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The Perils of DRM — When Content Providers Die
An anonymous reader writes "If you purchase music or movies online, what happens if the vendor goes out of business? Will you have trouble accessing your content? The question came up recently after HDGiants — provider of high-quality audio and video downloads — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. A consumer says his content became locked inside his PC. Walmart customers suffered a similar fate last year when the retailer shut down its DRM servers (a decision they reversed after many complaints). And if Vudu dies? Your content may be locked in a proprietary box forever. Time to start buying discs again?"
It didn't work even back then. Cracked software spread almost as fast by sneakernet and BBSes as it does now by Internet.
Are you too young to remember... or maybe too old to remember? ;-)
Back "before the internet" we had these things called floppy disks which were quite capable of delivering a copied group of bytes to a buddy in another state by a process now known as "snailmail". The latency was pretty bad and you had to pay "per packet" but the connection was extremely reliable. And, if you were of a mind, you could pack up hundreds of floppies into a single "packet" and send them all in one go.
I never had to break anyone's copy protection either.
gog.com is an example of how things should be done: you download the game installer and it's yours to keep. There's not DRM, no copy protection, you can have all the game installers on your hard drive or you can back them up on DVD, Blu-ray, another drive, a flash drive, whatever. if gog.com goes under, you can still install your games.
This is even better than having a (copy-protected) media, even if such copy-protection has been cracked. I always found it a hassle to even think about how to back up those CDs and DVDs. With gog.com, I have the installer files and can do with them whatever the hell I please.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.