Slashdot Mirror
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.
I never pirated any games until the day my storebought copy of Doom 3 flat out *refused* to work on my computer because the installer was convinced my setup meant I was going to make illegal copies of it. I got pissed off even more when movie DVDs started refusing to run in my laptop as well.
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 stopped buying PC games about a year ago due to DRM technologies such as SecuROM and StarForce, because of the faults they can cause when burning CDs, which is an essential part of my job.
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.
A couple of weeks ago my girlfriend and I both bought The Sims 2. Neither copy worked! I've since discovered that the copy-protection on the DVD is known to cause installation errors, and one of the recommended workarounds is to install the disk imaging software Alcohol, and this indeed allowed us to install the game. Alcohol can of course be very useful for people who want to pirate games.
I feel like games publishers are pushing me towards pirating their products. I don't want DRM to harm my system, and if the only way I can play a purchased game is to pirate it then how long will it be before I skip the purchasing?
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!
What happens when steam goes bust?
What has happened every time digital restrictions interfered with the desire to use some content: Someone will break the protection. In Steam's case this has already happened for many games.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
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.
seriously who didn't know this was the case?
(insert name of media corporation here)
My webcomic
My daughter wanted Ashley Tisdale's Headstrong on her iPod. (Please no comments - I'm ashamed enough as it is).
We can't get it from iTunes because we use Ubuntu.
We can't get the mp3 from Amazon.com because you have to be US resident.
We can't get it from Amazon.co.uk because you have to have a UK billing address.
We can't get it from Amazon.ie because that doesn't exist.
So I have a choice, buy the whole album on CD from Play.com or pirate it....
I'm getting a bit sick of this malarkey where I'm told what I can and can't buy with my money. Obviously, I accept the principle that Xyz has the rights to sell something in this market, but if Xyz won't sell it to me then I say screw Xyz.
So this news doesn't surprise me - the more you tighten your fingers yada yada yada...
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
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 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.
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.
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
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.
Or you can just stick the disc in the player, go make popcorn and when it's ready the movie has reached menu. What's so difficult about it?
I'm not talking about media you purchase, but media you rent.
Ripping it is faster, more convenient and removes the corporate propaganda. If I can't remove the propaganda, I won't watch it at all, and I won't let my kid watch it.
You would be surprised how jarring it is once you've freed yourself from it... like someone who grew up in the city going camping for a month in the wilderness, then coming home to realize that they've had people shouting in their ears their whole life and that they never realized how much their thinking had been muddled and their senses numbed by what was being done to them until they finally got free of it.
Once you actually experience it for yourself, you start to feel like someone who just realized they've been abused their whole life and didn't know.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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
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!