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DRM Content Drives Availability On P2P Networks
jgreco writes "The music industry once feared that going DRM-free would drive a massive explosion of copyright-infringing music availability on P2P networks. Now, a new study seems to suggest otherwise. The answer is obvious: if you can easily get inexpensive DRM-free content that works on your devices through legitimate channels, most people won't bother with the headache of P2P networks. It appears that users largely turn to P2P to acquire DRM-free versions of content that is distributed with DRM. The MPAA, of course, will not come away from this with the obvious conclusion."
How many more years of this before other industries like software (SecuROM anyone?) come away with the obvious conclusion as well? DRM doesn't do anything but restrict legitimate purchasers of the product, people who illegally obtain things don't have to deal with such inane restrictions
Basically, this is based on the correlation that "hey, most of the stuff through a trackerless BitTorrent setup is pirated movies/tv, porn, and software, almost no pirated music" and "you can get DRM-free music easily, but not movies/tv, porn, and software" as implying "its because of DRM that people pirate stuff".
Unfortunately, there are two problems here:
a) Music is not just DRM-free, its also SMALL. BitTorrent's strength is moving big files, while pirated songs are very small in comparison, you can just email em to your friends.
b) A lot of porn online is DRM free, so why so much porn in BitTorrent?
Correlation does not mean causation.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Lest anyone think that TFA is saying that BitTorrent is used almost exclusively (to a degree of 99%) for copyright infringement, remember that this study focused on DHT-based, trackerless torrents. Legit torrents, like Jamendo and Linux distributions, usually use their own trackers. There's no reason for them to use DHT. So the study will naturally underrepresent legal BitTorrent content.
Also, the bit about DRM doesn't surprise me one bit. Nobody likes DRM except rights holders. It causes many more problems than it solves (which are very few already), not the least of which is perpetual content control even after the copyright expires. Far from banning circumvention of it, we need to heavily discourage (or outright ban) the use of DRM as we know it.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
I do not necessarily mind paying for music. I do mind being told what type of device I can play my music on. That, my friends, is tyranny. This leads me to another gripe: The iPod and its ilk. We bought the device, therefore we own it and should have the right to modify it to work the way we want it. This is very much like purchasing a car, truck, or motocycle and customizing it. We purchase the vehicle so we own it and can modify it (legally) to ways we see fit. In this day and age, it looks like we purchase the license or right to use something which stifles innovation and puts us even further technologically behind other countries.
so it's clear - unequivocably clear - that all music that people want ends up on P2P networks, for anyone to get hold of. thus it is up to the music providers to realise this, take realistic stock, take advantage of the opportunity, and make some money by providing people what they want!
it is only by NOT selling people what they want (DRM-free music) that they are hurting their profits!
so this is something that the BBC Trust could learn from, and also the HD video data providers. it's quite simple: there's not really that much difference between music and video. programmes _will_ end up on P2P networks, period. thus there is absolutely no point in driving up the cost of set top boxes by adding in DRM that's going to be bypassed, regardless.
Since I discovered that I can "sample" most games and movies on 'torrent, I've downloaded quite a few of them. However, relatively recently I learned about gog.com, and over the 1.5 years since I signed up, I bought 3 of the games (all DRM-free) available there. This is surprising even to me, as games and movies are a luxury for me, at the moment (wife doesn't have a job, so I'm a sugar daddy, even though I'm just a grad student/researcher). Yet gog.com makes it all really convenient: easy to purchase and download, great titles at very affordable prices, already packaged to run on Windows 2000/XP, and I will always have those titles in my online collection, so I can download them on any computer I like. All in all, I think companies that follow their example can make a decent buck.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The RIAA / MPAA force through laws via easily bought politicians that benefit the dinosaur music / film industries. They will therefore not benefit from using the argument that stripping DRM dives more sales.
A reason that BluRay has not taken off in the way they hoped is the attempt to stop the discs playing on non-authorised drives (didn't pay the bribes), region locking / cartel protection etc. etc, and you can't back up the content to a different device (in theory, and not easily). The record industry sells fake audio CD's, taking off the CDDA logo and putting in "copy protection", breaking the Red-Book standard.
Consumers have had enough of being shafted.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
New study tells us what we already know! ... idiots
DRM does not work on some operating systems such as the one I (ab)use. It is so very strange that those who can not use legally purchased DRM content, and in most cases can't even do the legal purchase, look elsewhere.. isn't it?
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I get the sneaking suspicion the content industry will backwardly interpret the results of this study as proof that they need even *more* DRM.
I pay for music - because typically I look for specific artists or songs. It's easier for me to find it on Amazon rather than wade through piles of junk.
I would also like for the music industry to clean up its licensing. Let me buy music that I can play anywhere, in public, to any group of people smaller than, say, 100.
No strings, no fear, no stupid RIAA tricks. Come on RIAA, make it easy for us to be legal. You make it as hard as possible, with impossible convoluted licensing (you need a separate license for public performance and for copying a CD) so that it's nearly impossible to remain within the licensing restrictions and play the music I like.
Heck, I could make a strong argument that the music industry licensing is so convoluted that it is impossible to play music and be legal.
So clean up your act.
I can confirm this (anecdotally, of course) with my own behaviors. If a PC game comes out that I want, and it incorporates some form of DRM, I will wait until I can get a NoCD patch (or some other mechanism) that removes the DRM from the game. I've had SecuROM screw with my system one too many times to mess with it again. I still buy the game, but I make sure there's a way I'll be able to play it without the headaches before I get it.
I don't think rights holders implement DRM to curb piracy (which it doesn't). I think rights holders implement DRM to make customers pay for the same media multiple times, and/or to tie them to specific devices, software or services. Why else would they be pushing it despite the fact that all DRM is cracked sooner or later? "Piracy" is just a convenient excuse.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
So I went out and bought the ultra Blu-Ray edition of the newest Star Trek movie. On the cover it was advertised that it contained a digital copy for me to use. Cool, I thought that I would just put the digital copy on my media server that streams to the various viewing centers of the house.
.mkv file of the movie. Plays perfectly on everything I want it to.
No dice.
The digital copy is DRM'ed up the wazoo, (and the quality is severely lacking) and will only allow itself to be played from certain devices and no streaming allowed. You must also register with the home servers before you're allowed to take the copy of the file off of the disc and it is limited to being on that one hard drive. You cannot reinstall it if you lose your data somehow.
So what did I do? I "acquired" a Blu-Ray rip
Eat me, movie industry. Offer me something that fits my needs, not yours.
Anonymous Coward: "This is slashdot. Accuracy is second class citizen here, unlike King Bias."
Agreed. It basically comes down to these choices:
I know you're joking (yeah, ok, most BT traffic probably is "piracy"), but my only recent use of the protocol was to download Knoppix; it seems they can't afford all the bandwidth to serve ISOs directly (unless you pay a small fee), so they've turned to Bittorrent... Precisely its intended use!
The reason why this works is rather simple: It's not a competition between something that costs and something that is free. That is only on the surface. I'll give my own rational: I hear a track I like on the (satellite) radio. Now, I can either spend the next 10 to 15 minutes wading through broken links, abandoned torrents, and spam sites to end up with something that has a high likelihood of not even being the remix or the quality I wanted. I could also run the off chance someone I know already has it and mentions it at some point, then spend a similar amount of time trying to exchange the media. Or, I can go to a central website, spend 5 minutes listening to previews and spend a buck for the track using a low hassle micro-payment system.
As the saying goes, time is money. If your customers have the disposable income that accumulates at a rate higher than the rate of benefit, they will often choose to spend that income rather than work for a benefit at a lower rate of return. And, then they have the luxury of spending their time on something more beneficial.
Someone mentioned porn? Pay for porn does not work because: ...which brings me to the public humiliation that is involved in acknowledging one's own sexuality, for IRL or online purchases.
- It is typically a significant monetary cost, two to three orders of magnitude. It goes from being petty cash to being a discretionary budget item.
- In the digital form, requires a month to month commitment. Human sexual desire typically involves a lot of spontaneity. You don't marry porn.
- Shyster websites will often not have the level of content implied and will keep charging customers long after they have terminated your subscription.
- The catalog is limited from site to site, and people are typically not going to pay the full fee just to see one spread.
- The record of your purchase is basically public (corporate) information that anyone can purchase.
-
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
I do not necessarily mind paying for music. I do mind being told what type of device I can play my music on. That, my friends, is tyranny. This leads me to another gripe: The iPod and its ilk. We bought the device, therefore we own it and should have the right to modify it to work the way we want it. This is very much like purchasing a car, truck, or motocycle and customizing it. We purchase the vehicle so we own it and can modify it (legally) to ways we see fit. In this day and age, it looks like we purchase the license or right to use something which stifles innovation and puts us even further technologically behind other countries.
Ok, so write your own firmware on the device and do what you want.. No one is stopping you.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Quick! We must add more obnoxious and expensive DRM to our content to prevent this rampant theft!
Call me old fashioned, but I buy CDs
Where do you get those CDs? I haven't seen those being sold anywhere since the 90s. Stores do offer something which has the same size and shape and look very similar. Too similar. I thought the last "CD" I bought was a real CD, I didn't realize it was not until I did a close-up inspection after being devastated by the fact that my CD-player refused to play the brand new "CD".
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
That doesn't solve the piracy problem though. Plenty of DRM-free stuff is being peddled and it gets pirated too simply to dodge the price tag.
There are two solutions:
1. Big brother internet, where DRM becomes (theoretically) enforceable because everything is monitored. Darknets will then inevitable become and we'll all be living in some cyberpunk dystopia.
2. Compete with free. Legalize noncommercial copyright infringement and force businesses to derive all their revenue from advertising, voluntary payments (donations), and value-added services.
One of these two things will happen. It's inevitable. Let's all hope it's not #1.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Obviously RIAA and MPAA will commission a study of their own that will find that the reason people pirate is that they are evil and want to steal the property of their poor, starving artists. But of course the bias of the study is in favor of the rights holders because they foot the bill for the study.
OTOH, this study suggests that people just want to own what they purchase and use whatever means available to make the ownership permanent. But of course the bias of the study is
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
yah, good point. except... P2P levels the playing field, there, too...
yup be lazy make somehting and then sit back get fat like a big fat roman of days gone buy
think of your wealth when YOU gouge and can screw everyone. HAVE parties with drugs and whores on boats celebrating your operating systems that help in this endeavor. MAKE secret treaties and have your companies sit in and make the worlds policies. WHO needs democracy. CORPORATIONS DONT.
SPEAK LOUD OFTEN AND EVERYWHERE
12 YEAR MAX COPYRIGHTS WILL END ALL THIS PROBLEMS
I've ripped recent releases with no problems.
Admittedly, the whole "lets sue the customer" thing with the music industry has reduced my once
very much thriving music media habit to a mere trickle of mostly used disks. Still, I get the
occasional newer disk.
Bluray and (Disney) DVD is much more of a Spy vs. Spy thing when it comes to DRM and "defective disk copy protection".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Choice 4: Learn to like Free media and choose it over non-free media. If Free operating systems are viable, why aren't Free works other than computer programs viable?
so it's clear - unequivocably clear - that all music that people want ends up on P2P networks
I sometimes wonder. I'd like to see the target demographics of the music and its audience. Who is there and who is missing. Even the geek doesn't remain twenty-something forever.
I understand what the article is implying. I used to pirate music, but then Amazon came along with decent quality MP3s that I can purchase at a reasonable price through an easy interface, and which play on anything. If I want something that can't be found on Amazon I still go P2P for it, but this activity is lessening as my library becomes more complete and Amazon keeps adding content. I used to pirate movies but then the Roku player came out and I was able to tie our Netflix account right into it. Now I get decent quality movies and episodes on demand, for no more ongoing cost than I was already paying for the Netflix account and an Internet connection. In other words, when things work to my benefit I spend money. When they work towards an evil empire's benefit I do everything I can to rip it off. So if you want me to spend money you've got to let go.
all music that people want ends up on P2P networks, for anyone to get hold of
Slightly off-topic, but I was doing research recently on how prolific various artists were over the last 50 years and hence needed to get the lengths of their studio albums to determine it. For artists from the 60s it was often impossible to get this information from Internet discographies. As such, I simply pirated the music to get the running times.
Rather ironic that piracy does a better job of preserving information about our historical artistic culture than the legitimate Internet in my specific case.
I actually did delete every file I downloaded once I got the info I needed BTW. Not because I care in the slightest about copyright, but because I don't support patented formats, and hence won't use mp3s.
"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves. " ---Henry David Thoreau
I know you're joking (yeah, ok, most BT traffic probably is "piracy"), but my only recent use of the protocol was to download Knoppix
You're not the only one. In the last few months, I've torrented several Ubuntu ISOs (i386/amd64, desktop/alternative), and a couple of Linux Mint ISOs. I only downloaded each ISO once, but my aggregate upload was close to 250GiB between these torrents. Maybe I'm an outlier in the statistics, but piracy does not enter into it here.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
You are describing the precise reason people get behind open source software.
I can see two roadblocks to the widespread use of free software as a response to the deployment of strong digital restrictions management. The first is that there often isn't affordable hardware on which to run free software. What handheld device do you recommend for running a free software stack? What set-top device? And will peripherals such as printers and scanners still support free operating systems, or will they start to have encrypted wire protocols the way Nikon started encrypting the white-balance data in its digital cameras' .nef (raw image) files?
The other roadblock is that computer programs are not the only kind of work of authorship. If someone switches to a purely free, non-DRM software stack, what professional-quality movies and what professional-quality video games will that stack be able to play? So far, the free cultural works movement has performed well at producing nonfiction (such as Wikipedia or training videos) but less well at producing fiction.
As an Ubuntu/Debian user I just stay away from any and all DRM. It gets between me and my content
What content do you speak of? For example, what recent professional-quality feature films have been lawfully distributed to the public without digital restrictions management?
I don't need to put up with that hassle, not with the existence of freely licensed alternatives
Consider the film Dances with Wolves. Non-free alternatives include Disney's Pocahontas and James Cameron's Avatar. But is there something free of comparable quality?
More likely, some CEO hears about digital distribution and someone mentions you can just copy and paste from one computer to another, and the CEO tasks someone to action a plan to stop it. Sure some segments are driven by repeat purchases, but most DRM doesn't have that effect.
It doesn't matter if it's a successful implementation, it's an action item that came out of a meeting and someone has to either do it or explain why it's bad. "Customers hate it" is only valid if it also means "Customers won't buy it".
Encrypting the repair codes on an automobile is one of those things customers might not like, but since it's such a small part of the car buying experience, won't change a significant number of purchase decisions. People who buy DRM music downloads find it mostly works for them, so they don't think about whether they can put it on another device - until it's too late and the library is too large. If you want BioShock for PC, you get DRM. Unless you know how to get it without DRM...
We can focus on intent all we want, but intent will change as new applications and situations arise. The only thing that will stop DRM is just not buying anything with DRM, bringing up the "Customers won't buy it" argument.
There's some DRM hypocrisy at work in ARS Technica's rework of the original blog article: when I try to print this article, everything prints, including the XKCD comic, *EXCEPT* the graphic pie chart contributed by ARS (the original blog had a simple numeric table). I tried printing it in two browsers and got the same result in both instances: no pie chart. I also tried selecting just the article column and printing just the selection, again in two browsers, and again got the same result: everything except the pie chart.
It would seem that ARS rather deliberately designed this article page to prevent that graphic from printing along with the article, in spite of the implication inherent in the presence of a "Print this story" button on that same page. ARS doesn't in fact truly allow printing this story, because the story is incomplete without both the graphic and the original blog's numeric table.
I was finally able to print the article, complete with the graphic, by editing the HTML source of the page and stripping out the CSS and scripts. I'm sure someone else can analyze those and figure out the specific method behind ARS' little DRM-like trick, but the fact that I had to "pirate" the article in order to simply print it for fair use is deliciously hypocritical of them.
Or get what you want from iTunes which is DRM free anyways.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
There is some truth there, but I don't think it's their only reason for doing it. DRM can work to a certain extent, in that it makes it awkward for end-users to copy content. Torrenting is far more mainstream than it used to be, but it's still not entirely intuitive. DRM, like all security, is not implemented with the understanding that it'll never be broken. It's more a case of increasing the amount of hassle required to break the system. Your house serves a similar purpose. You keep all your stuff in there, and that deters most thieves from stealing it. It's better than leaving your wallet lying on the pavement outside your house.
DRM is a useful way to "obsolete" the content of the user and force them to buy multiple copies for their devices, but if this was their motivation they've done a pretty bad job of it. At best we could argue that they only want their content viewed on DVD/Blueray players, but not on portable players or computers with no optical drives. That doesn't make much sense to me, since offering more ways of enjoying the content would seem to increase the probability of a purchase. In reality they have been trying to lock us in, but they've done a piss poor job of offering alternatives to piracy.
There are some clever exceptions, such as the Family Guy movie "Something, Something, Something, Dark Side". The DVD version of this includes a code that can be used on the iTunes Store to obtain a version for iPods/iPhones. That's clever, and removes my need to rip my own copy. I bought a copy because I like the show, but also in support of this interesting approach.
The main problem I see is that the content producers have been too slow to respond to the changing needs of their customers, and technology and social changes have left them behind. I want legal download options, and would have bought a show last night if it was iTunes Store. Instead I ended up finding a torrent. Given a choice between difficult to obtain content and something that can just be sucked down through a torrent, it's not difficult to understand why so many people chose the latter.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Exactly right!
In fact, I'm not against the idea of Digital Rights Management. I'd be happy to support a system that tells me which files I have payed for and which ones I have not payed for, but rather borrowed from my "friends". (I have a big circle of friends... Really big. We talk alot as well. I can say a million words per second to my friends...)
If I would see some borrowed files climbing up on my Last.fm charts, I would feel called upon to pay for those. But only if the files are in some reasonable format, like FLAC.
Parent is correct: if it does not have the "Compact Disc; Digital Audio" logo, it is probably not a (Redbook) CD.
The MPAA, of course, will not come away from this with the obvious conclusion."
Oh they have reached the obvious conclusion, it' just doesn't support their business model, so they are publicly denying/fighting it to extend their lifespan as much as possible. I'm sure they realize the result is inevitable, but until it actually happens, they will continue to profit on it. They'd be extremely stupid to just give up, so none of this comes as any real surprise.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Since Slackware 13.0 came out I've been seeding the CD and DVD images (32- and 64-bit). I'm also seeding a NetBSD iso and OpenOffice.org.
In all those months, I've not uploaded a single byte of OOo, but Slackware is constantly hammering away.
I've never torrented anything illegally.
Someone needs to start a campaign to preserve the rights of legitimate bittorrent users, so that the message is put across that it is a very useful tool and not just an aid to law-breaking.
Stick Men
Bluray and (Disney) DVD is much more of a Spy vs. Spy thing when it comes to DRM
Yeah, I refuse to get on the Blu-Ray bandwagon. Any format that requires a Java VM on the player just to unlock it -- and which must be "updated" by dialing home -- will never receive my support. I need an Internet connection just to play a Blu-Ray? No thanks.
I was at a friend's place a few weeks back and he wanted to show me a new Blu-Ray movie he'd bought. It wouldn't work, because he needed to "update" his player... This wasn't convenient to do at the time since we didn't feel like dismantling his A/V setup and carrying his player to an Ethernet jack, so we gave up and watched something else. He'd have been much better off with a DVD; the quality is good enough, I say.
Hmm, good point; thanks for the heads up.
That said, maybe I've just been lucky, but this hasn't really been a problem for me.*
At any rate, these "copy-protected CDs" just contain an extra data track with trojans right? The audio tracks are still plain old redbook audio, no? So you only have problems with (1) Windows machines with Autorun on, and (2) players that can't skip data tracks, right? Practically this doesn't seem like a huge problem.
It's still a dick move by the publisher, though, and I'd like to avoid supporting this behavior by purchasing these malware-infested CDs.
* I do have one CD that has given me some problems, but it does not seem to contain any malware; the data track just has album art.
I actually did delete every file I downloaded once I got the info I needed BTW. Not because I care in the slightest about copyright, but because I don't support patented formats, and hence won't use mp3s.
But you care about building the Public Domain, right?
So after you determined the length of all the albums, you contributed that information back to the net in some form, right?
Have you ever looked at hybrid SACDs? They are exactly the type of secure content that would fit your (and my) criteria: a high-quality layer (5.1 or 24-bit 2.0) that is protected, and a regular CD layer that can be ripped, copied, distributed without too much hassle. Other than the insane prices of SACD players, does that fit your bill?
I like content
I used to buy content
But then you asked for money for every blank
So fuck you
I would like to see HD movies
But you said Macrovision is a must
And I can't upscale to my TV
So fuck you
I bought into HD-DVD
And picked up a few nice movies
But the content cartel said no
So fuck you
I have divx on every player
And terrabytes of storage
But I can't buy movies that way
So fuck you
My mp3 player does wireless
And its legal to share songs*
But the player won't do it
So fuck you
*In Canada
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Your scenario could be accurate, but I think the more likely one is that DRM is sold to the company by the DRM maker and the company simply falls for it. The average high-level manager at a big company probably isn't an expert on software. When a company shows up and says they have a technology that can protect their property and has the tech-speak to back it up, then they'll bite. And honestly, DRM doesn't always fail. It took a while for Blu-Ray to be cracked after all, and even now it's still a hassle for most people to get round.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
This is why I propose an artificial government enforced monopoly on intended meaning rather than just expression.
Expression monopolies are so 19th century. We need to get on with monetizing the roots of expression: intent.
Just imagine how great that world will be!
Dont you mean RIAA???
It appears that users largely turn to P2P to acquire DRM-free versions of content that is distributed with DRM. The MPAA, of course, will not come away from this with the obvious conclusion."
The obvious conclusion is "create DRM that can't be cracked"? (Ah, I kid. I kid.)
Seriously, though. There was a time when no music had DRM. That didn't stop Napster from being extremely popular.
Correlation strengthens causation. How else do you think Millikan got his charge of an electron? He
1 Came up with a theory that electrons were of some small unit charge
2 Came up with an experiment to see what the charge is on a droplet
3 Came up with an expected result if his theory was right
4 Made measurements and graphs
5 The correlation was seen
Then YOU come along and say his experiment didn't prove anything because correlation != causation
???
That's when I had to get a cracked copy of Wizardry after the copy protection on the original floppy destroyed it.
I had the guy I got the copy from write it on top of the original gold-labeled floppy. He thought it was a hoot.
It booted faster, too.