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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.
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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?
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.
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."
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.
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Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
That, my friends, is tyranny.
And that, my friends, is hyperbole. This is tyranny. Choosing an iPod and iTunes over one of the many unencumbered music players on the market and then bitching about the well-known restrictions it imposes is just ordinary, garden-variety cluelessness.
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