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

Re:Enforcing artificial scarcity is a poor strateg

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny that you want others to work for free yet you have no issues with working for companies that lock up your work. 09/08-04/09 Attachmate C++, Linux, Unix, PKI, OpenSSL, ssh, secsh Assisted in development of Attachmate's implementation of ssh (i.e. the IETF secsh standard). I assisted in reviewing code for bugs, making design decisions with a security impact and writing code to fix bugs and add new features. * Discovered important bugs in code by inspection. Either fixed bugs myself or assisted in fixing them. Assisted in creating tests to show bug's existence and prevent regression. * Convinced people to clearly articulate the reasons for design choices, and discovered better ways to optimize all design criteria. * Learned new complex cryptography APIs an implemented software on top of them. * Helped several team members learn better and safer C++ coding techniques. Wrote reusable code demonstrating those techniques. 11/07-02/08 Evri Ant, Subversion, Linux, Maven I was the build engineer for Evri. I was responsible for making sure the build environment, build system, and source control system supported the needs of the developers who used it. * Improved integration with Maven so many build products could be removed from source control. * Made several tweaks to improve modularity of Ant scripts as well as moving them from a procedural to a declarative style so developers could invoke any target at any time instead of having to invoke them in a particular order. * Made a case for and sketched out preliminary plans for moving to a distributed source control system. Git was already informally used by many developers. * Changed build system to invoke new automated deployment system to run integrated, full-system tests. * Moved several operations from external perl scripts into Ant so the build was easier to understand. * Assisted test engineer in understanding and using Ant to its full capabilities. 02/07-08/07 Regence Blue Shield on a contract for Kforce. Python, AIX, Java, Source Code Management, Turbogears, Ant I was a release coordinator for Regence. I managed the source code control system, official builds, the build system, and releases for a team of developers. I also did other miscellaneous coordination tasks as required, and was sometimes called on to investigate version histories to determine how some change happened or where lost changes might be. I was also responsible for ensuring that developers have followed Regence policies and good software engineering practices in both testing and creating a system that can be built with a well defined set of tools. * Wrote a web app in Turbogears (a Python web app framework) to automate certain portions of my job and provide better visibility into which builds of which projects have been released. * Started building mindshare and comfort with new version control tools that work better than existing tools to ease possible future transition to those tools. * Ensured mission critical applications were not deployed to production without adequate testing. * Provided a communications channel for disparate groups to learn surprising ways their actions might affect each other, thereby enabling them to make better plans to minimize the negative impact of those actions. * Coordinated the actions of different groups to ensure that an environment is adequately set up for a new piece of software or changes to an existing piece of software. 05/06-11/06 Lockdown Networks Ruby, Linux, Layer-2 networking, switches, Ethernet, VLAN, 802.1q, SNMP Lockdown Networks makes a network appliance that controls the switches on your network in an attempt to enforce a security policy that both ensures only authorized users use the network, and that those user's systems are clear of various forms of infectious software. It does this by isolating them from the main network until they pass a configurable policy.

Re:Where to begin?

[Totenglocke]

The purpose of the McCarthy trials was to prevent communism from taking over America. It's a noble goal, but the casualties are unacceptable.

Just wanted to point out (since it seems you were unaware) that the Venona Project (released to the public not all that long ago) showed that McCarthy was actually right about communist spies in the US government.