I carry it in the open to the checkout and hand over money. I then go home with my item in plain view. Barrier to entry: Getting to the store with money.
This is in comparison to buying something DRM laden from the web vs. just downloading it via whatever pirate site there is. Both have the same barrier to entry: You need internet and special software (either their DRM client or torrent software or a newsreader). The difference is after that. Once you have the goods from both sites, buying it means you have further hoops to jump through *forever*, and you need to be prepared to sue the company when they go out of business and your goods stop working. Piracy has just one more barrier to entry (and you only have to learn it once): The ability to evade being caught (which, unlike the aforementioned crimes, is extremely easy).
So, disempowerment encourages rebellion? Gee whiz, who'd a thunk it?
Great thing about capitalists, they can just ignore the lessons of history and the realities of the market, and use control and coercion to accomplish their aims. When will this world start to realize that the market is a power branch, and must be separated and regulated as such, and not allowed to corrupt government and culture with its survival-at-all-cost ambitions?
Cheap processed foods almost completely devoid of value, mind-poisoning media, pharmaceuticals to mediate the symptoms of our sickness and addiction, lies, damned lies... someone tell me the great benefits left to us at this time in history by these maggots?
-- thinkyhead software and media
I think a lot of people will buy something that is reasonably priced with or without DRM.
I think a lot of people will pirate or not buy something that is unreasonably priced.
The longer DRM exists, the lower that price gets however. Because once folks pirate something at $70 because of price + DRM, then they are more likely to pirate cheaper titles.
Some of my titles without DRM from the 1990's still work. I don't know if my titles with DRM work- I lost the original media or it broke. The non-DRM software I was able to back up in multiple places so I have not lost it. Of course Total Annihilation (which still rocks) was DRM'd but a crack came out years ago that allowed me to back it up.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Hypocrisy is stealing a hundred years worth of cultural content from every individual with a copyright extension, and then calling other people pirates because they take back a movie or an album.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Except that paying taxes, paying for goods, etc. are all required by law.
Circumventing right-restriction is authorized by the law in some cases (="Fair Use"). But regularly you can't do it.
Besides, DRM is useless and doesn't even fulfill the basic mission it was created for (stopping unauthorized duplication of content).
Case 1:
I'm about to go on vacation somewhere and I want to have a couple of movie on my portable driveless device (PDA, iPod, Netbook whatever), without needing to lug around a drive and a pile of discs. I need to shift formats (DVD/BD -> H264 or whatever the portable device takes) it's authorized by fair use in most juridiction. But I can't because DRM blocks it.
Case 2:
I'm a student making a presentation on a movie director. I want to copy a (reasonably) short segment of a movie to show as exemple to my audience. I can't, DRM blocks it.
Case 3:
I want to make a backup of a movie and keep the original in a safe place (that's actually a case I've been through : I have a mentally challenged brother who has a tendency to damage his favorite movies. It's important to him because otherwise he goes into an autistic crisis. Currently the originals are safely locked away, and copies loaded onto- and played from a server)
DRM blocks it (or would have if I haven't resorted to DeCSS).
Case 4 : ...and this list can go long...
I'm a Linux user (that my case also, actually). I want to play a movie I've legally bought on my custom-computer. DRM blocks it.
All are legitimate uses, which unlike the example of tax fraud or theft of goods should be protected by fair use by copyright laws in most jurisdictions. (Or sometimes are even normal uses like the "i just want to play it, but the system doesn't let me" cases. Fair use isn't required)
But aren't technically feasible because manufacturer of DRM solution only take into account the big 80% of their market : basic average user which buys a media to pop it into a certified player.
They just don't want to spend the additional resource to handle all the exotic corner cases in the remaining 20% even if those are exceptions covered by fair use.
-----
Meanwhile,
Counter-case :
I'm an EEEVVIIILL pirate (Yar!) and I want to get a movie for free, because I'm a free loader and don't want to pay for anything if I can get away with it.
I just go to whatever is the most popular torrent portal-du.jour and just click on a link.
That's it. Just. One. Click.
At no time did any form of DRM get in my way to stop me from doing this.
At no time would I be subjected to FBI warnings, advertising for up coming disc releases, etc...
In my series of example :
- DRM got in the way in lots of situation which are legal
- the sole time when a copyright-forbiden act took place, DRM didn't make any difference at all.
Copy protection worked in the previous decade because the only way to get an unauthorized copy was to copy the media yourself. If it's protected, only a couple of users where able to make copies and thus the propagation was limited.
Today, with the magic of the modern internet, all it takes is one single user to publish a torrent (and at the scale of internet among all milions of user, there's always at least one user having the necessary knowhow/equipement/social engineering skill/whatever to do it) and then suddenly the media becomes easily available to anyone connected to the intertubes, without any protection stopping it.
The Internet is good at making some content instantly available to the whole planet without restriction, and that's what make duplication-level protection obsolete.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]