A Brief History of Failed Digital Rights Management Schemes

antdude points out this article at opensource.com on the "graveyard" of digital rights management schemes — the death of each of which has left customers out in the cold. An excerpt: "There are more than a few reasons digital rights management (DRM) has been largely unsuccessful. But the easiest way to explain to a consumer why DRM doesn't work is to put it in terms he understands: 'What happens to the music you paid for if that company changes its mind?' It was one thing when it was a theoretical question. Now it's a historical one ..."

Comments

What happens?

[wsxyz]

'What happens to the music you paid for if that company changes its mind?

Answer: It PlaysForSure (TM).

Re:What happens?

[DurendalMac]

It's one thing to stop selling music with a certain DRM scheme. It's quite another to tell customers that they won't be able to play it again. How this is even fucking legal is beyond me. Either keep your damned DRM server up or give users alternatives, ie, a legit way to strip the DRM or the exact same music in a different format.

Re:What happens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly like I did with Star Wars.

I bought it on VHS.
Bought it on LaserDisc too.
Bought the special edition on LD.
Then came the DVDs, bought them too.
Now BluRay... guess what... Fuck You George Lucas and Fuck You media industry.

I now downloaded all my media and buy it when it hits a price I agree with.
Movies.. less than $5 in HD or $3 in SD.
Music.. no more than 10cents per track.
TV shows & anime.. under $1 per episode.
If the price never gets that low I dont buy but either way I'm happy.
That is my EULA and if you dont like it you know where you can shove your opinions media industry.

Re:What happens?

[VitaminB52]

They'll still work just as well as they did the day you bought them if you haven't wrecked them.

Some of the first CD's I bought have become unplayable due to CD rot. Contrary to what the CD manufacturers want you to believe CD's won't last for ever. Nor will DVD's.

Re:What happens?

[Anonymous Coward]

DVDs have DRM (ineffective as it is) called CSS AND they have region coding.
Region coding is just as bad as DRM. I do not accept artificial limitations on commerce created purely to create artificial scarcity and increase profits.
If its available anywhere I have the right to obtain it at its lowest price. They can try to stop me if they can.

Re:What happens?

[icebraining]

The fix is to have strong consumer protection, like plenty of EU directives provide. Any EULA terms that violate them are invalid, so you as the user don't need to worry about them.

Re:What happens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Extra? Whats extra? The story is unchanged.
All they've done is add irrelevant data. Its still the same movie.

Paying more for HD makes as much sense as paying more for a 320kbps MP3 instead of a 160kbps.
Or paying more for for a car because the speedometer shows your speed in hundredths of a mph.

Re:What happens?

[Teancum]

Some of the first vinyl LP albums that I bought years ago have become unplayable due to scratches and hard usage. Contrary to what LP album manufacturers want you to believe, LP records won't last forever.

Well, something like that. The mythical "100 year compact disc" certainly was never believed, and all forms of data storage have problems. To get a very long lasting CD, it needed to be essentially an "archival quality" impression onto some durable material, preferably a metal like gold. You can buy such materials, but they are very expensive and generally are not in common usage because the expected life span of those discs aren't all that long.

DVD discs, and Blu-ray discs even more so, have even higher data density and thus are even more prone to accumulated errors.

From an historical perspective, the only way that any information has been preserved over long periods of time is to keep copying that information, preferably to distribute that information widely as well to as many people as possible so if a few copies of that information are lost it can be recovered from the redundancy alone. That certainly is the only way ancient texts such as the Greek literature like the Iliad and religious texts like the New Testament and Talmud have been preserved over the centuries.

It is also a part of human culture, where ideas are over time weeded out. This includes music, where the really bad stuff has simply been forgotten over time. Sometimes good stuff is lost too, but that is part of life. The reason why "classics" are so fondly remembers is that the awful stuff that was being made at the same time isn't remembered.

Re:Successful DRM

[ZackSchil]

I assume it can't be circumcised because, as conceptual business model, it lacks genitalia.

Some changes were quite good ...

[perpenso]

What happens to the music you paid for if that company changes its mind?

Well in the Apple iTunes case the audio quality was improved and the DRM was also removed.

Re:Some changes were quite good ...

[93 Escort Wagon]

What happens to the music you paid for if that company changes its mind?

Well in the Apple iTunes case the audio quality was improved and the DRM was also removed.

You left out the part where we had to pay 30 cents a song for the privilege.

On the other hand - even now, Apple still supports the original DRMed files if you choose not to upgrade - so this case isn't really a good example of a company "changing its mind" a la PlaysForSure.

What do you mean it didn't work?

[frovingslosh]

What do you mean it didn't work? DRM schemes such as Microsoft's "Play Anywhere" are abandoned and then the customer who paid good money for the music has to buy it again if they still want it,. DRM works exactly as planned and intended/

supposedly inteligent people don't want to know

[frovingslosh]

Several years ago when I first learned of HDLC, I posted here into a thread about the "new" high-definition technology warning that there was a new connector coming (it became HDMI) and a new nasty form of DRM going along with it (HDLC) and that people should hold off because the early adopters were going to get screwed. The response was a lot of angry posts telling me that I didn't know what I was talking about, early adopters told me that their expensive TV sets could play HD just fine, and I was modded down, apparently so people considering buying an early set without HDMI and HDLC would not see my warning.

Now people who bought those amazingly expensive early "monitors" can't watch HD content from a Blu-Ray player or on-line streaming service on them (although they can enjoy grainy 480 line service). Why? Apparently we can get angry enough when a bank tries to charge $60 a year to spend our own money via a debit card, but we are not able to get angry enough with the content providers when they screw us and make it clear their intent is to buy congressmen to subvert the intention of Copyright as stated in the U.S. Constitution. So the content providers are going to keep screwing their customers. I'm sure that they would like to screw more people, but so far they have only figured ut how to screw the artists and the customers, aside for some random lawsuits that assume if you are not signing up for the screwing then you mist be a criminal.

Apple's FairPlay didn't "fail"

[DavidinAla]

It's insane to call Apple's FairPlay DRM a failed system, as the item for this says. The system did exactly what it was supposed to do. It allowed Apple to start legally selling something that the record labels wouldn't allow without it and then it was taken away when the labels agreed to go without it. The system worked as advertised. It achieved the goals of building a market for legal music. And then it went away. It was very successful and then it was retired when it was no longer needed.