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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."
First, a study showing that piracy has a negligable effect on profits and now this? I officially decree today to be the day of "No shit" Stories!
DRM is an attempt to circumvent one of the primary functions of a computational device: Copying of data. The reason for this is money and power. One group thinks they deserve money or power over another group. This is the simple truth of all DRM, and I can explain it shorter than the article, and even the summary of the article. It is what it is.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/03/19/209213/study-piracy-doesnt-harm-digital-media-sales
I'm so confused. Goddamnit Slashdot.
DRM is about distributive control... but they've always had distributive control in one form or another anyways.
The purpose of DRM is to supplement the diminishing faith that the content makers have traditionally placed in the strength of the copyright claim alone to keep people from copying the work without authorization.
As copying has gotten easier and easier, the mere social contract between publisher and community, which essentially says that the latter will not copy it without permission, effectively granting the publisher a form of distributive control, has started to break down... people are no longer adhering to their side of that contract, and so it is inevitable that publishers will seek alternative means to protect their interests.
Before copyright itself, effective distributive control still existed for people who made content because the work involved in making a copy was very time consuming and difficult. At the very least, it involved sufficient manual labor and errors in reproduction that the counterfeits rarely obtained as much notoriety as the originals. This is hardly the circumstance today, where it's pretty much an an everyday occurrence to see movies that wer3e 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 see it in the theater.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
DRM manages you rights in the same way jail 'manages' your freedom.
I have media players from China that will play most popular video formats and completely ignores any DRM scheme including Cinavia. I paid $40 for it w/ free shipping and no tax. It has no network port, doesnt rely on servies or logins or fees. You put movie files in, movies play out. Copyright as it stands now will not be able to weather ubiquitous computing.
Good-bye
But on the book side, it seems many E-readers can easily read PDF and other formats which makes for easy licensing.
Yeah, and it was the wide range of supported formats that persuaded me to opt for a Sony reader. But as it turns out, I would still do the same even if that were not a factor. IMO the epub format is far superior to any of the others (fortunately .mobi and .lit formats can be converted by Calibre), since these files are so easily tweaked for better readability. I really dislike having to put up with PDF files on the device, since they are invariably prepared with silly page layouts that just don't work very well on the device's display.
The other good news about epub files is that it is so easy to strip DRM out of them. My rationale is that if I have paid for an ebook, I should be able to treat it exactly as I might a paper copy, i.e. lend it to family or friends.
Not something we here in the USA give much thought to. But in the rest of the world, region-free DVD players are more than a curiosity.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm confused. Why would anyone care what a DVD player does or doesn't do, when there's a free, high quality, ad-free version of pretty much anything on the Pirate Bay (and countless other distribution channels) that will play on any device, in any way I want, whenever I want?
They can (somewhat, temporarily) control their own distribution channels. But once it's out in the open, any and all control over these closed channels is moot.
Proud member of the Ferengi Socialist Party.
Except you have a device to create infinite amounts of candy for free using only a single piece of candy and then being told that you can't, not because of any real limitations, but because someone told you that you can't.
The sooner we get rid of artificial scarcity the better.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
People who make IP are pissed when other people can easily copy and distribute their work for free. It is a VERY common Human emotion from creators.
DRM is nothing but a modern version of 'copy protection'. Or perhaps the idiot Hickson wants to argue that copy-protection sought by people like the Beatles, or used on VHS tapes, happened because the 'content providers' wanted 'leverage' over the people making the playback hardware.
DRM is a super-set of basic copy-protection ideas, that has vastly enhanced functionality ONLY because modern levels of tech make such functionality possible. Everything that DRM causes is a 'down-stream' consequence of tech possibilities, NOT the reason DRM exists in the first place.
All current legislative pressure (the actions of your government) insists that DRM must NOT relate to issues of hardware monopolies- the exact opposite of what idiot Hickson is saying. Hickson is like the idiots who try to argue that EULAs over-rule your 'first sale doctrine' rights.
Governments will only allow DRM to ultimately serve two purposes. 1) to stop illegal copying and distribution. 2) to allow media to be provided as a 'service' (where the data is no longer accessible when the service conditions end). Companies that use DRM do NOT get to trump the law of the land.
An idiot might ask "why then are so many DRM schemes associated with particular hardware". The answer is, of course, down to the emerging state of the technology. Universal DRM systems require technology to reach a level (cost and capability) where they become commercially feasible. In the interim (as with all new technologies) a lot of proprietary intermediate solutions get implemented.
The example of 'licensed' DVD players is laughable and humiliating. There is no such thing as an 'unlicensed' DVD player in the sense the idiot Hickson means. Unlicensed in this case means companies that illegally refuse to pay to use the patents of Sony and Phillips- patents that have nothing to do with DRM, but patents that describe the fundamental workings of DVD players. Refuse to pay for the patents, and you can make a cheaper DVD player. None of these so-called unlicensed players (stand-alones) allow for illegal copying of protected Disks. Idiot Hickson is obviously confusing the idea of 'region free' players- a feature found in the majority of LICENSED players via a service menu function.
Of course, in the short term, many companies will attempt to illegally exploit their DRM system in order to restrict the rights of their customers. But let me ask you a question. Did Apple do this? Cheap crooked behaviour is for small fry criminal companies. You want to be the biggest player? You are going to have to respect consumer rights.
A neat example of this is with Sky TV in the UK, the world's most advanced broadcast service. Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Sky (and Fox in the USA) may be rotten to the core, but he is no fool. He has hardware built to spec for home reception, but has embraced the Internet and all mobile devices. He intends that all of his televisual content can be received on ANY mobile device owned by his customers, including offline storage of shows with DRM. Hardware issues play a part here, but not in any way Hickson describes. Media companies require 'protected video playback paths' in the video hardware subsystems so that the decoded video stream may not be intercepted and copied. You may imagine this as the concept of 'write-only' memory for the video-buffers.
DRM has NOTHING to do with seeking control of those that build the playback hardware. PS now I know why HTML 5 is proving to be such a bad joke. Isn't it time open-source grew up, and started to worry about the intellectual abilities of those that control key projects.
In addition to unauthorized distribution of copyright works, I assume that DRM is also intended to prevent "unauthorized producers" of content from being able to distribute their works. Now that distribution no longer absolutely requires going through "official" channels, some means of preventing "pirate," that is to say, non-major-studio-authorized, content is needed.
I am not a crackpot.
... one industry wants to create a distribution monopoly by controlling everything, and eliminating competition.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
No, DRM hasn't "worked" for video and books. Its been made less annoying, but it still hasn't "worked" and it won't "work" in the future. Two reasons why this has happened:
1) eBooks have apps for just about anything. You can read your Kindle on your Kindle, on your iPhone, on your Android, on your PC, on your Mac, etc. And there is a bonus to using these services because theoretically it should keep track of where you are in your book. But when Amazon eventually stops supporting X, customers are screwed.
2) Video is limited by sheer size, downloading a library of 100 songs takes up, what, less than half a gigabyte? Downloading a library of 100 movies in full HD can easily take up several hundred gigabytes. Video is also limited by what devices really "work" for it, you're unlikely to want to watch Netflix on your new iWatch on its 3 inch display. They've also done streaming which makes the DRM more bearable.
But the problems that are inherent in DRM is that it punishes people who want to buy things legitimately, but can't. Just look at region-locking which is often paired with DRM, you're essentially telling someone that if you want what we're selling, you need to acquire it through illegitimate means. I'm sure there's lots of non-Americans who'd pay for Hulu, I'd easily pay the BBC to have access to iPlayer, but instead I pay for VPN/Proxy to access it illegitimately.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
...and Hickson nailed it in one. The motion picture industry and the recording industry learned the hard way what happens when you lose control of the distribution channel. The RIAA and the MPAA are just ways of doing damage control until the those industries can get back into control of the distribution channel. As Hickson noted, the publishing industry learned from the recording and entertainment industry's mistakes -- it is embracing digital delivery via the net without surrendering control of the distribution channel by insisting on DRM in their content and requiring only DRM'd devices at the consumer end of the channel. The publishing industry is well on the way to making dead-tree fiction and non-fiction -- well, fictional, if you'll forgive the word play. That's what DRM is all about -- helping content providers maintain control of the distribution channel from end to end.
That's because the Australian regulations add to the development costs of games.
To legally sell in Australia they have to go trough a ton of legal bullshit your elected officials inflict in the name of 'The Children'.
Really? So how about all the non-game software, how about Adobe, Microsoft and many others?
From the article:
“If you go to Apple’s iTunes and buy Macklemore’s song Same Love, which is number two in the Australian charts, it’s 69 cents in the US and over $2 in Australia,” he said.
“[And] we found it cost $5795 more to buy Microsoft’s Visual Studio software in Australia compared with the US. These are downloaded products with no Australian labour involved and no local distribution costs – it’s simply a matter of where the computer server thinks you’re coming from.”
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Right of first sale bitch.
Region locking flat out puts nails in it, and tries everything possible to kill it with fire.
Without region locking, the right of first sale would permit entreprenurial individuals to buy up cheap(er) product in one target market, then resell the units at a higher (to them, but lower for the downstream customer) price elsewhere, and undercut the phyrric bloodletting bullshit of the publishers and distributors.
That is completely legal. See the supreme court ruling concerning foriegn textbooks.
Modern playback equipment boasts scaler chips in their design already to support the many different HD television formats, so claiming "regional formatting" is bullshit. Doubly so considering that the data is digital, and the medium itself is a universal standard.
I agree that people should pay for their candy. I disagree that they should be barred from buying candy in one place, and selling it in another, taking advantage of price differences. The supreme court recently ruled in my favor on this.
Region locking exists exclusively to compartmentalize the world economy, and relies on de-facto collusion for price fixing. Laws to enforce the region locking restrictions directly add legitimacy to that collusion. It only works when everyone plays the collusion game, which is why they are lobbying so very fucking hard to kill first sale. First sale lets the cat out of the bag, and deflates the collusion enforced price by opening up alternative markets and pricing.
Basically, I should be allowed to pay some guy in botswana to buy a dvd for 5$ for me, and ship it overnight air for 15$, for a net of 20$, if I want to. The fact that this would undercut the "handed down from god" price of 50$ in my region for the same product simply doesn't mean dick, other than that the big distributor has a control fettish, and is being abusive. There should be no technological obstrctions to my doing this. The disc is a legitimately printed and authorized copy. The guy in botswana is permitted under the first sale doctrine to transfer his user licesence to me. No illegal copis are made, and no illegal activity is being performed. Especially if free trade agreements remove all import duties and tarrifs as considerations.
That it makes you feel "oh so bad" as a rights holder that I don't share your estimation of what constitutes a fair market price for your product does not factor into the equasion, and you do NOT have a legitimate basis to enforce your price by locking out foriegn markets from domestic purchasers.
Competition. Deal with it.
He had the candy analogy forced on him - imagine if somebody had mentioned this fictional machine that copies books, records, and pictures losslessly 100 years ago - you'd have said something similar about paper being consumable.
He merely turned the useless baby / candy analogy on it's head, and put it literal terms (unlimited flawless copies). It is you who missed the point, not your parent post.
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
It's not even that.
DRM allows content providers to enforce restrictions that go above and beyond vanilla copyright law.
everyone is a "criminal" based on the law, if all laws were enfored fully 100% of the time. I can think of a few ways everyone breaks the law daily
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I would argue, at least in the world of books (and eBooks), that DRM has been more useful economically to owners of the content readers (e.g. Amazon) than to the content publishers. The fact that Kindle has DRM on its eBooks means that the average end user is unable to easily transfer their eBook purchases from a Kindle to another eBook ecosystem (e.g. Kobo, Nook, Android, or Apple). DRM on eBooks effectively allows an eBook device vendor to lock consumers into their eco-system and provides about as much protection as a paper-mache helmet. Publishers know this, and in my experience are not the ones insisting on DRM for their eBooks these days...
*rofl*
Here, let me help your addled mind.
1) the cost of production is fungible. There is no real need to subsidize any market in a true free market. You are confusing the employment of a command economy with price fixing and subsidies with a free market economy. This is because when you factor out a ratio of unit production cost as a part of the price component, and retain it in all sales, you will always recoup the unit production costs. Eg, I can look at the supply and demand curves, and see the projected sales price, and use historic data to compute a sales estimate. I can then factor my cost of production into the price as a ratio. Eg, if it costs me 10,000 dollars to make the product, and I expect to sell 200 thousand units, the ratio comes out to .05%. I can therefor realistically recoup some of my development costs from the botswanan economy, if I bake in my costs, computed for their market's demand and currency power.
That is to say, I still get my money if I sell 500 million units at 5$, or 50 million at 50$. There is no legitimate reason to price gouge one market, and subsidise another, other than that one CAN do so, and get away with it.
Here's the kicker, AC.
If everyone rushes to buy the resold botswani dvds instead of the 50$ local offers, money will rush into botswana as a result of the trade. This devalues the american dollar in botswana, and changes the equation. The influx means more money changing hands in botswana, and thus, more disposable wealth in the economy. The local price for the DVD stops being 5$. The incentive to buy from botswana dries up, as the system reaches equilibrium. Eventually, it is cheaper to buy the DVD locally, now for 30$, instead of paying the newly inflated price in botswana, plus shipping, plus markup. The drain stops.
Even while the drain is occuring, while sales at 50$ have dropped precipitously, demand for the 5$ price unit has skyrocketed. Again, if I have been smart and not greedy, I have baked my production cost ratio directly into that unit price, and the huge surge in demand produces my profit. I sell many times the unit number at the lower price, but still hit the same financials.
Your argument that the reduced price in botswana is the result of necessary subsidization makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Here is why:
If we accept the absurd notion that the distributor cannot sell for less than the 50$ point, irrespective of local economies, then selling at 5$ is selling at a loss. Not only that, we are offering and advertising that product at a loss, warehousing the product at a loss, creating regionally locked units that can *ONLY* be sold at a loss, since they can't be used elsewhere.... see where this is going? What you assert as being true will only serve to radically increase production cost, with no sensible benefit. Allowing the rampant piracy you complain about would actually cost significantly less than making physica product available at such a substantial real outlay.
The truth is that due to the overall reductions in market costs of the botswani economy, it costs significantly less to send the freight, significantly less to warehouse, significantly less to advertise, etc. The result is that the costs associated are proportionally reduced in conjunction with the price. It is simply easier to do business in botswana. The ratio remains the same. All that changed is the unit price compared to a different market, with higher penetration costs.
Allowing the customers in the more costly to penetrate market to buy like crazy from the easily penetrated and lower price market, and relying on the free advertisment that will flow as a result of entreprenures marketing their discount DVD shopping services, you can simply invest in a little infrastructure in the cheaper economy and make a fucking killing.
(Gasp! That's what fucking china is doing! They are making it simply cheaper to do business in china, then getting everything set to pull the rug when the sucking lev
Not only do we (NZ) not have such regulation - our law explicitly excludes recognition of the validity of anything designed to prevent something playing in NZ. IE if the DRM stops you playing something here - there's no reason to fear anything if you bypass the DRM to play it (providing the "it" was legitimately obtained) http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1994/0143/latest/DLM1705866.html