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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.
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
How is this related to DRM? magnatune.com gives you the same service (download whatever you bought whenever you want, wherever you are) without DRM.
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
Too many DRM schemes (with companies that still operate) have already gone under and taken the protected files with them. Relying on the promises of a company instead of a contract is ridiculous. They're handing you sales fluff and you're eating it up. I would love to buy a lot of steam-only games, but _never_ will, because I want to play them X years from now.
BTW, you can't stop a "Steam sucks" thread in an anti-DRM post.
> The majority of users probably have no idea what DRM is and are thus unaffected.
They may not know what DRM is, but it surely affects them when they buy a DVD movie only to find out it doesn't play on whatever device it is they're trying to play it on. Even NASA fell in the DRM trap.
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.
seriously who didn't know this was the case?
(insert name of media corporation here)
My webcomic
The majority of users are also affected when they have to sit through the "FBI warning" nonsense which are afflicted solely on legitimate buyers.
For a really goo example, see here. I myself have stopped buying games that I don't find a crack for first, thus making sure the games companies can only sell me games when they have dropped in price. Why? Because just as with the link I provided way too many times I have set there and watched that damned SecuROM screen pop up even though I HAVE the stupid %^%#^$$# disc in the drive!
Of course, now that I have switched to XP X64, cracking the games I paid good money for is no longer a simple desire not to have to keep the %^%#^$$# disc in the drive, that maybe works 50/50 for me anyway, but one of necessity. Because while the games play wonderfully in XP X64, their %^%#^$$# DRM doesn't work. So I HAVE to crack the %^%#^$$# game just so I can actually use what I fricking paid for. And just like the gamer I linked to(just look at the amount of game boxes surrounding him. That is a serious paying customer they are boning) their DRM for me just makes me jump through damned hoops so I can have the "privilege" of giving them money while the pirates laugh their asses off and don't have the hassle.
Is it any wonder more and more people pirate? It is because you are screwing your customers! And it is 2009 and I have big fat HDDs! I should NOT have to change %^%#^$$# discs when I want to play a game. if I wanted that I would have bought a Fricking PS2! And please don't mention Steam. As someone who had his $50 stolen by Valve over the HL:GoTY Edition I will never use that damned ripoff! Look up HL:GoTY Edition and ripoff and you will see Valve burned a LOT of folks. pretty much if you buy anything in a nice retail box from Valve they can rip you off and ANY time and refuse to give you what you paid for. No thanks!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Lacking cable and unwilling to pay for it, I'm currently watching airbender on DVD from netflix.
First there's the FBI warning. For like 30 seconds. Then there's no less than 6 segments of spongebob advertising that I can't skip to go to the menu to play the more interesting, slightly more adult anime.
If I'd downloaded it off the internet, it would have been free and advertising free.
What advantage does getting the legal copy give me again?
I don't read AC A human right
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 ]
How about this 'what if' scenario:
/. is running an article about how the movie The Cotton Club can't be recorded from one VCR to another. You say,
Imagine it is 1985 and
It doesn't stop you from recording your decaying tape if you have a macrovision free VCR, and most of them are.
Runaway1956 posts:
Yeah, but what if they introduced encryption and then made it illegal to circumvent that encryption.
Now choose carefully. Do you:
A) stand up for yourself and say the media companies have gone too far
or
B) say "you can't just make up arbitrary realities"
Congratulations. You chose B. Welcome to the real world, where if you don't stand up for your rights at even the smallest infraction, those stepping on your rights will continue down that path until your reality is based on their arbitrary actions.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!