The Real Purpose of DRM

Jeremy Allison - Sam writes "Ian Hickson, author and maintainer of the HTML5 specification, comments about the real reasons for DRM. They're not what you might think. Ian nails it in my opinion. He wrote, 'The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations. The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices. Content providers have leverage against content distributors, because distributors can't legally distribute copyrighted content without the permission of the content's creators. But if that was the only leverage content producers had, what would happen is that users would obtain their content from those content distributors, and then use third-party content playback systems to read it, letting them do so in whatever manner they wanted. ... Arguing that DRM doesn't work is, it turns out, missing the point. DRM is working really well in the video and book space. Sure, the DRM systems have all been broken, but that doesn't matter to the DRM proponents. Licensed DVD players still enforce the restrictions. Mass market providers can't create unlicensed DVD players, so they remain a black or gray market curiosity."

Comments

Re:The author has it partly right..

[girlintraining]

The purpose of DRM is to supplement the diminishing profit that the content makers have traditionally placed in the strength of the copyright claim alone to keep people from excercising their fair use rights.

FTFY.

As copying has gotten easier and easier, the mere business contract between publisher and community, which essentially says that the latter will not copy it for personal use, effectively granting the publisher a form of monopoly, has started to break down... people are no longer adhering to unfair and restrictive business practices, and so it is inevitable that publishers will seek alternative means to protect their interests.

FTFY (again)

This is hardly the circumstance today, where it's pretty much an an everyday occurrence to see movies that wer3e [sic] just released up on Pirate Bay within days or sometimes hours of release, for download by anybody who simply doesn't want to pay the cash to watch something once and decide they don't like it because most movies are shit today.

FTFY (yet again)