Copyright Common Sense From Telecom Ericsson

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from a story at Torrentfreak: "Entertainment industry lobby groups often describe file-sharers as thieves who refuse to pay for any type of digital content. But not everyone agrees with this view. Swedish telecom giant Ericsson sees copyright abuse as the underlying cause of the piracy problem. In a brilliant article, Rene Summer, Director of Government and Industry Relations at Ericsson, explains how copyright holders themselves actually breed pirates by clinging to outdated business methods. The most vocal rightsholder groups would ideally turn the Internet into a virtual police state, and at the other end of the spectrum there are groups that want to abolish copyright entirely.'"

Comments

Re:yup

[mlts]

It is sad, but there are a lot of cases where this is the truth:

DVDs -- disabling the PUO crap, so one doesn't have to sit through 45 minutes of previews for movies that flopped.

Games -- playing games that will not activate because the activation servers have been taken offline, or continuing to play a game after a video card was changed out, and the game will not activate.

Applications -- being able to continue use of a program even after hardware has been changed (RAM upgrade).

The best DRM for games is the simplest -- have a serial number to access multiplayer servers. This worked for almost a decade for NWN1. It keeps the freeloaders at bay, while ensuring that legit users have as good a gaming experience as possible.

Re:yup

[betterunixthanunix]

How about the fact that copyrighted DVDs frequently come with "structure" DRM, in an attempt to discourage ripping (which is legitimate for personal use e.g. to play a movie on a tablet that doesn't have a DVD drive)? Or the fact that DVD players are designed to force people to watch certain tracks on the DVD before they can see the actual feature? Or the fact that DVD players refuse to play DVDs from different "regions?"

With DVDs alone, there are plenty of reasons that a person might opt to download "pirated" copies instead of dealing with the hassle themselves.