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?"

Comments

Start buying disk again?

[pecosdave]

I never stopped! With a DVD I have "Digital Copy" on EVERY DVD without having to use the stupid number system and ask for permission, and it's legal. I don't have to rely on a content provider to stay in business, and I don't have some company somewhere with self interest telling me what devices I can and can't play back the content on. Well, I do, but I don't have to listen to them.

Re:Start buying disk again?

[sakdoctor]

DVD has copy and region protection. The only reason I have a large DVD collection today, is because the copy protection was utterly destroyed early on, ensuring my fair use indefinitely, of the discs I own.
More modern protection schemes haven't been shredded to my satisfaction, so I won't be buying into them any time soon.

Legally grey means nothing to me. If there is decoder library that works in linux, and region hacks for the physical drives, I'm in.

Re:Start buying disk again?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Maybe...

[SilverHatHacker]

Maybe if the content providers would have used a sound business model that actually ATTRACTS customers instead of alienating them, they wouldn't have died in the first place?

XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/488/

Analog hole

[davidwr]

The analog hole will always be there for audio and video. Yes, it's a pain to buy a DRM'd song then hook up ye olde tape recorder to your speaker output before the vendor files for chapter 11, but it does work.

I'm more worried about games and other content that are different each time you use them.

Re:On the other hand...

[BrokenHalo]

Six months? May be it's just me but that is a lot of interest in an album... ATM, my music "library" has 13 artists for a grand total of 7 GB (half of it is King Crimson).

Make up your mind! King Crimson has been active for something like 40 years, and Robert Fripp has been prolific outside the context of that band for years. If you are discerning enough to download their work, why throw it away? And if you like it, why not let them have some royalties for their work?

I can just about understand not wanting to buy a CD if you only like one track, and I can even understand not wanting to pay for a single track if you're only half-enthusiastic about it.

But if you like a band enough to download 7GB of their work, why begrudge them a modest return for their work?

How about a deal?

[nightfire-unique]

If you release your content in an encrypted/restricted format, you lose copyright protection. You're taking matters into your own hands. You're not benefiting society.

If you release your content in native format, you are afforded copyright protection. Your works will enter the public domain (some day), and you are benefiting society.

Sounds fair to me.

Whose?

[arth1]

...if what you "bought" was shallow crap that you will have lost interest in in six months, who cares if the DRM servers shut down after a year? And that describes 99% of the market.

Because that shallow crap is yours. It's the right that's at stake here, not the economical value or arts value.
Is it OK if I go through your home and throw away the things I think are crap?

One man's crap, another man's treasure. I don't know whether my daughter in the future would like to have a copy of Lipps Inc. "Funkytown" or Video Kids' "Woodpeckers from Space". But if she does, they're there. And playable -- not subject to whether a company has gone belly up or not.

Best option: gog.com

[blind biker]

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.

Re:Finally an original thinker

[Z00L00K]

The first thing - this is one of the reasons why DRM-protected media is doing bad in online sales.

People are aware of the limitations and problems.

And this is yet another reason why getting the media in formats that are secured for long-time use. Even DVD:s are better for the consumer since they don't depend on the availability of a server somewhere on the net, and can be used standalone. But the thing that really sucks with DVD:s are the copyright notice that you are forced to watch, which means that some people rips the DVD:s to get rid of that crap.

If the media industry had caught on the track earlier and offered music at a reasonable price without any crippling DRM they would have been better off in sales. There are people willing to pay for it, if they can get it. Going torrent works for some, but some of us wants a reliable and legal source for our media.