Indie Game Dev On the Positive Side To DRM

spidweb writes "The online backlash against DRM has gotten a bit excessive, especially since the purpose of DRM is entirely admirable: to stop thieves and free riders and to help creators actually get paid for their work. This blog entry calls attention to XBox Live, a place where strong DRM is helping to encourage quality games at low prices which make money for their developers. Quoting: 'If I could snap my fingers and give myself the same absolute control over the games I make that XBox Live has over theirs (in return for lower prices), I would. The freedom of the current system is nice, but it comes at too high a cost. Honest people need to pay extra to subsidize thieves. The unfairness is just this side of intolerable, and it's only getting worse. DRM is fair if, for what the corporations take, we get something in return.'"

Comments

Watermarking

[goombah99]

To me, DRM is about two things. First it's about making sure that people don't actually have control over the things they've ostensibly bought.

Okay then I assume then you would be in favor of a scheme were your copy is entirely unlocked (ignoring the fact that it only works on the version of the Xbox you bought and perhaps no future version). But that it is water marked with your Credit card number and you agree to be liable for every single one of the games that shows up in the wild even if its thousands of them?

If your cool with that then say so.

Re:I stopped buying games

[Anonymous Coward]

if you're so windows free than what the fuck drm games are you playing?

blow it out your ass. you cunt liar.

-don caballero.

Re:Let's call it what it is

[mark-t]

Copyright infringement *is* stealing... it's just that what a person steals by committing copyright infringement probably isn't of any value to the infringer, so it is unlikely to be noticed. But what is actually lost by the copyright holder when a person infringes on copyright is some measure of the exclusivity that the copyright holder was actually supposed to have on the right to copy. Exclusivity, meaning that nobody else does it, by its very definition is compromised when somebody else copies the work. This exclusivity is intangible, of course, but that does not mean it is not of value to the person who holds the copyright, and really, the value that a person might place on something intangible is no less important than the value that another might place on something more substantial.

Re:Let's call it what it is

[mark-t]

I believe you misunderstand the point I was trying to make. I was not attempting to say that the label of theft is adequate to legally denote copyright infringement. What I was trying to show is that the assertion that copyright infringement is *NOT* theft is incorrect.

I have often heard people try to say that copyright infringement isn't the same thing as theft because in the case of theft, the victim has less of whatever it was that stolen, and they will try to argue that the copyright holder seems to have just as much of everything he or she had before any infringement. However, the copyright holder *DOES* have less of something than before the infringement, which is a measure of the exclusivity on copying the work that copyright is supposed to grant to its holder. This inference follows directly from the literal meaning of the word "exclusive" being compromised in any case of copyright infringement, so my point is that people who try to argue that copyright infringement is not theft of any sort by the very definition of theft that they are attempting to utilize to assert that they are not the same are mistaken.

Re:Let's call it what it is

[mark-t]

I did not propose that we not have different names for things... I merely showed how copyright infringement is theft, not that the term "theft" is entirely adequate to denote "copyright infringement", as I had recently remarked to another person who also responded to my comment.