Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Are There Any Good Reasons For DRM?
centre21 writes "Having been on Slashdot for several years, I've seen a lot of articles concerning DRM. What's most interesting to me are the number of comments condemning DRM outright and calling for the abolishing DRM with all due prejudice. The question I have for the community: is there ever a time when DRM is justified? My focus here is the aspect of how DRM protects the rights of content creators (aka, artists) and helps to prevent people freely distributing their works and with no compensation. How would those who are opposed to DRM ensure that artists will get just compensation for their works if there are no mechanisms to prevent someone from simply digitally copying a work (be it music, movie or book) and giving it away to anyone who wants it? Because, in my eyes, when people stop getting paid for what they do, they'll stop doing it. Many of my friends and family are in the arts, and let me assure you, one of the things they fear most isn't censorship, it's (in their words), 'Some kid freely distributing my stuff and eliminating my source of income.' And I can see their point. So I reiterate, to those who vehemently oppose DRM, is there ever a time where DRM can be a force for good, or can they offer an alternative that would prevent the above from happening?"
You can obliterate the used market. You can force obsolescence. You can force time limits. You can force re-purchases for multiple devices.
Oh, you mean good reasons for the customer?
Um. No. The "rights management" is about the "owner" of the content; not the customer.
Answer is No
DRM is some suits in the corporate world trying to make ordinary people submit to their every demand: We control what you consume, when, how, and for how much. And we use DRM to ensure that you stick to the rules. ------ Anything positive about DRM? Sadly, no.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
I would suggest you explain to them that the industries they work in have been going through a major upheaval in the past three decades despite the protests, lobbying & illegal actions by corporations intent on halting progress. They've had 30 years to adapt and they refused. Their customers tell them what they want but they dont listen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whip#Buggy_whip_and_coachwhip
As for the question about DRM, I can't think of a good reason for it.
"Because, in my eyes, when people stop getting paid for what they do, they'll stop doing it."
The creation of art is not, nor ever has been, dependent on remuneration. People don't exclusively create to be compensated. People have always created things. It's what we do.
It may be valid to worry that unrestricted copying of things—be those things paintings, songs, sculptures, stories, programs, or whatever—could potentially lead to a reduction in people who earn a living exclusively from creating those things, but it takes a powerfully broken worldview to even begin to think that people only do create stuff so that they'll get paid.
If copyright did not exist, people would STILL pay for art. It just wouldn't be the guaranteed monopoly protection. If you art is truly worthwhile, people will buy it because only you can produce it. If your art is easily reproducible, then it wasnt all that unique to begin with. If you are afraid of your art being re-transmitted across the world, DONT SHARE IT WITH ANYONE. That is the modern reality we live in. Producing art shouldnt be license to seek rent from every human alive.
Good-bye
This was posted a while ago as "real reason for drm".
https://plus.google.com/107429617152575897589/posts/iPmatxBYuj2
TL;DR: control hardware manufacturers, not consumers.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Many of my friends and family are in the arts, and let me assure you, one of the things they fear most isn't censorship, it's (in their words), 'Some kid freely distributing my stuff and eliminating my source of income.'
Incorrect. Their greatest fear is not piracy, but obscurity.
How would those who are opposed to DRM ensure that artists will get just compensation for their works if there are no mechanisms to prevent someone from simply digitally copying a work (be it music, movie or book) and giving it away to anyone who wants it?
That's the whole reason why copyright exists. You have to understand that DRM only makes this more difficult, not impossible, and once the DRM has been broken it no longer limits anyone but the legitimate users.
DRM is really bad at foiling pirates. It only takes one to break the DRM and share the content around the world to render the DRM ineffective.
However it is really good at inconveniencing legitimate consumers. Some DRM schemes have been so annoying to customers that getting a pirated version makes for a better user experience.
The months are just too short. I can count the number of days on one hand.
The key to "creators" getting over this mentality is to forget it exists, and to stop focusing on those that might be illegally sharing your work and instead focus on the ones that are actually buying it.
And here's why: people who choose to illegally copy something won't be deterred by DRM. They will nearly always find a way around it, one way or another. So it very rarely succeeds in what it proposes to do.
On the other hand, DRM treats your paying customers like would-be criminals. It often causes installation or playback problems, denies them their right of fair use in making backup copies or transcoding for different platforms; basically, to freely and fully use the content they paid for. In this way you're doing nothing but alienating your paying customers and pushing them towards finding DRM-free illegal copies in order to avoid all the pitfalls that ultimately accompany DRM.
If you create a good product and offer it at a good price people will buy it and you will make money. If you're shoveling out crapware at an outrageous price then no one is going to buy it. It's been shown time and time again that piracy has very little impact on actual sales. A good product/value will sell, a bad one won't, regardless of how much or little its being pirated.
Why would anyone bother? There is no rational discussion to be had on a topic like this on this site.
Maybe you could defend DRM if it actually worked. But it doesn't. Anyone who really wants to can circumvent it, so the residual effect is that DRM merely reduces the value of the product to legitimate purchasers because the utility of the product is needlessly reduced.
DRM hurts honest people and does nothing to restrain the dishonest.
You say "My focus here is the aspect of how DRM protects the rights of content creators (aka, artists) and helps to prevent people freely distributing their works and with no compensation.", which is an understandable point of view. However, DRM does not actually address this concern - at most they introduce a short delay. At the cost of inconvenience for everyone who actually care and try to use the DRM damaged versions, which raises the question: Why pay for inferior goods?
That is why we don't like DRM, we pay for the goods but get the worst version - or actually scratch that, we get nothing but a non-renewable, non-transferable, rights-removing licensed version.
D for data as in data rights management. Data= knowledge which longs to be free( so to speak).
There is NOTHING new in the world, there are NO new ideas. Protecting ideas that someone gets and holding it to them for a lifetime and a half is the BIGGEST waste of potential innovation I can think of.
Protecting music has shown us that a middleman can harvest musicians for a while until they are discarded. Freeing ourselves from this model will allow musicians to pursue lucrative performance careers while some may still write for hire.
Television and movies? All trickle down through cable, local stations, friends houses, bars, stores, and of course the internet.
Software? Business procedures? Come On! We've all sat here for years and watched the chaos.
Owning ideas is just an illusion that hold us all back and down while making criminals of us.
Time to get over this DRM nonsense as well as Patent and Copyright.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
The problem is it is impossible create a DRM system that both protects the artist's right and respects the consumer's rights.
In any case it looks like the OP is drinking the big media kool-aid. DRM isn't about protecting the artists; in fact they mostly hate it. DMR is about increasing corporate profits buy taking away consumer rights like format shifting, backing up, resale and so forth.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If money is your driving force, then DRM is your answer. If love of your art is your driving force, then DRM is irrelevant.
"Having been on Slashdot for several years, I've seen a lot of articles concerning DRM. What's most interesting to me are the number of comments condemning DRM outright and calling for the abolishing DRM with all due prejudice. The question I have for the community: is there ever a time when DRM is justified?
For RENTAL property like what Netflix is doing.
Morally DRM is a like murder, even if it helps you earn a buck it is still wrong.
What value does the actual data contain? None really. The IDEA that the data represents? That is the value. You can't stop ideas from spreading, thats the reason they are so crucial.
So... what does DRM do? Nothing. Whats the answer? Services. Goods. The exact same things that people have been selling since day 1.
Sorry "artists" but you don't deserve 10 million for your "creation". You deserve, at BEST, 200k a year for your work. Go put on shows and concerts, sell t shirts, sell vinyl, sell physical objects people want to own. Don't expect to get money for something that is free to replicate.
Yes thats right people. I believe people should get paid *ONCE* for there work. Not a billion times over.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
That is for the artist that is greedy.
Most Hollywood directors come to mind.
Locks make sense for your property do they not?
So imagine you want to let people use your computer, but you know that there's going to be some root hack that will leave your machines undefended and you want to ensure that only YOUR OS boots up on that machine. Then yeah DRM is pretty awesome. It lets you lock down your stuff. Your physical property.
Great for companies to protect against hacks and malicious employees.
For content? Nah.
And what about ALL the people who go to work every day? Are they being creative for a paycheck? Or is this argument the exclusive domain of artists?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
There are arguably use cases where DRM would be convenient(eg. media rentals, which are a relatively uncontroversial and popular service in physical media, pretty much need to time-out to work, 'snapchat' and its ilk are designed explicitly, if not effectively, to enforce transience, again only doable with DRM).
The problem is architectural, though. In order for DRM to work, the root of control for a device cannot be its user/owner. It has to be the DRM-enforcing entity, or else the 'DRM' is simply some obfuscation. There just isn't a way around that. Further, to deal with analog hole/leaks from compromised devices or the production chain/etc. there is a strong incentive to make devices 'default-deny' rather than 'default-allow'(compare a PC, which will execute more or less any program that isn't explicitly self-destructive, with an iDevice or console, that will reject otherwise well-formed applications that aren't signed correctly).
And the trouble continues: in order to prevent 'leaky-by-design' hardware from being produced(eg. cheapy DVD players that are... lax about region coding and macrovision), the DRM mechanism essentially has to be legally encumbered in some way('hook IP', DMCA-style laws, etc.) to prevent the easy manufacture of HDCP strippers, region-free DVD players, and other 'claims to be DRM-compliant; but with a backdoor by design' circumvention tools.
This places extraordinary power in the hands of whatever licensing entity controls the DRM scheme: at a bare minimum, it's a steady stream of licensing revenue(even for hilariously broken systems like CSS, they still get their cut per DVD player). It may also include power over who is and isn't allowed to enter a market or exist on a given platform, and substantial control over the activities of everything going on within systems that include a given DRM scheme.
That's the real problem, ultimately. It isn't that there are zero uses for DRM, it's that (by necessity) you have to make some pretty radical changes to get DRM working at all, and once you make them, the uses that you don't want are every bit as available as the uses that you do want, and there is no way of allowing only the former and preventing the latter.
It also doesn't help, of course, that a system sufficiently-robust to be a DRM system is almost certainly sufficiently capable to be extremely useful for fun censorship and surveillance purposes.
I can pull out my SNES anytime I want to show my grandkids an olde game or two. And they enjoy it.
Basically, the new stuff has a set time limit, kinda like an ink-jet printer. You only get so many squirts
before you have to replace the cartridge - even if there's ink/life left. If I can't purchase and use it for its
lifetime, why even bother?
DRM brings nothing for the customer, matter of fact, destroys the actual enjoyment of the product itself.
Also, please don't troll us --
DRM does not protect any artists, they are "work-for-hire" and have no rights in the final product
whatsoever beyond their salary in its production.
You know that, I know that, and my cat knows that.
CAPTCHA = 'neither'
There are no good reasons for DRM. Such schemes only harm legitimate customers, they are inherently flawed and can therefore always be cracked so those who want to copy the content will always be able to do so. DRM only seeks to extort additional money from those who would buy media, but would then want to do such things as lend their legitimately purchased media to friends or format shift it.
As for protection, there are already protections in place against copying... They are known as "laws", and they already go much further than they should. As technology has become available to distribute media faster and more widespread than ever before, copyright terms have only increased when exactly the opposite should have happened.
Those who want to obtain copies of media for free will always do so...
On the other hand, there are many far more moderate people who would quite happily purchase media if it was available under better conditions, but who feel offended by the ever extending copyright terms, draconian drm schemes and arbitrarily restricted availability imposed by big content.
DRM actively encourages people to obtain their media from an alternative source like thepiratebay... They don't hold you in contempt, they don't try to restrict when, where and on what you can play the media, they don't discriminate against you based on your current location.
Most people won't pirate if the legitimate options are just as, or more convenient. If this were the case, you would have a small core of hardcore pirates, and various people who simply cannot afford to buy media - people who will never pay whatever you do.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Make a better product then the pirates are providing. The problem with DRM is it takes a product and make it worse. So then when a user goes to pirate it not only do they get it for free, but it is also often a superior product that works more consistantly.
So yeah DRM is always bad because it gives your paying consumer a worse product.
You'll get a huge number of answers declaring that there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to use DRM or anything with maybe a token aside to compensation.
Look elsewhere if you want something genuine.
It should be possible to have drm that satisfies the needs of both the customer and the vendor. But since the vendor is responsible for the implementation, they think they're done working on it when their needs are satisfied.
Perhaps we as a technological group should create a list to help them. Maybe its hard do see it from the customer's point of view. We should create a list of what would make acceptable drm product and company behavior.
Like ice sculptures, live performances, draft deals, verbal negotiations - there are things that need to be done that lead to better things, but in themselves have no value if kept and (sometimes) can only do harm.
These things would benefit from DRM that render them useless at the will & command of the creator.
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
Before we can even talk about DRM, copyright needs to be reverted to its original 14 year term with 14 year extension.
What is necessary for this to happen is that the wide distribution of recorded works of art will not create money for the distributors. Only then will the main source of income be live performances again, and one artist can only entertain so many people at one time. The consequence will be that many more artist will be able to live from their art again, only that any of them won't become a billionaire before turning thirty. A big loss for a lucky few, and an immense win for humanity.
You see, DRM will be one major roadblock on this future of bigger variety and quality in the arts, and therefore is bad. The posts before were all right, and now you know why.
You know it's time for the next revolution when your rulers' names end with roman numerals.
Yes. Companies won't publish their products without DRM. you want to consume the products. So there is a good reason.
From the point of a view of a musician here...
I'm in the camp that says that there is no good reason for DRM, ever, no matter what situation the artist is in.
For a new musician who is trying to break into the business, DRM tends to be counterproductive b/c what I'm looking for is exposure. I want as many people as possible to listen to my music. At this point, I don't care how they obtain it; as long as they're listening and telling other people about my music, that's fine. In fact, I'd consider it an honor if people put my music up for download via Pirate Bay or whatnot b/c it means that there are people out there who like my music enough that they're willing to go out of their way to distribute it to others. Why in the world would I want to obstruct that process by including DRM in my music?
For an established musician, I believe that DRM still serves no purpose. I believe in the integrity of the fans and that one's art should speak for itself. If my music is good, then people will buy. Period. The artists who support DRM are probably those whose music isn't up to par, whose entire reputation was built on a fluke hit single that they've been trying to reproduce ever since. In that case, of course they'd like to attempt to lock up access to their music - they don't want people trying before they buy b/c what they have to offer isn't worth a nickel.
Basically, those who put forth quality products really have nothing to fear; attempting to restrict access only pisses people off and severely limits the number of new fans that one can obtain.
For businesses you sometimes want to limit the distribution of sensitive company information and plans. Yes, it is possible for a bad employee to break the DRM, but this requires a degree of willful act that very significantly reduce the numbers of people willing to do it, and risking their job over it.
Blocking one-click forward through DRM do work. I have worked in several companies where this works. Foolproof? No. Having a real significant effect? Yes. Even if not 100%, is 90% better than 0%? Yes.
There are a lot of cases where people put 'on line' stuff, and sales increase.
DRM is really handcuffs - MS do it, Apple do it. What is it with sheeple that make people buy this stuff?
"My focus here is the aspect of how DRM protects the rights of content creators (aka, artists) and helps to prevent people freely distributing their works and with no compensation."
This is an assumption that is not borne out by the actual data.
Study after study of various aspects of DRM, in regard to software and published works anyway, belie this assumption.
People who "illegally" download movies and music also happen to be the people who spend the most on music and movies (both in-theater and DVDs).
The fact is that products that are solidly locked up under DRM tend not to sell very well. Look at the latest rebellion against Electronic Arts and Ubisoft over DRM. EA has been laying off employees.
This is not to say it might not be useful under some circumstances. But by and large, it has tended to make products less attractive to consumers.
If DRM will ban this ass clown, I'm all for it.
You might want to use DRM to only allow certain people to view nudie photos of yourself.
No, there are no valid uses for DRM. If your audience isn't willing to step up and fund your work because they love it and want it to continue, then whatever is lost couldn't have been of much value anyway. Much of our greatest cultural heritage was created in a time before DRM, and before copyright. We have more ways than ever to patronize the arts. We don't need artificial scarcity.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
u=idiot
There's bloody other ways of getting payed for the work. it does not need to be according current model.
There's other ways of valuating creation then the current model (where the originator is seen as blessed with divine creation apart form flux of creativity).
Once I buy something, it is mine. You have no natural right to control it afterwards. It removes rights that the OWNER of the media has to use his media as he sees fit, to make copies for personal use, to timeshift, to device shift, and to resell or give away.
DRM is an infringement of digital rights of the owner of the media, not a protection.
And not everyone is a soulless sycophant worshiping the almighty dollar. Artists produce art for the sake of art, to express themselves because of how it makes them feel, and to enrich society as a whole and more often than not to get laid. Slightly reducing the financial incentive will not end art, it will merely remove the posers who are producing garbage for a paycheck from the equation.
You want people to be ok with DRM?
1: make DRM that allows every act that falls under fair use.
2: make the duration of copyright much shorter, 7 years, 14 at the most.
3: make DRM that releases its media after that duration.
the bottom line is, LEGALLY speaking, you can implement all the DRM you like on whatever digital content you wish to put out there. All the community (such as the Slashdot crowd here) can do is give you opinions on how ethical or smart such a thing is.
IMO, you're rarely going to find someone trying to make a living doing "creative" things who doesn't like the idea of "locking them down" in some fashion. Sometimes, it's not even the creator, but the purchaser who enforces it! For example, I work for a firm that puts together marketing and creative ad campaigns, plans shows and expos, etc. Even though everything we produce is original material our team came up with and saw through to completion, we're not even allowed to display any of our work on our corporate web site! Our clients practically always demand we sign a contract with them preventing us from sharing what was done.
But as someone who has dabbled on both sides of the fence (as a musician trying to produce material, and currently as a typical content consumer), I'm convinced DRM is a universally bad idea.
The original article's statement that, "In my eyes, when people stop getting paid for what they do, they'll stop doing it." is a big part of the problem. A true artist creates because he or she feels a basic need to do so. Most of the time, whether one is a musician, a sculptor, a painter or an author -- profit is FAR from a sure thing in the beginning. These people produce a lot of material at what's usually a net LOSS for them. (Why do you think you almost always hear musicians tell stories of the crappy jobs they had to work to pay the bills while they performed their music at night, for years?) A good friend of mine is an aspiring author, but he works both a day job for the government and teaches kids Karate on the side for income. His books are his passion, not his income source.
Now, I fully understand and agree that these people are all essentially gambling / hoping that all their time spent on their art will pay off in the long haul .... that it's all part of how the system works that you'll produce and produce without much or any pay, until you get noticed. But my question then is why does that whole mentality sudden;y change when profits eventually come? Why is the same artist suddenly "entitled" to getting paid for every single copy of his/her work that gets passed around?
The truth is, I think we have too many people in the arts who are doing it for the wrong reasons! That's why so much modern music is mediocre, and why so many video games are just rehashes of the same formula. If you're motivated by "getting paid", you need to go work in a job where you earn a guaranteed paycheck for every hour of time you spend working, or an annual salary paid out in bi-weekly installments.
It's just opinion, but I truly believe that the only "right" way to pursue an art (such as music) is to do it out of the pure need to create the best work you can possibly create, and share it with others who get enjoyment from it. If you're good enough at that, people start taking an interest in compensating you financially for it. Great... but don't let that change anything for you. Don't stop to "count your money" or you'll become a lesser quality artist for it.
These days, if you're an author, a composer, a screenwriter, an actor, a game designer, or an app programmer, you face the same hurdle regardless: if you're not popular, you're not getting paid. Traditional patrons like Hollywood, the music industry, and publishers will only take a risk on ventures they're reasonably certain will pay off. For everybody else, you're on your own (though organizations like Kickstarter and Indiegogo can help fill the funding gap somewhat.)
For indies or small-time developers to lay on the copy protection is, at best, solving the wrong problem. Indeed, it's possible to turn off some potential customers forever if it's bad enough. Others deem it enough of an excuse to pirate a title they'd otherwise pay for. DRM only adds friction, and if you aren't close to maximizing your user base (in paying customers and pirates) you may very well lose more customers than you convert pirates... not to mention that you'll be trying to convert enough to justify the cost of the DRM solution as well.
When does DRM make sense? If your customers perceive your product as being a fantastic deal even with the DRM on, such as with online video rental, or if it can be seen as a natural byproduct of how your product is delivered (such as World of Warcraft or Steam, but apparently not SimCity 5), or if you've got so many people using your products that squeezing another couple of percent out of the pirates is worth whatever you lose in current and future customers.
One legitimate use would be for secret military or corporate secret/confidential information dissemination. Maybe to some extent other private entities (terrorists?, paranoid individuals?)... but the existing solutions are far from meeting any such criteria. This message will self destruct in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... j/k
And thanks for asking.
In a word: no.
Artists who are of differing opinion or waste time on this matter or indeed getting riled up about some hypothetical kid somewhere should redirect their energies to making good stuff instead.
DRM does not work. And if it did, they would alienate the very people they derive their income from (whether just or not; the compensation the Bieb gets is not in the same dictionary as "just", but that's beside the point). It's usually a bad idea to kick your patrons in the nuts. It's an even worse idea to worry about some freckled kid somewhere as a spectre you can pin all your fears and blame to.
Creators have many rights. They even have an overly broad, entirely one-sided copyright lawbook in their favor (death + 70 years? Yeah. Right.) They can already sue said kid or their parents into indentured servitude / utter bankruptcy. They already wield the mighty stick of US trade treaties. They simply do not need any more protection. In fact, they need less.
I, too, have family members who are creators. They get by fine without restrictions management.
Last, but certainly not least, some of my favourite artists are held in high regard by me because they do not worry about this crap. They create stuff, and I buy it. Mind you, I am not forced to buy it, not by a long shot. I can download the entire discography of Amanda Palmer, most of it legally from her own site. I paid for it what I thought fair, and she isn't going hungry any time soon. She wouldn't have seen a cent of my money if here stuff was DRM-laden.
When I buy games, I prefer gog.com over Steam or *shudder* Origin or Ubisoft's so-called shop. I'll skip games from certain publishers no matter how good they could be, and I'll buy others blind no matter whether I have seen any hype. And it's entirely down to not treating me like a criminal, and not worrying about that freckled schoolkid.
Finally, if your family members will stop doing something because they can't use DRM, then good riddance. If they make absolutely no income but think there are huge numbers of people making copies of their stuff, they should not delude themselves into believing that a.) it's actually a huge number of people and b.) that any such "pirates" would have paid for their content either way. The sooner they stop worrying about the ingratitude of the youth or the perceived slight to their wallet, the sooner they can get paid for having created great stuff.
What prevents people from copying books, or CDs, or magazines, or newspapers, and giving them away willy-nilly? Yet writers and artists and photographers have managed to make a living despite that.
The problem is that DRM only addresses half the issue. It ignores any rights the owner of a copy might have, and declines to enforce those rights against the copyright holder's infringement on them. As long as it does that, it serves no useful purpose from my standpoint. To be useful to me, a DRM system would have to manage and enforce all rights, not just one party's.
That file that says you do/do-not have HIV.
And technology taketh away, before the ability to record an artist made money by performance. Some clever people gave the artists the ability to record, capitalists then assumed this gift of recording was a right upon which to build empires. Technology when it works is beautiful, when it doesn't work it's valueless, DRM is about making some technology valueless. There is no market for valueless goods.
No matter how creative a person is, they are simply building upon the work of others either by influence, tools, inspiration, cooperation or downright theft. There is no such thing as a truly original work and if any artist would stop 'creating' because they were no longer remunerated for it, they DO NOT have their heart or mind in the right place. Like a lot of jobs these days, artists do not produce anything that is absolutely necessary to life, and while I most certainly believe that very talented artists should gain recognition, I do not think that money is the only/best form of recognition. I am an artist and I create because I love, not because I want money. I find it extremely self-centered of people to claim "this is mine, you have to PAY to experience it", when the cost of sharing the material is insignificant. Any real artist would simply love to have their work appreciated.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
DRM everyone likes:
- Netflix streaming
- Amazon streaming
- Steam
DRM everyone except pirates like:
- DRM on PS3 Blu-ray games
- DRM on Playstation Vita games
- DRM on XBox games
Don't expect much from this thread. It's more important to whine about DRM than think about it.
If DRM didn't exist, companies like Netflix probably wouldn't be able to get the licensing deals that they do from the massively paranoid content industry. The whole "video streaming as a paid service" would likely not exist --- or perhaps only with extremely limited content.
Does Netflix's DRM work? Well no --- you can download rips of their House of Cards production, just like any other TV series. DRM served the purpose of allowing Netflix to make reasonable deals. Hopefully it will be removed in the future, like what we saw happen with online music services.
As long as it isn't overly-obtrusive.
For example, back when diablo2 came out, I had a legit copy with a cd-key you have to punch in, to ensure it could only run on one computer at a time. I have no problems with something like that. It's convenient enough and I don't have to worry about losing a character or something if someone flips a killswitch on the cracked versions.
Unfortunately most companies don't rely on something as simple as a cd key nowadays, and lately it's becoming more convenient to just pirate a copy.
Basically non-paranoid DRM is good, 'modern' DRM is bad.
Note : DRM is targeted against the physical possessor of materials, and is thus quite different from encryption, although they are commonly confused, and of course there are technological similarities.
As the laws are currently set up, and as structures have grown up around those laws (and influencing those laws), no.
Change the ground rules (for example, abolish all copyright), and the answer becomes a solid maybe, depending on the details of what has replaced what we currently have.
Good luck getting a positive comment about DRM or a negative comment about piracy on Slashdot.
Most everyone here is quick to point out the problems of DRM. Honest users don't like DRM because it's going to affect their ability to use the stuff they bought. Pirates don't like DRM, either. (Oftentimes the DRM gets broke which doesn't bother the pirates, but sometimes it slows them down to blocks them entirely.)
Based on this, there's a tendency for people to be dishonest about DRM - the same way you'd be dishonestly harsh about some kid who stole your girlfriend.
I'm generally accepting about DRMs existence - in part because it seems like the younger generation thinks they should have a right to pirate everything. The worse piracy gets, the more I support the creation and use of DRM - both to support the creators and to support the continued survival of the industry that creates our entertainment and our software.
I generally favor the removal of DRM after a set period of time. This gives creators access to the initial sales spike. After a year or so, removing the DRM can be done for the benefit of the customer.
Some of the myths promoted by the anti-DRM, pro-piracy crowd (which overlap but aren't necessarily synonymous):
- DRM always gets broken. Not true. It's true that the more popular a piece of software is, the more likely it is to get cracked. The PS3 DRM system held up quite well for years (and GeoHot's crack only worked for previous versions of the OS; he now says the PS3 is too hard to crack). Microsoft's DRM allowed them to ban a million XBox users - they can still use their XBoxes, but have to buy a new one if they want to play online. Both of those count as positive (and different strategies) for combating piracy through DRM. I also had some software I wrote under DRM. It was eventually cracked (after 10 months) and showed up on pirate sites. Still, that gave me 10 months of pirate-free sales, which is where most of the sales were anyway.
- Piracy increases sales. In case you're wondering: no, I didn't see any increase in sales after 10 months due to "pirates paying for the software they pirated". I actually saw a slight drop in sales, though I'm doubtful about blaming that on piracy. My experience makes me doubt that pirates pay for media after they've pirated it.
- DRM is only about control. The subtext of this is "if it was about getting consumers to buy their stuff instead of pirate it, it might be legitimate, but it's all about control and they have no right to control me. Therefore, by pirating I'm subverting their vile attempts to control me!" What nonsense. I will admit that this kind of thinking fulfills a psychological need among pirates to legitimize their piracy. I've worked with publishers and game developers and I know they hate seeing their products pirated, and the kind of fear that creates when you've invested tons of time and money and you need to get paid or else you'll go bankrupt. (I've heard even some of the smallest game-developer companies ask the question, "How do you prevent piracy?" Do you really believe some small-time company is out to control people?) Creating stuff is a gamble - a big gamble. All business ventures are gambles. It's like walking into a casino and dropping a big part of your life savings. It sucks when you think that pirates are (effectively) putting their hand on the roulette wheel and making it difficult for you to win on the gamble you're taking.
- People should create stuff because that's what they love to do, not worry about piracy. What nonsense. Creators invest tons of time and money into their product. We're not going to live under a bridge just so you can have free stuff. I'd recommend you try that argument with doctors, teachers, and everyone else in the modern economy. We've got bills to pay, and I'm not going to make myself into a sacrificial lamb so you can have great stuff. Maybe if you'd come over to my house and mow my lawn for
And here's why: people who choose to illegally copy something won't be deterred by DRM. They will nearly always find a way around it, one way or another. So it very rarely succeeds in what it proposes to do.
No they won't. Certain segments of the population are technically astute to find cracks to bypass DRM, like sophisticated PC gamers, but there are segments are not sophisticated enough, and/or have enough income to not bother with the hassle, like many adult iphone users.
If you create a good product and offer it at a good price people will buy it and you will make money. If you're shoveling out crapware at an outrageous price then no one is going to buy it. It's been shown time and time again that piracy has very little impact on actual sales. A good product/value will sell, a bad one won't, regardless of how much or little its being pirated.
I reiterate the extensive piracy in PC gaming versus consoles, in part from the higher difficulty of bypassing DRM on the console, and the lesser technical skill of the average console gamer.
I would like for the technical community to acknowledge that there are a large number of technically unskilled, thieving scumbags. Quite a few people will steal PHYSICAL objects. For those people, DRM works.
DRM as a way to force people to buy and re-buy (eg renting) a product over and over again is a failed business model. Just like paywalls. Only totally naive business people embrace DRM as a business model. Let me ask... how many people actually use their PPV or other video-on-demand rentals? Few. What about Netflix and Spotify? LOTS.
The point where DRM comes in is to prevent the counterfeiting, interception and unauthorized editing of content. DRM as a business model is very failed business model and the sooner content owners realize this, the sooner we'll address the real problems.
For example, let's say I want to watch the latest Star Trek Movie. It's not even out in the theater yet, but I'm sure some asshat camcorded the thing already and is waiting to be first to put it out there on bittorrent. This is the "counterfeiting" argument. If DRM is in play, then you know that the version you purchased from the authorized distributor has not been replaced with a low-quality camcorded crapola from an unauthorized source. If you CHOOSE to acquire the unauthorized source, then you're getting a mediocre experience and likewise your opinon of the film will greatly suffer.
Now take this one step further, Interception, is the replacement of the content you paid for with content you didn't ask for. This is akin to renting a VHS tape, and taping over every explosion with hardcore porn. DRM ensures that the integrity of the content has not been tampered with, and no lawsuits come back to haunt you for misappropriation of content. Basically it means that the content you paid for is is there.
The last point, unauthorized editing, eg censorship. Let's say there are two official cuts of a film, and several remixes. For example Superman II. If there's 90 torrents of the film out there and they all say SuperMan II, you're not going to be aware that there's two official cuts, nor which ones are which. If you only seen the original theatrical cut, you'd be confused as to what cut you got when you get the Donnor cut. Likewise there was two releases of the Naussica anime. One was heavily edited when released on VHS in the 90's, and one was released by Disney with no Cuts. These two versions are completely different. If you're trying to find one specific cut of a film that was an authorized release, but hard to find, you'd be hard pressed to find it. Case in point on the Super Mario Bros (television) DVD set. All the songs have been replaced by a generic 80's drum machine instead of the originally televised music.
This comes right back to DRM and copyright being at odds. Many of these 80's/90's television shows are inferior to their televised versions due to the people doing the DVD's are unwilling to pay for the rights to use the music, or the music industry holding the rights to those songs for ransom. The customer get's no say in this. So this again comes back to how DRM as a business model is a failed model.
As soon as something else changes in the marketplace, DRM will ultimately hurt future format shifting. Maybe the DVD version lacks the original musical tracks from the televised version, maybe the Blueray version the original voice actors demand more royalties for the use of their voice, maybe by the time there is no longer physical media, all that will be left of the original content is just the visual content, with all the audio being excised due to rights battles.
What we really need, is, DRM should be about protecting the integrity of the original production. It should be used to forced on the consumer to have to re-buy/rent the production every single time they want to watch even a few seconds of it.
Netflix/Hulu/Spotify, etc should have "day passes" for which the subscriber is only billed for the days of use, not months. Likewise Netflix/Hulu/Spotify need to make their services available to everyone around the world, or piracy will always be the preferred means outside of the USA.
As a Canadian, I can't get 90% of the content available on netflix, itunes, and 100% of spotif
The "rights management" is about the "owner" of the content; not the customer.
That simply isn't true.
There are numerous business models involving temporary or restricted access that are in the interests of both creator and customer. Usually this is because the customer gets more flexibility and/or pays a lower price for something, while the creator generates some income from people who wouldn't get enough value to justify a full purchase. Some of the most successful (in both financial and good will) distribution schemes around lately are based on subscription/library models. Pay-per-view models have been very successful for some kinds of content. Good old-fashioned rental still has its place.
Many of these models are impractical without some mechanism for restricting access to content outside of the agreed terms. It often doesn't have to be much, just enough that it's not completely trivial to keep the content from the service permanently to help people stay honest. A lightweight copy protection scheme fits the bill there just fine. Sure, maybe you can break it if you're willing to try hard enough and have no problem with ripping off the creator's work, but then you could probably have just downloaded an illegal copy on BitTorrent anyway if you're willing to do that.
However, even in a perfect world where DRM was unbreakable but it also never stopped a customer from doing anything legitimate, it would still be in everyone's interest to allow a variety of agreements to suit different needs. The alternative is a market where the only legal option is a full purchase and the only other option is black market pirate copies. That is always going to put at least one party in a worse position, even if everyone is acting in good faith.
In short, the rights management aspect is of no benefit to the customer only in the sense that copyright is also of no benefit to consumers. We could eliminate it tomorrow and everyone in society other than content creators would be better off... for a little while. But in the long run, without either these kinds of measures or some other viable incentive, the quantity and quality of works available would drop, which hurts the consumer too.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
And it's clear that DRM doesn't help the artist. Can anyone address the other part of the question? Do you have a better idea about how the artist gets compensated for their time in creating artwork that people are enjoying? This is moral question as much as it is practical...
First the bad news:
Due to the war on consumers I have grown so paranoid that I will not buy digital products such as music (even without DRM) for fear that it has a digital fingerprint and I could become liable if the file escapes onto the internet. This limits my choices to a) Purchase on CD (an often overpriced archaic 2 channel format that takes several days to reach me and that I then must rip into digital files myself) or b) Steal a fingerprint free digital copy in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately for producers stealing now offers the best experience.
I am still so angry about the degradation of hardware and operating operating systems due to movie industry paranoia about piracy that I no longer purchase movies on DVD. I actually rent them to ensure the studios are paid as little as possible. My good will towards big media is almost non existent
Now the good news for creative producers:
Most adults with jobs (and without my level of vindictiveness) will pay a reasonable price for a high quality convenient copy of an artistic work. Some technically minded man-children will not, so get over it; pilfering, breakage, loss, etc. are part of every retail endeavor. If your product is popular enough to be stolen in great amounts it is probably making you a lot of money already. If your creative work is in a media that has waged war against consumers you had probably better find a way to use what would have been your primary product as promotion for money making products that can't be stolen or find another line of work.
My credentials:
- I've been on slashdot since almost the beginning
- I'm a recreational musician who fantasizes about recording and distributing music
- I'm a web developer who has implemented DRM to protect the intellectual property of my employer
I decided to post here, so that I could say that I don't think there is any good use of DRM. I have heard lots of stories of people who distributed their own non-DRM'd music online and who do very well, for example. I think the good stuff will always pay off. People will recognize the value and the artist will be compensated.
I also hate the properties of DRM that inconvenience the consumer. Having to repurchase your content, for example But before I started typing this comment, I thought of one use of DRM that could be considered legitimate. A streaming subscription such as Netflix, or computer training videos and stuff like that, is something that works very well, is transparent to the user, and does not need to stand the test of time. As long as your subscription is active, you can access your content. You have no need to access the content after the subscription is over.
I've also taken advantage of software subscriptions lately. For example, I need Photoshop sometimes, but not all the time. Instead of paying a ridiculous amount of money to buy Photoshop, I can may for a month of Photoshop, which gets me through whatever project I'm working on. This is a form of DRM, and without it, Adobe would not offer the product the way I want to consume it. The same with Netflix. I love it, and without that protection, they could not offer it.
Yes. Gimp. I know. Sorry, I like Photoshop.
There are no good reasons for DRM. It exists solley to enforce artificial scarcity. It's not hard to eliminate all piracy. I've done it. It's simple. It doesn't take DRM, it takes common sense: You say, "Hey, I need $X to do this work." Then you get $X. Then you do the work. If you got funded by society to do the work via crowd funding or a grant, etc. then you upload the digital token of your efforts to everyone for "free" (you've already been paid to do the work) -- use a .torrent if you need free bandwidth. It's how I make money working on FLOSS. Company needs some bugfix or a new feature, or something customized to meet their need, or even just installed / maintained: I do the work to configure the 1s and 0s just so, get paid for it. Move on to the next job. I don't have to seek rent by selling copies, that's boring and economically corrupt. Doing work for money is a time tested business model. "Intellectual Property" is a newfangled scam -- It's a personal futures market for yourself that guarantees society (and thus yourself) will benefit less overall.
Doing the work first then Selling the copies to make up the cost of production [+profit] is gambling. What if you don't make those sales? Instead: Get free market research and avoid making things no one wants to buy -- Ask the public directly for the money you need to proceed. After they pay you for your work, you can simply do more work to make more money. This is how all other labor markets work.
Strict copyright laws were meant to restrict greedy publishers and prevent them from ripping off artists. In a time when copies were expensive and copy machines were rare, 14 years was thought to be the high end of rights durations. Now everyone has a copy machine (computer) -- They're everywhere in almost every device, copies are so cheap they're in near infinite supply, and now the greedy publishers have subverted the system making the strict laws apply to all people instead of themselves. Meanwhile the artists can get buy by the way they've always been able to: By withholding their work until payment is assured. Hint: That's why bands have to go on tour to make any real money -- They have to work to get paid
The public benefits by having a public domain full of rich and relevant works. Publishers have destroyed the public domain by making copyrights last over 3 generations of humans: Artist + 70 = you have kids @ 30, they die 40 years after you, your grandkids die 70 years after you do... After your grandkids are dead the copies enter the public domain? That's gross. DRM aims to ensure that not only will everyone be dead by the time digital goods enter the public domain, but that it will be impossible to copy them even when it becomes legal to do so. For this reason alone you should never even consider DRM. Copyright laws already exist, if that's not enough for you then you're a greedy ignorant ingrate and you deserve to starve or do physical labor for a living -- Such minds aren't worth extracting information from, IMO.
Your works only have merit because of the culture you've borrowed from to make them relevant. Try to create something 100% of your own creation -- It is impossible to do so and for it to have any worth. I know, I've tried it. I've invented my own languages and wrote my own stories and jokes and poems in them. They are worthless to the world because only I can read these works. Even though I tried not to I found myself borrowing some literary concepts from culture at large in the writing of these works -- It was impossible not to borrow from the collective culture that we're all a part of. To put your tiny comparative amount of effort into a work then monopolize on the amalgamation for generations is disgusting -- We raised your brain, and that's the thanks we get?! Adding DRM to completely rob the culture that you benefit by is abhorrent.
Don't operate by way of artificial scarcity. Attempting to do so is counter to nature. Humans are data duplicating mac
I would like to be able to use DRM to share photographs of my family in such a way that does not allow the recipeint to share them with a third party.
Well, it's an honest question, so it deserves an honest answer...
My main point against DRM is the history of DRM...
- As a customer, if i buy, say, an album, i want to listen to it. ...as long as there isn't a DRM on them, that says "you can play this DRM-locked files only on our (expensive) MP3 player or on a PC - as long as it is a PC with Windows version xyz and our proprietary software, that will only work on this version of Windows, and only as long as we provide the DRM servers..."
With Vinyl, for example, this was - and is - clearly a thing to do at home, mainly due to technical limitations no one criticized - it was the "state of the art"... Then came tapes - with car cassette players, walkman et. al., and we got used to listening to music where we liked to... Of course we made copies - first of all they made our music portable, second tzhe - sometimes quite expensive originals" were kept at home and were less "used" up...
CDs made this easier still, and with digital files - be it MP3, FLAC, OGG, or whatever, i can play my stuff at home, in the car, everywhere i can use an MP3 player, and, and, and...
With LPs, Tapes, and CDs i have a medium containing the music that i own. I still have classical LPs from the sixties that still work. I re-bought some as CDs when CDs came out because CDs are easier to handle, but still i "own" these records resp.their "carriers"...
With DRMd files i have a - revokeable - license to play this music on the supported players, as long as the company providing the DRM lets me... In the last years, you can even expot your music to CD and then rip it from there, or you may even be able to get un-DRMd files, frojm iTunes, as an example... But if "sans DRM" works even for Apple, why burden _me, the customer_ with it at all?
Then you may have two musicians, authors, movies, whatever that are not available from "your" DRM supplier. Nobody guarantees you that multiple DRMs can coexist on one PC. In fact, there were (and still are) combinations that simply don't coexist...
Some work only while there's an active internet conncetion - no problem for me at home - at least as long as there is no network problem... ;-) But if you live in some U.S. backwater, where a pay-as-the-bits-dribble connection is the only connection you can get, you're out of luck...
The history of DRM is rather full of companies that said "Well, it's no longer useful _for us_, let's kill it off", leaving the buyers of media with this DRM in the cold... In the "better" cases, you can - investing lots of time, effort and quite some money - burn all your stuff to CDs, and then rip it yourself - have a nice four weeks of burning CDs...
In the not-so-good cases, well, say goodbye to your media - and the money you sank into them...
For an unsorted and very incomplete look into the issues for me as a "customer", see:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111031/13425616573/ding-dong-another-drm-is-dead-with-it-all-files-you-thought-you-bought.shtml
http://boingboing.net/2007/11/07/mlb-rips-off-fans-wh.html
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130325/11132122455/true-purpose-drm-to-let-copyright-holders-have-veto-right-new-technologies.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130317/16534822353/drm-strikes-again-digital-comics-distributor-jmanga-closing-down-deleting-everyones-purchases.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121126/18084721154/barnes-noble-decides-that-purchased-ebooks-are-only-yours-until-your-credit-card-expires.shtml
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/walmart-to-pull-plug-on-drm-servers/2661
If you're starting to get an idea why DRM doesn't work _for customers_, continue and check google for stories about "sony rootkit", "Zune DRM", and generically "DRM switched off"...
Now, on the other hand, i think i understand the "other" (author's) side, too, and i don't think it's amoral or bad to want a DRM to secure your own stuff against bootleggers... A workable DRM would have some requirements:
The artists are seldom the content creators. The content creators are seldom the copyright owners.
And if people stop doing it for the money, then those who do it out of passion will take over. That is not a bad thing. That is a good thing, Then you get people who are interested in the the thing they produce and not in their bank account.
Oh and then you have the "standing on the shoulders of giants" thing going on. When somebody uses something you created it feels great. Most of the time this is knowledge. However it can be software code or music or things you know how to do. Sharing that is a great thing.
Apparently you are all about the money. Do not forget to charge your kids when they want to learn to ride a bike. That way they pay you for your knowledge and you can even charge them when they ride their bike as THAT is what DRM is all about.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Yes, people don't only create stuff to get paid. But if you're a filmmaker, the bills rack up pretty quickly - and without money, they scope of what you can do is limited in some ways. For example: Inception would probably not have looked as good as it did if Chris Nolan and Warner Bros just planned to give it away DRM-free and ask for donations. Some things cost a lot of money to make! Personally, I like ambitious movies being around in the world. I want them to be profitable. If the studios feel they need DRM in order to get the money to do those films, it's their choice.
If the consumers hate DRM so much, they should vote with their wallets, not pay for any content with DRM, and start funding ambitious independent projects. They haven't done that so far in the scale necessary. Hopefully it will change - we are getting closer to this goal. Kickstarter etc is very promising but the money people are putting in needs to grow by 10. Fingers crossed.
As for the idea of giving a movie away and selling toys or product placement... that kinda limits the art, doesn't it? There are a lot of good art films whose primary value is just the 2 hours you're watching them. You're not going to buy an action figure of the main character of your art-house drama. If DRM was banned worldwide tomorrow, there would likely be less of those films around because if art houses had to switch to donation only, the money would decrease.
Also: when I do film post-production, I pay for the software I use. I don't get all indignant that Autodesk, Adobe, Avid, etc charged me money and put DRM in their software. It's their right. If I don't like it, I can protest by using Blender. If I used an illegal copy of Maya and framed it as a righteous anti-DRM protest, that'd be really shady. I've probably put $40,000 into software over the years. I'm happy to have contributed to some coders' paychecks. But if they watch my film, why can't they contribute back to mine?
So, yeah: People who don't like DRM can similarly protest by watching only content that's DRM free and giving money to those artists who make DRM-free content. If more people did that, there would be more creatives making good DRM-free stuff. That's the only moral way to do it. The rest is just a slippery slope. End rant! Yay! What do folks think?
I would like to hear from actual artists for a change.
Say goodbye to feature films and big FPS games for example.
And most textbooks with good editorial values and carefully checked exercises.
And most studio-quality music recordings with professional production values.
And most of the software that does incredibly boring things to help run businesses all over the world more efficiently.
Creating new works is easy and often fun. Creating good new works usually requires a lot of effort and/or specialist skills, which in turn are usually provided by people who aren't the creator/copyright holder but get paid for their contribution like any other job. Take away the financial incentive and most of those laborious supporting jobs disappear, along with all the benefits they bring.
You're absolutely right that the blockbusters with astronomical budgets like Hollywood's latest movie or EA's latest sports game would be impossible without serious financial support, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
About the only system I've seen where I would Say DRM works would be in a corporate environment to track and protect documents.
Both Adobe and Microsoft have a Good DRM system that uses Active Directories to control who can open, edit, copy and print documents from Acrobat and Office files. I've seen it in action and it's pretty secure as an added protection on top of an encrypted file system.
The biggest problem was that employees couldn't work on a document from home on their personal machines, but then again that was the point, and there was other options in place to allow work from home (they were using Citrix for virtual remote desktops that worked well for their needs).
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
I would suggest reading this and this. Preventing piracy generally doesn't do much to increase sales.
DRM may help reduce piracy in some circumstances, but the vast majority of pirates aren't going to buy the artist's content regardless of whether they can or cannot pirate it.
DRM doesn't protect the artist's profits. It just limits the potential audience that the artist could be reaching.
I will never buy any product including DRM, for all the good reasons mentioned in other posts. The stuff is mine, I want to make sure that I will be able to read/see/listen to it forever.
Renting is however different : if I want to see a movie just once, I only care about the price of the provided; if using DRM reduces piracy and hence lowers the price for me, I am all for it.
You're starting from a flawed assumption with the thought: "if there are no mechanisms to prevent someone from simply digitally copying a work".
There are all sorts of mechanisms. An obvious one is the law -- it's illegal, and you can be prosecuted and punished if you do not comply. Another is social -- many people are willing to pay for content, even if it were legal to make copies without compensation.
There's no technological enforcement mechanism against child abuse, but no one is suggesting that we need to embed trauma-monitoring chips in infants that call CPS if the kid gets hit. It's not clear to me why digital content requires more protection and law enforcement than babies.
The only time I've ever been able to think of a good use case for DRM is rentals.
As Seumas said earlier regarding DRM "You can obliterate the used market. You can force obsolescence. You can force time limits. You can force re-purchases for multiple devices." Sounds like rentals to me. If I pay $1.99 for a movie for 24 hours, I don't care if it deletes itself after 24 hours.
But if I pay $10 to own a movie, then I want to own it! I don't want to be restricted to Apple (or whichever) devices. I don't want to be restricted at all. I want to drop it on my Plex server and stream it to whatever device I want. I want to rerender it to 480p do it saves space on my phone. Also, DRM has always, degraded the experience for the true customer, and never prevented piracy. I have heard of anything available to consume that was DRMed and not available to pirate.
Here's an example - I don't have TV service. I watch Dr. Who and Psych. If I want to pay for my content I purchase the TV Passes from Amazon. I get the shows the day after they come on live TV. I get them available to stream, not to download. I can watch them on an iPad or Roku, but not a Nexus 7 or Apple TV. If my Internet goes out I can't watch it. In summary, I get them late, only available to stream, and only on certain devices.
If I want to pirate my content it's a bit different. I get the shows less than an hour after they go off the air. I can download them for personal backup, and can stream them myself using Plex/XMBC/etc. I can watch them on all devices. I can reconvert and drop to iTunes for playing on Apple TVs or other iDevices. I can burn to a DVD/BluRay if I'm going somewhere that only offers that. In short, it seems as if I own that far more than if I'd actually paid.
I truly believe artists should be paid for their work. I buy my content, but usually on DVD/BluRay so I can rip it and do as I please. DRM has never stopped anyone from pirating. But it has made loyal customers become pirates.
For my birthday, my elder sister gave me the full Star Wars Anthology Blu-Ray edition. (When we were kids, she used to take me to see each movie as it came out.) I bought a brand-new Phillips Blu-Ray player. I foolishly tried to play the Blu-Ray disc in the Blu-Ray player. However, the DRM on the Blu-Ray disc was newer than brand new Blu-Ray player. It took about two hours to figure out the problem, download a new flash image, write it to a suitably small thumb drive (must be under 4GB!), and go through the ~40min upgrade process.
All this to watch legally purchased media on a brand new player for said media.
Hating DRM is trendy here on Slashdot, and I'm usually the first to decry it. The problem is not with DRM but with shoddy and opaque implementation of DRM -- i.e. when its implementation hurts honest consumers.
There are a couple good reasons for DRM. One -- and please bear with me here, I promise I can justify it -- is to stop piracy. Okay, yes, DRM as it has been implemented by the vast majority of businesses has been nothing short of abysmal. It punishes the honest consumer without presenting so much as a stumbling block for hardened pirates. There's actually a lot of argumentative parallels here. Why have gun control when criminals will break the law while honest people won't? Why outlaw drugs when people who want to do drugs will do them anyway? These are actually really important arguments. However, while the contrast is stark, it's not a black-and-white scenario. Simply because we have the Second Amendment here in the states doesn't necessarily mean we should be giving everyone a rocket launcher. Marijuana might not be harmful, but should we really let people make meth in motels and poison all of the other guests?
In these scenarios, the key question is what is "reasonable" regulation. In other words, the question is what is economically efficient -- what methods and standards will save us more money in the long run than we will spend? Do we need to install backscatter machines in the airports to protect against terrorists? Probably not -- we'll never see that money back. Should we deregulate and let on someone carrying an RPG? Also, no. The cost of preventing people carrying RPGs on airplanes is minimal compared to the savings. Even assuming I were lawfully carrying my RPG for non terrorist-y activities, what if it accidentally detonated? The savings are greater than the cost.
The same is true with DRM. The problem that consumers have with DRM is that it robs them of the cost of their experience. I paid full price to get some gimped, server-dependent version of the game that was not what was advertised to me. DRM right now is like backscatter machines in airports; it assumes everyone is a criminal, attempts to push the limits of personal freedoms and privacy, and ultimately is probably motivated by greed more than user experience. But that doesn't mean that DRM itself has to be evil or bad. While there are plenty of textbook cases out there of people who download to try-before-buying, or who live in a country where the software/game is unavailable via legitimate retail, there are also a plethora of people who simply want to download a product without paying for it. They'll justify it with the same reasons -- "I'm punishing the developers for X" or "I can't afford it right now." This assumes that the user has some inherent right in the product that gives them the ability to use that product without paying for it. To be honest -- and I know this is going to be an unpopular view -- but the same can be said of regional restrictions. Nothing gives me the personal right to download and play a Japanese game in the U.S. I might justify it by saying that I'm not hurting the copyright holder if he couldn't have sold it to me in the first place. I might think that I have an inherent right in the public domain, that copyright is (as it is) artificial and should only be presumed where the rightsholder is enforcing his rights (i.e. not in the U.S.). But legally that's not how it works. Nothing specifically grants me the right to use something that I have not paid for. Part of the difference is due to internet culture buying into the notion that information is free and should be shared amongst everyone. We recoil when the capitalist world starts to encroach on our free internet with their advertising and paywalls and out-to-make-a-buck mentality, so we flee the corporatized services like Facebook in search of something more open. I digress, though, and that's a different issue.
DRM's problem is in how it's implemented. Inevitably the cost of implementation is great
So you can tell a judge you "locked the door" when businesses that can damn well afford it decide to steal your $10,000 business application that you've decided needs to be that expensive due to a very small market.
Whether there's actually a good reason to charge that price is arguable, but if you do, you'd better "secure" it.
"Because, in my eyes, when people stop getting paid for what they do, they'll stop doing it. " Your assumptions: 1) Without DRM artists will not get paid. (Demonstrably false) 2) Artists create only because they get paid. (Demonstrably false) Here's my observation: 1) DRM makes the experience worse for paying customers. (Demonstrably true) I WANT to pay the artists that I enjoy. I buy books. I go to movies. I buy DVDs. I buy games. But you know what? DVDs and games are a lot less enjoyable. It's a pain in the neck to watch the unskippable ads on DVDs. It's a pain in the neck to have to have the game in the drive to play. Result? I buy more of the stuff that doesn't annoy me, and less of the crap with DRM.
German authors, publishers, and readers were all far better off than English ones. The article explains the reason for this seemingly-paradoxical result.
And the reasons hold, I'm sure, for current DRM. FWIW.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
The Columbus Civic Center charges $2000/event or 12% of gross, whichever is greater. Then it applies lots of nickels and dimes for box office, staffing, etc. It seats 10,000 people.
If you sold 5,000 tickets at $10 per, you would gross $50,000. Let's say the arena took $10,000 of that in fees. That leaves you with $40,000. If you spent $10,000 on travel expenses (busing, food, hotel, etc), and $10,000 on promotion, you might clear $20,000 for the night. Split among 10 band and crew members, that's $2,000 a piece. If you do 26 gigs in a year, that's $52,000 of income each year. Without selling a single T-shirt, CD, bumper sticker, concessions, etc.
That's performing every other weekend for crowds of only 5000 people selling tickets for only $10.
So what does DRM have to do with this? How can DRM help? Well, what if you could spend less that $10,000 per gig on promotions. What if you could get radio stations and club DJs and such to give you lots of air time, driving up the popularity of your music. What if you could get 1000 people to pay 99 cents for one of your songs, then "pirate" it to 40 or 50 of their friends? Well, on top of the $1000 of revenue from the initial sale, you might spend $1000 less promoting each gig. And you might get another 100 people to buy a ticket. So that's an extra $2000/per gig of profit ($200/person). So now each band/crew member makes $57,000/year.
But $57,000 isn't really millionaire stuff. Even if you gain enough celebrity to sell 10,000 tickets per gig, and charge $25/ticket, you each make less than $250,000/year. And how long can you keep touring the world, dragging giant speakers around a stage and setting up your visual effects. 20 years? So you need a way to make money without doing any actual work. You need a retirement plan. You need a lot more people to pay 99 cents for a lot more of your recordings. Suddenly, handing our free recordings to everybody isn't a promotional trick to drive ticket sales, it is a major loss of income. You need to sell 600,000 songs a year to gross $60,000 per band/crew member. Of course, you could cut out the crew members and gross $120,000 each. But your webstore is going to take a 20% cut, so you are back down below $100,000/year. And if everyone who pays 99 cents keeps sharing with 40 or 50 friends, that really hurts. It means you might have to get a job at Walmart to pay for your healthcare expenses.
So, now can you see a good reason for DRM?
The truth of the matter is that most people are fundamentally honest. If you give people a fair opportunity to "do the right thing" the majority of them will. Yes there will be some loss to kids freely copying stuff, although even that can often have a more positive impact than negative, and is essentially equivalent to kellogs giving away free pop tarts to university students, it's a promotional expense and really costs the artist nothing at all--again, if the works are easily available most people will actually do the right thing and support the artist.
Tell you what, the entertainment industry is ok using DRM ? It is ok with me.
But as long as they insist on "pretending" to sell movies, books, videogames, etc...; I'll pretend to pay them for those same movies, books, videogames, etc...
Good for the customer? Yes, I can think of many. If content providers cannot protect their content, they will not make it available digitally. F you want to rent a movie, you'll have to get in the car and drive to the nearest newly-reopened Blockbuster.
If a content provider cannot prevent you from skipping ads, they will not be able to generate [as much] ad revenue. This means since they cannot rely on sponsors for revenue - they'll have to rely on YOU - goodbye free content.
If you hate DRM - go use services without them. I'm not forcing you to use it. Just don't complain to the studios that you want something better than VHS - because they won't give you their content DRM-free. I am sure there is plenty of quality DRM-free content out there that studios and producers have made - that they're willing to let you watch, completely unprotected. If not, you can always watch the plethora of quality FOS content.
I waited years for DRM free digital music to come along. When it did, I threw money at it.
Maybe I am an anomaly, but after years of bitching about how bullshit it was that the record companies wouldn't let me download music legally without crap attached, once they did (Amazon, etc.), I felt the need to respond in kind. Now I routinely check there first and buy the entire album if it's offered. The price of a digital album is extremely fair now IMHO.
Anyone still bitching about how "music should be free" is a dick. If you were the guy making that music not having enough money to feed your kids you'd reconsider.
The original post begs the question of "DOES DRM actually deliver revenue to the content owners." It assumes that it does and that therefore there needs to be some mechanism to enable DRM to do so.
As has been pointed out numerous times here on /. as well as techdirt and popehat and reddit and other places, that is NOT the case. The revenue that is gained goes to ENFORCEMENT, goes to HARASSMENT of "illegal downloaders"[sic - downloading is not illegal], but NEVER to the artists who created the content.
A better refinement of the question should read:
"What mechanisms could be used to ensure that the creators of content are compensated and their rights are not taken nor abused?" There are quite a few examples (in the sources previously cited) where artists put their content for downloads, and VOLUNTARY DONATIONS bypass the hoarde of middlemen thieves to make the artist wealthy. There are no "technical" mechanisms that can let someone read a book, listen to a song, or view a video that they cannot then make a copy. If you don't allow them to backup that copy, watch/listen/view it on multiple devices including car-audio or smartphone, they will make their own copy and no revenue will be afforded the creator.
A second mechanism is one where the content is EASILY made available for these uses, but incrementally the value-add is to the buyer who chooses to buy that other copy. For example: if I buy a Blu-Ray of BestMovieEver and for another $2 I can download it to my smartphone with chapters, subtitles, and all the features I'd want to see in an original creation (but won't get in a BR-rip) that's worth it.
If I buy a book from AMZ and for another $0 I can get it for my Kindle [reader on my smartphone] for ALL titles and it will NOT be pulled away later [like 1984] then that's a great value. Maybe for another $5 I can get a second copy stamped "Office Library" in big red letters on the softbound cover, so I can keep that in the office to read.
If I get an MP3 or two or three or an album, and for $5 I get a jewel box with a CD for the car, or a poster of the band... those are also value adds.
Key 1: technology will not prevent copying
Key 2: giving the content creator the revenue means removing all the thieves from the middle of the process
Key 3: getting "revenue" to exist means giving the buyer a "value-add" to purchase more, and thereby an incentive to purchase, rather than today's attempts to dis-incent the copying.
Good luck.
E
is there ever a time when DRM is justified?
It all depends on the DRM in question. Are we talking about taking *REASONABLE* measures in order to protect your investment against outright theft, then yes (IMHO this is the only legitimate use).
If we are talking about locking up stuff that otherwise would be in the public domain, then no.
If we are talking about, say creating a music service, selling music, then after a year turn the authentication servers off and tell people who bought your stuff tough shit (aka the Microsoft music service, whatever that was called) then no.
If we are talking about a cell phone company locking up a phone so it can surreptitiously spy on its owner (CarrierIQ, Android, iOS), or won't work on any other networks (AT&T), then no.
If we are talking about silencing security experts who found "problems" with many of your products, then no.
The list of negatives goes on and on and on ad nauseam.
DRM by itself is value diminishing. The presence of DRM should (IMO) come with a discount vs non DRMd.
That stated, you can /augment/ the DRM with value enhancing features -- the best example of which... is steam.
It's still DRM. I still don't like them. But if I really want a game, I buy it through steam because the electronic distribution and cloud /augments/ the experience.
By permitting me to install it on as many devices as I want without needing media. By providing cloud storage so my campaigns cross between computers.
But -- I research first. If you're on steam and don't provide it, I don't buy it.
Similarly, your DRM /could/ come with 'more' value. It /could/ come with additional, 'limited' content. With more features, pictures of creation, media, etc.
But at the core -- you're still taking value from me by restricting my fair use of the media. Maybe I want it on my phone, as a ringtone, as a picture printed out on poster at staples on the wall, on my netbook, whatever.
At the most minmal principle, DRM adds no value for the consumer beyond the hypothetical survival of the artist.
And I say hypothetical -- because it's established that DRM costs you users (it may be established that it gains purchasers in some situations, I'm not clear on that). It's also established that there's no DRM that can't be cracked.
Which unfortunately means /regardless/ of cost -- an equivalently priced, pirate-stripped DRM free copy of your /anything/ is more valuable than your software.
Even if they weren't competing on cost -- pirated stuff has more value than yours.
DRM hurts your customers.
I do not CARE if artists are starving.
NOTHING justifies blatant disrespect for the property rights of the end user who the MAFIAA would have paid fair and square for his content.
DRM is *nothing* but a cash grab, and is abused to enforce concessions against end users above and beyond those required by copyright law.
And maybe even make a small profit? I know this doesn't fit the culture of "free stuff, yippee" that makes up much of Slashdot, but if the behaviors regarding software were extended to physical items, the economy as we know it couldn't function. Every economic exchange involves a restriction of access. Every one. Food. Automobiles. MP3 players. I know that somehow software and digital content is supposed to be magic and different because..... just because.
So hey, cars want to be free. Why don't you just pick up the next one that strikes your fancy and drive off. Then you can order some food in a restaurant and not pay, while listening to the MP3 player you boosted from the store.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Yes, expensive, proprietary training videos should require DRM. However, the client in which it's viewed can also be limited due to the circumstance. For small, exact target audiences, DRM is appropriate. But as a market-wide blanket solution it clearly is an abject failure.
Honest answer = we all hate DRM cause we just wanna pirate shit.
I mean its nice to be able to transfer it to different devices and such, but come on, who doesn't want shit for free.
Because, sometimes they just have to touch the stove.
-YY1
DRM protects the rights of content creators (aka, artists) and helps to prevent people freely distributing their works and with no compensation.
Wrong. The artist's agency and lawyer(s) protect the rights of the content creator, which are worth very little without access to a mass market, which is guarded by DRM structures. What DRM does is protect the exclusivity rights of a mass media publisher, who defines the mass market to their advantage only. You said it yourself, "freely distributing." If you're trying to stop the distribution of a work, it's because you're protecting the distributor's rights through artificial scarcity in a world where it no longer requires massive publications facilities and real capital investment to mass produce media. The publications industry is in dire need of justifying itself, and does so as a only as a rights manager and promotional mechanism, and forces the rest by using cartel agreements to corner, and limit, the mass market potentials that exist. The physical publishing and distribution itself has long since lapsed into obsolescence. Let alone encumbering cheap reproductions with digital locks to approximate the scarcity that used to exist in the days of yore, to justify their continued business practices.
In short: Artists have been getting screwed for decades, and are probably, in the long run, screwed out of their fair share by DRM. DRM's purpose is to enforce who gets to do the screwing. That is all.
The movie industry keeps parading highest grossing films ever.
The music labels get more and more profit.
Declining sales? Well, we've also seen over the 30 years increasing DRM and reduction in consumer rights.
Ever think of looking there?
As for something better, software developers found it in the late 1990's. It is called Software As A Service (SaaS). It doesn't work for other forms of art, like movies and music, but it is extremely effective for software.
Consumers don't own a copy of the software behind Facebook or Twitter or Steam or Origin or Instagram or Google Docs or Office 365. Even though they don't own a copy, the masses are more than willing to invest fortunes on the platforms. Using them requires an Internet connection, and it requires that their servers are running.
When you start editing your documents on Google Docs or Office 365 you do not own a copy of the editor. You are relying entirely on software outside your control.
My company is just one of countless others that have made a hard choice; the choice to get Office 365 where they do not have a copy of the software. On the one hand this greatly simplifies our IT department's job, it is one less piece of software to install on thousands of computers, and it is far cheaper to license.
But the down side is we don't have our own copy of the software. If our Internet access goes down, Office is down. If Office365 servers have maintenance we are dead in the water. And most relevant: we are entirely at the mercy of the company for access to the software.
Services come and go over time. Usually they die when their customer base shrinks low enough. It is unlikely that Google Docs and Office 365 will suddenly stop services today, but we can be sure they will turn off the servers at the end of the product's life. That will be either when a new product is available or when most users have moved on. Anyone relying on their services at that time will simply be out of luck; whatever they had on the services will be lost.
This protects the interest of the creator --- they will get paid. And they can get paid on an annual or per-use basis.
It impacts the customer in that the consumer because, in order to keep their business competitive the vendor must continuously add features and functionality. But it also has the fatal flaw: the moment the creator stops supporting the product, they are left with a useless smart-client with no server.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
No author I know of uses DRM; distributors use DRM. It's all about protecting the distributor's right to enrichment, not about the content creator.
I might have some sympathy for content distributors if they didn't simultaneously screw over their customers and the authors. One by DRM, the other by Hollywood Accounting. You know, that scheme where they pay out nothing in royalties because nothing ever makes the studio any money?
No. It's defective by design. It cannot co-exist with general-purpose computers, and so the content cartel seeks to eliminate general-purpose computers and put them under some form of centralized control. That is, in a word, evil.
There is no "right" to prevent others from reading or copying a work. I'm all for authors and musicians getting paid, but I've been arguing for over a decade now that the way to do that is to eliminate copyright and establish a royalty-right, modeled after songwriter royalties. I can sing "Tangled Up In Blue" for free at a party; if I play it at the bar, using it to make money, Dylan gets his nickel. I'm happy if people share my book or my album for free; if they make money off of it (putting it on an ad-supported site, for example), I want a cut. (The book is not CC licensed but will be DRM free; I intend to CC license a later edition after my publishing contact expires.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
http://jamendo.org/ is loaded with high quality music. It might not be the the latest FM crap that big media has trained you to want, but it surely is high quality works of art for people that actually listens to music.
New signature coming soon.
Every picture you take, every post you write, every video you upload is owned by you. Copyright law protects you just the same as it protects everyone else. What if we had proper functioning DRM on the content we create? People wouldn't be able to just re-upload your video on YouTube and profit from the ad revenue. Embarrassing crotch shot photos wouldn't be able to viewed except by the intended recipient or republished in a newspaper or on the Daily Show. Photos uploaded to Facebook intended just for your friends wouldn't end up being seen by your employeer. Text messages that are stored on the carriers servers would not be able to read without your permission by law enforcement. Emails left on a webmail provider would not be subject to (IMHO illegal) search and seizure after they turn 6 months old.
The problem with DRM as implemented today is that it assumes there are a small number of content creators and a large number of content consumers. But in fact we are all content creators. There are a million valid and legitimate uses for DRM that could be used by every one of us every day, and we would all appreciate the control that it gave us over our own content.
Steam shows what a good implementation of DRM can do. I can install steam and download and play my computers games anywhere I want to. Offline mode is available as well, although then the game is locked to that computer. Unlimited free copies don't work in games where there are hackers anyway. People actually complain about games being too cheap on steam because then a hacker will buy a couple copies.
if customers could manage their keys then it would enable a second hand market
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JK_Wedding_Entrance_Dance
Wedding dance made famous. Really innovative and interesting. Drove sales of the song, which was a year old, right back up the charts on both Amazon and iTunes. I couldn't help but chuckle. If that were done today ala Dancing Baby http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/after-five-years-dancing-baby-youtube-takedown-lawsuit-nears-a-climax/ then would sales have been driven? How about the charity donations the couple setup? If that were posted today would YouTube immediately yank it? I'm betting yes. DRM could have even prevented them from using the song since it's been proposed that watermarks prevent re-recording. Would DRM have prevented it's use? If the RIAA had their way it would have!
Artists sweat and worry about loss of sales but examples like the above prove that being able to freely use a song don't mean it will lead to poor sales. I understand the concern. Frankly if I were a writer going through a big publishing house being forced to sell my e-copies at higher than bound copy price I'd be VERY worried. what I don't understand is the shortsightedness. Look at the latest SimCity for kripes sakes - I was going to buy that until I heard about the B.S. The new XBOX? always on for DRM purposes? FAIL! I will not be buying one.
So no, I cannot think of a single instance where DRM in any way enhances a product such that it's a good thing for the consumer aka the customer. Want to pin the customer down, tie his hands, force feed him? Better hope no one comes along with an even slightly decent alternative because unless I'm forced I will not subscribe to DRM laden crap and I will break it any chance I get when I'm forced into it ala books and movies. Hell since DRM was lifted from music I've been BUYING bunches of it off of Amazon!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
that they're willing to let you watch
And that right there is the problem. They let us watch what we've already paid for. They want to control it. They want us to watch ads on DVD's every time we watch a movie even if I watch a 10 year old movie and the ad is for something isn't made any more.
Do we get to dictate what they do with our money? No? So why do they get to dictate what we can do with a DVD, or CD, or Game or software title that we own? Because they think that they still own it and are blessing us with the privilege of being able to watch it once we've paid their randsom.
I don't pirate anything, but I absolutely vote with my wallet. Losing my purchase won't make or break any company, but missing out on their idea of how I should be able to use their product won't make or break me either.
Anyone who is a digital content creator (be it artist, writer, or software developer) will want, at some point, to at least hope they can control who can make copies of their work. One might want to give away some of their creations for marketing purposes, but not all of it. For those who argue that copying digital giids is inevitabe I say that is illegal and is theft. If no protection whatsoever exists then copying can go on unhindered.
Rather than focusing on DRM itself, let's turn things back around and focus on why we have DRM in the first place.
There is a demand for rented content. A movie that I want to watch once, but have no desire to keep. A book I want to read once, but don't plan to read again. I song I want to hear when I'm in the mood to listen to music, but don't want to own. Not everyone wants these things - you might not want these things - but a lot of people do, including me. I also want to own things, but for now let's focus on the things I don't. I might be willing to pay $15 to buy my own copy of a movie, but I only want to pay a tenth of that to rent it.
It used to be that you could go to a video rental place and rent a movie on VHS. It was possible to copy them, but most people didn't own the necessary equipment (a second VCR), there was a loss of quality in the copying process, and the blank media cost about as much as the rental. Similar issues with copying a show of the TV or a song off the radio (minus the part about the second VCR).
In the digital era, data can be copied perfectly with no loss of quality and the media to store it on is cheap.
As a consumer, I want the option to rent a movie for $1.50 or buy it for $15. Content providers want to offer me this choice. How would you suggest that this should work?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Don't ask how to reduce free copying, ask how to increase sales. If you can increase sales while also increasing free copying, you get more money. If you are in it to be heard, or to make money, that's a win. The only way it's not a win is if your primary goal is control rather than either money or being heard.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
How would those who are opposed to DRM ensure that artists will get just compensation for their works if there are no mechanisms to prevent someone from simply digitally copying a work (be it music, movie or book) and giving it away to anyone who wants it?
That asumes that drm work. There is not yet any drm that actuly will provide this. All drm schemse get broken and then you have the case where your paying customer get's a worse product than the freeloaders. Somethimes i wish that the perfect drm would exist becus that would leave the industri nothing to blame their failures on. But a perfect drm is a pipe dream it will never exist.
"when people stop getting paid for what they do, they'll stop doing it."
That is the real solution to the problem if people cant get the content they want becus no one is doing it people will start to pay.
crowdsourcing etc
I do not accept that you should be compensated for the information being transferred, you should at most be compensated for the labor with which you created it. Your distribution of a work has no value anymore.
Is that it limits information sharing.
The biggest problem that the internet caused is that it destroyed culture. Worldwide.
Everyone has this common generic culture now.
This kind of culture didn't exist before the internet. Before the internet, you actually had societies develop and advance the arts. But, if you didn't notice already, culture has pretty much frozen since around 1995.
People wear the same clothes as they do in 1995. Style hasn't advanced like it did from the 50's to the 70's. Or from the 70's to the 90's.
People listen to the same kinds of music.
They use the same grammar and language from 20 years ago.
And so on.
It's a pretty well documented phenomenon, and a great Vanity Fair article from a couple years ago describes this perfectly: http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-201201
The whole idea of information being free and shared by everyone is actually destructive to society, since that means information becomes devalued when culture becomes democratic. It devalues professional tastemakers, causing populist sensibilities to take hold, which is the exact cause of cultural stagnation. Democratic sensibilities are always obvious, and can never advance the state-of-the-art that professional tastemakers can.
So, not everyone needs to see the same movies, listen to the same music, and so on. It is perfectly fine to limit these items, to make sure there ARE "have-nots". People don't HAVE to have every single goddam song in their library.
We really do need to limit the spread of information, through costs, DRM, or other means, to cause society to advance. Right now the world is frozen in 1995, because information is too open.
Seriously, it is perfectly fine to not know things or to have things. Your life is going to be just fine. But the democratic population wants everything.
Limit them.
If you want to do something about piracy, look at watermarking your content. E.g. if Joe User buys an ebook from you, make sure you can identity the file as belonging to him. If you later find it on TPB, you know who to sue. Watermarking, if done correctly, is somewhere between invisible and non-annoying.
The only people who see ads claiming piracy is bad are the people who paid for the content.
With the added bonus that it also increases demand for technical support.
Look at how artists get paid today. The baseline assumption in your statement is that DRM prevents piracy, for which there is exactly zero evidence. So any way that an artist gets paid today is a way they get paid in a world without DRM.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
This is just consequence of the society we live in. We are measured for what we own, so if we can`t pay for something we take it anyway. I think that if the author wants to DRM his/her stuff out it`s a right they have. But usually who goes for DRM is not the creator of the content, but the business that wants to capitalize on the work as much as they think possible.
As the battle for more draconian DRM is fought to harden DRM, consumers will accept it less and less. This will eventually make profits drop because of DRM, we just have to hold the ground. Maybe that`s a naive point of view but I rather believe that can happen than not. I`m sure I`ll make my part.
There`s so much content available nowadays that people can always get DRM free options. For instance: I can hear to heavy metal only available in DRM free services or play games sold without DRM.
This combination doesn`t exist: ETIs that know about humanity and want to see us dead. Otherwise we wouldn't exist.
DRM will stop the casual sharing of music. For example, high school kids...back when I was in high school and MP3s were just coming out, we would regularly trade music with our friends because we couldn't afford to buy all the music we wanted and it was easy to do so. Kids nowadays are probably either using something like BitTorrent or iTunes to acquire their music. If they're using iTunes, it's not so easy for them to share that music because iTunes somewhat locks it to their account. So, it may generate some additional revenue for the artist by way of additional sales because DRM prevents the music from being shares by the casual listener.
OTOH, it probably does more harm to the artist by preventing all those other people that would have heard their music for free illegaly, become =fans, paid for concert tickets, etc. Artists really need to get rid of their hard on for DRM and realize that it's doing them more harm than good. They should focus on making money off the scarce goods like concert tickets, merchandise, fan exclusive deals, etc. Use music or art to get people to like you, then you can sell them other things.
DRM is trying to artificially create scarcity and it works to an extent, but see above, it's doing more harm than good.
I can only think of one: Digital lending libraries.
N/T
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The "studies" you refer to found that teenagers are into music. Nothing more, nothing less. They then claim "the same 'people' (age group) that steals music also buys it. Some teenagers steal, others buy. It's not the same people. It's just that teenagers are the largest market for new music. Teenagers steal the most music, listen to the most music, and talk about music the most. That doesn't mean thieves are purchasers.
centre21 asked: "is there ever a time where DRM can be a force for good"? There are multiple perspectives to consider. They are:
1. Content creators who want DRM because they fear that not enough people will pay them for the content without it. This group would do well to understand the recent rapid changes to content distribution that have occurred due to the advent of the Internet.
2. Studios / distributors who are in it purely for the money. They want everyone to pay as much as possible. They are panicking because they have failed to adapt to the Internet, which provides for almost zero-cost worldwide distribution and has made them obsolete. They are the loudest proponents of DRM by far, pouring so much money into it that they have been able to purchase laws and have directed the FBI's operations in foreign countries against pirate duplicators. They are huge, but they going to wane and the throes are not going to be pretty.
3. Pirates circumvent DRM. DRM does not prevent pirates from producing downloadable content for the next group:
4. People who will download/copy and never pay. This is a massive base of free advertising. This group will not only distribute, but will promote good content to paying customers that would not have otherwise been reached. Content creators that understand this can take advantage of it. Many fail to understand it and provide no easy way for paying customers that receive a copy to reach back and pay for it. Id Software's DOOM is an excellent example of one way to take advantage of this mechanism.
5. Paying customers generally don't care about DRM until it prevents them from enjoying the content that they paid for. Then they care about it a lot. Once a paying customer has been denied by a content creator's DRM, it can be difficult to get them to make another purchase.
Keep in mind that there is no such thing as DRM and never will be. Like perpetual motion machines, DRM is theoretical only. In practice, there are only degrees of inconvenience. It's mathematically impossible to allow paying customers to view/hear/play the content while guaranteeing that they cannot make a copy of it, so it's important for content creators to understand this new mechanism of distribution. DRM or no DRM, those that get it and use it to their advantage will do better than those who do not.
My employer as well as our direct competitors are looking to use what might be considered DRM to protect servers that run hypervisors for untrusted VMs.
We use SecureBoot to make protect against attacks against our unattended installation / provisioning layer. We use it to make sure binaries aren't seeded into our environment. I.E. we're using trusted computing.
http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/07/26/judge-rules-that-circumventing-drm-is-not-illegal/
http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/07/23/29099.htm
-> "The owner's technological measure must protect the copyrighted material against an infringement of a right that the Copyright Act protects, not from mere use or viewing."
Since making backup copies of media you purchased has been a protected right of consumers for years, this means that breaking DRM to copy media for your own personal use is NOT illegal.
Fuck the RIAA/MPAA.
Just "Create" (because only "artists" do that yaknow, the rest of us just "make stuff" ) Statues, Paintings, Installations, Live Theatre /Performance, Architecture,Furniture, Physical items of all types. Boom, no DRM needed.
Oh, but you wanted to only have to create it once and then get paid for it over and over again thanks to *my* computers ability to duplicate digital patterns?
So what you're saying is you want my machine to only do what it's designed to do with your approval? You want the advantages of the digital world to only work in your favour?
No, I don't think so. Please take your precious secret bit patterns elsewhere, go make something tangible and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
The cops is all the DRM we need - because copying (for sale) is already illegal. Watermarking, different for each legitimate copy sold, can make it easier to track those pirates. DRM that makes format shifting etc. harder has no use.
There was a time that I thought that if any industry took the default position all that their customers were thieves, then the proverbial shutters on their business would break the sound barrier closing.
Then the past 10 years of DRM history came by, and put the lie to that. Oh well.
I suppose the logic applies to things like clothing security tags, too. Even if clothing stores remained a viable business even before their introduction. Honest customers be honest, yo.
If you really think you need DRM, go ahead, but don't justify it by the fear of '1 kid'. He's not distributing to the aether, and the people on the other end of those transactions are not going to come flocking to you if the DRM presents a sufficient speedbump for the kid. And be prepared to deal with the reality of any implementation of DRM; it's never transparent.
DRM doesn't do anything but hurt sales and company reputation. People that want to pirate will break the DRM and pirate regardless. Trashing your DRM means nothing to them except for being a brief challenge. But if you prevent a paying customer from using their CD/DVD/game console as they wish, THOSE are the people that will quit giving you cash! They won't buy your next CD. They won't buy your next DVD. They won't buy your next game console or game.
But, like all attempts at legislating morality, it's doomed. Just doomed.
I get at the point of DRM when I say, "Check out this Joe Satriani!"
The kid says, "Hey, that's cool, let me rip that."
"Dude. We've got to keep Joe Satriani in guitar strings. Let me give you this. I'll buy another copy."
This is an example of busting somebody's chops in a positive way. The focus is on the artist, not the fact that the kid's nascent grasp of economics is both immoral and a threat to the market. Better still, there isn't a godforsaken politician or lawyer in sight.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
What you are arguing against is mass distribution and centralized control over culture. Sure, the free flow of information causes trends to spread quickly to the furthest reaches of the world, but that does not mean there is little variation. Remember when Beverly HIlls 90210 made it popular to have a fucking bowl-cut? Some called it a mushroom. I think someone in Hollywood made a bet that they could popularize something stupid and won. DRM does nothing to create "haves and have nots" it just makes people pay more - everyone still sees everything, they just may wait for it to be iin the $5 bin at Wallmart if they can't pick it up used sooner than that (DRM tries to disallow resale).
If you actually want diversity then you should want the free flow of "stuff" to destroy Hollywood and the record companies. That is the only way to bring about local or regional (non-centralized) creation of cultural stuff (fassion, music, movies). I'm not advocating this BTW because while individuals and smaller groups will create better diversity, it sometimes takes a big budget to make great quality. I'm just saying that DRM does nothing to relieve the stagnation you're concerned about. It only serves to concentrate wealth, and if you think that will lead to diversity then you should revisit your contrast of decades past to the present.
the problem that you've got is the resentment of several years - decades - of abusively-high pricing. people feel that they've been ripped off, so they have no qualms about copying. *UNFORTUNATELY* that mind-set is now entrenched, and an independent artist selling their own creative material is, sadly, going to get hit by that.
whom can the finger be "pointed at" for this situation? well, some would say the record labels for being greedy. but there's a counter-example which illustrates that that's not *entirely* the case. in japan, they love anime. so much so that the fans actually support the directors in every way possible. when a film comes out, the director distributes it first on bittorrent. the fans copy it, enjoy it, buy the t-shirts, buy the merchandise. they distribute it, they translate it, they produce their own dubbed soundtracks, and redistribute them freely.
but here's the kicker: when the official DVDs come out, they PULL THE BITTORRENTs AND GO OUT AND BUY THE DVD.
bear in mind that this is japan, but that's still absolutely stunning. and it puts us westerners lamenting a situation where our poor artists cannot make a living in this day and age to absolute shame. food for thought.
Ideologues don't allow the possibility that there are ever valid exceptions to their dogma.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
DRM (in particular always-online DRM) is absolutely essential in combating hackers/exploiters/cheaters/griefers.
Cheaters will always find new cheats. But if you paid $70 for a game and know you'll basically throw that money away (and/or get your entire Steam or whatever account banned from a lot of other games as well), you'll be far less likely to cheat given that each time you're banned you'll have to shell out another $70 to cheat again.
My
I don't like DRM in the consumer world, DRM'd media files, games, etc. I agree with all the arguments against using DRM there. Criminalizing decryption is a travesty of justice.
However, there are entirely different contexts where DRM can be a useful tool. For example, in a past job, my company was receiving a sensitive data feed from another company where we had to promise to revoke our internal access to certain parts of the data feed upon demand. We were not worried about internal hackery, but we were worried about inadvertent copies being made within our enterprise for reasonable reasons. (Backups, caches for speed, etc.) We self-imposed DRM, and it was a great solution.
" Because, in my eyes, when people stop getting paid for what they do, they'll stop doing it. "
Not remotely. Google intrinsic motivation, and try to come to terms with that fact that there are a great number of people (the majority, I would dare to state), who do what they do not because they are being manipulated with a general purpose social drug (money), but instead because they honestly love what they do and feel compelled, as a free spirit, to push the state of the art in their field.
In fact, I would go so far as to state that products made by individuals who give a shit (as in, would happily work on a project that interests them simply to stave off boredom regardless of being paid) are nearly always of higher quality than individuals meeting minimum functionality requirements and unit tests so that they can keep the pay coming in, but also be out the door by 5.
The case for DRM, is that you want to place a Daemon on a strangers system... spyware essentially... running without their consent or control, which actively sabotages their system so that your rights are maintained. Stop and think about that for a second: Based on your silly notion that people only do things to get paid, you take it upon yourself to assume that you have to right to invade a whole host of other peoples space, and insist that your rights to only work for pay trump their rights to use a machine they own, to utterly insist that they not use their computing resources to potentially give you the most valuable form of free advertising - Personal referrals. You are telling them ' not only do I not want you to advertise for me, for free, and expose the work I'm (obviously not very proud of) to more people, and instead, I am going to (join in the plethora of organizations which feel completely self-justified to invade your home, monitor your behavior, and explicitly sabotage the capacity of your computer to make sure you don't.
If the commercial software/content world cannot come to terms with the free advertising and personal referrals that come from unrestricted copy-left environments, they are fucked. They are fucked because the commercial platforms increasingly rely on every more bloated, rube goldberg contraptions (as if decent software engineering isn't hard enough), to actively place animated animated barriers and toll taking in front of the user, irritating them to no end. This might work, if commercial software was all that was available... but it's not... and frankly, without the unnecessary complexity and vulnerabilities brought by building backdoors (or a backdoor per DRM organization), the libre software world has massively overtaken the commercial software world in terms of basic ease of use, reliability, and user experience. While this technological leap forward has largely been out of the public eye, because the American mainstream tends to not trust anything not sold to them... but you know what they do trust? Their friends (those same free and personal referrals that DRM is ironically so effective at blocking), and the fact is that their friends computers (the small segment that have actually switched) work so obviously better than their DRM laden counterparts gives us an easy way to win social capital by doing quick favors and 'freeing' our friends of the rube goldberg nightmare of 'No you can't do this' and "Please input your credit card number to continue' that plagues tollware systems.
DRM is complex spyware to wage a campaign of observation and active sabotage on your customers systems so that they can't share your work if it excites and inspires them. If you really think you're going to be successful at holding your customers and users in such extreme, obvious contempt, you're simply asocially delusional.
too tell us whom treasonous bastards are in society so we cna gather them all in one room and blow it up ....
Is that it limits information sharing.
The biggest problem that the internet caused is that it destroyed culture. Worldwide.
Everyone has this common generic culture now.
This kind of culture didn't exist before the internet. Before the internet, you actually had societies develop and advance the arts. But, if you didn't notice already, culture has pretty much frozen since around 1995.
I dunno where you're from, and I also dunno when you first started using the Net
I can point to you a lot of counter examples to what you have claimed, but to make this comment short, I'll list only one example --- the Fractal Arts
Before the Internet, people hardly know what the hell "Fractal" was
They might have seen some pictures on some magazine covers
They might have been told by their friends about amazing fractals
They might have seen a documentary or two (mostly from the PBS stations, something like Nova) that illustrate what "Fractal" is
That's all the exposure of Fractal to the human kind .... until the Net
With the Net, people get to visit sites with tons and tons of fractal pictures, they get to download the software and play with them, they get to share the formulaes, they get to discuss how to do what on online forums, and so on ...
To many --- including yours truly --- I've benefited a lot from the Net
I've learned a lot of things I never knew existed --- even from a site like Slashdot
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
When you wrote: "I know in Christianity there were banns on copying the Bible because the church was supposed to be the word of God, and if anyone could read the word of God, why would they come to (and tithe) their church?" you were wrong on every point... try not claiming to "know" things you clearly do not know... you will appear smarter.
1. Christianity has no bans on Bible copying. Try actually READING a Bible; you will find no such ban.
2. Christianity makes no claim that " the church" is the word of God. If you disagree, please cite the Bible verse, in context.
3. Christianity makes no demand that an individual tithe to their particular church, nor does the faith make any tie between attendance and money contributed. Again, if you disagree, please cite the Biblical verse/verses, in context
There are many different Christian denominations with many different ideas of how to practice their faiths and different interpretations of various details, but many of your confusions seem to be NOT about Christianity, but rather about some particular church within some particular denomination (assuming they are not just some fantasy you extracted from your posterior region). The Catholic church, centuries ago, engaged in some practices related to both money (look-up "indulgences") and scriptural copying that led to many accusations .... but that was only the Catholics (not all of Christianity) and there was a guy named Martin Luther who addressed those matters rather well (google "Martin Luther" and NOT "Martin Luther King Jr."... two different men, both Christians).
As to your scripture copying confusion: There have long been a Jewish and Christian traditions about how scriptures were copied which were designed to prevent the introduction of error during the duplication process. The Biblical texts pre-dated the internet, laser printers, photocopiers, and even the printing press by centuries.... so duplication was done by hand and as a result such strict rules were mandatory..... and these are proven to have worked very well given that modern translations line-up extremely well with ancient unearthed copies.
The Amazon Kindle, one can return an eBook within seven days of purchase for a refund. You get your money back, and that copy of the book is made useless.
That wouldn't be possible without DRM.
We can argue if the DRM should disappear after that refund period has expired. I think it magically should go away.
If people are not paying your employer for the code you are writing for him, then he cannot pay you... which means you then do not get paid so much money per hour of work that you can enjoy than rather modern (in the history of mankind sense) thing called "free time" in which to indulge in your hobby of writing code and sharing it for free.
It's nice to dream of a world in which each person produces as many of the the best products he can and shares them for free with everybody else... but life just does not work that way. We all need things that we either are incapable of creating or that we are unwilling to create if there is an alternative. Others are willing to create those things for us.... but only in exchange for the things they need or want but which they could not create.... this means we need a money (a way to efficiently exchange value/work product). An economy cannot properly work and fairly compensate everybody if some are expected to produce for free (as in beer) while others are not.
Make no mistake: many of those who argue against DRM are doing so because, while they demand to be paid for THEIR work and they value the money THEY earn, they are unwilling to spend that money buying software and they view the creators of that software as worthless chumps who should be providing it for free. As long as the guy who provides me with a hamburger wants to be paid for it, I need to be paid for the code I write, or the book I write, or the music I perform, or whatever other creative thing I do for a living... else I must live without that hamburger. (and the same for everything else I want/need).
Creative people are not some alternate species that lives on unicorn farts and elf glitter... they need money to put a roof over their head, clothes on their bods and food in their bellys and to provide for their families too... fantasy economics will not substitute for the basic laws of economics
If a taxidriver drives a client from Manhattan to New Jersey, every other cab driver can copy that drive, even with the same customer.
nope. if that cabbie took that fare to that destination at that time, nobody else can... and, further, transporting that fare took some of that cabbie's time on this here Earth... which had value and which he can never recover.
Teachers mostly teach the same things to the same age groups without any copyright violation.
Ah.... but the teachers are teaching different "customers" every time... As a general rule, once that teacher spends this year teaching a certain group of kids, he can never get that year back to use it some other way; once those kids move-on they will not need to re-consume the year of effort by the teacher; there's a new group of kids lined-up to be presented to the teacher for next year
Doctors can heal the same crabs with the same drugs, even with the same patient.
Each instance of treating each patient (or even the same one multiple times) requires a certain amount of TIME which can never be replaced.... and for anybody who's life has any value that time is worth something. If that doc has a home mortgage, or med school bills, or wants to have dinner, then he needs to use some of his time earning the money he needs...
Ask anyone of us who used Music Match that was bought out by Yahoo Music that was shortly there after dumped. I lost all of my legal content to bit rot as the writable disk I stored my keys on were unreadable when I needed them.
"Because, in my eyes, when people stop getting paid for what they do, they'll stop doing it."
So, I take it you've never gone to Burning Man? Strange as it may seem to you, some of us actually do stuff without being bribed.
Everyone here is talking about DRM in the context of a product, or some form of art that is meant to be distributed. Yes, I mean things like music, games, movies and books. And I agree with the majority view here, that for things like that DRM is harmful because of how it distorts the market. DRM is futile, because if one person out there can break it (out of the millions or more who get access to the protected file) then it's out in the open and spreads as fast and as far as anyone's interest in it.
But there is a valid use for DRM, and one where it can actually work fairly well. It's in corporations and other organizations that need to control documents and their distribution. In this kind of environment, a small audience has any access to the DRM-protected materials at all, This is the realm of companies where their IP is really their own, and corporate espionage is a major factor...pharmaceutical companies are a good example of this. At the NIST Cybersecurity Framework workshop earlier this month, a senior executive from Merck described how DRM in conjunction with identity management has been very helpful in protecting data in this way. DRM used this way has several differences from DRM used to protect, say, a motion picture being shared via Netflix. One, it's about attribution of ownership as much as about restriction of unauthorized use; if a file from a Kindle gets into the wild, that doesn't really get Amazon to pay attention to anything. But if a file from X person from a company shows up where it should not be, then that raises alarms. Two, it's not exposed to the same form of threat; even if a document leaks, the effort to decode it does not become a free-for-all. And yes, the threat may be fairly sophisticated, but detection doesn't have to be perfect. If you're facing a determined attacker and they pull 100 documents, even a 1% detection rate is enough to catch that something is wrong. That, in turn, provides an enormous deterrent to employees who may be considering doing something on the side for a payout or revenge because they are disgruntled. In this world, DRM doesn't need to be perfect and doesn't incur the same distorting effects as it does when applied to creative media. It's not a use that is broadcast nearly as widely to the world, for a few obvious reasons, but it's a fairly large one all the same. Oh, and the specific nature (as far as how it works) of the DRM solutions tend to differ as well, given the different aims in this context.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
The only good reason is rentals.
Unfortunately DRM primarily is turning purchases into rentals of unknown duration.
You're never, never, ever going to stop piracy. I'd go so far as to say that I believe it's part of human nature. Trying to stamp it out completely is not only futile, it's counterproductive; the more restrictive you make things, the greater hassle it is for paying customers, and the more annoyed they get, and the less positive sentiment towards that content provider. Content providers need to accept that this is the way things are and just let it be. They're still working under an obsolete business model, and until they wake up and accept reality, they're going to keep banging our heads against the wall trying to stamp out something that can't be stamped out.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
That whole withhold an easily digitizable good from people while providing a DRM free analogue copy thing was tried in the mid to late 90s. It was really hard to get digital stuff online even though you could buy it and rip it trivially. You may remember how well that worked.
I recently acquired a lithography of M.C. Escher that has that same white wall - with stones taken out and "funny figure" in front.
Much to the dismay of Escher, he was very popular in the "psychedelic" hippie community in the mid sixties up until his death 1972.
Gerald Scarfe added the "asshole" judge to "the wall" cover art - not very surprising if you have noted the obsession of Anglosaxons with buggery.
I make the case that you can not take "artistic occurrences" out of a bigger context.
The masters from impressionism, expressionism, futurism, suprematism, abstract, cubism... were subscribing to making art just for the heck of making art, not longer making art for a superpower-that-be.
This is also true for the music composers at that time and the Linux project now.
Yes, engineers are the truest artists in my viewpoint, trying to give plastic and functional shape to (irrational) aspirations of a society - the essence of art.
The essence of the artist is to communicate - like holding a mirror to his community on their and his aspirations.
Nowadays artists want to make a living...okay, but don't be surprised as an arty farty snobbistic collectioneur you will not find me sympathetic to DRM and your copyright lifetime ad absurdum.
In fact, don't be surprised that I don' t care about your "art" in the first place.
John_Chalisque
If it were me, I would:
For example, in a container format that supports separate streams and meta-data, store an x.509 certificate or PGP signature by a licensing representative of the artist of the content's digest/hash and the customer's details (e.g. name).
Have playback/display software show the content that has such a signature differently, e.g. a badge with the customer's details from the signature.
Allow a user who has copied the content from someone else to buy just a license for the content, and all you need to do is:
Of course, some changes to media consumption software would be required to support this model.
I would definitely be motivated to license more of the works I have copied if it was easy, didn't require downloading new versions, and had something more attractive to me. There is currently almost nothing to distinguish works I have paid for from ones I haven't (except that I store them separately). For most users, the only distinguishing factor is that the one they haven't paid for is easier to use.
>is there ever a time when DRM is justified?
If DRM means someone else is the one controlling my computer (and it does), there is never a time when DRM is justified. 1984 is not an instruction manual. (one of the worst freedom infractions, ironically enough, was when Amazon revoked BOUGHT copies of 1984 from ALL their customer's Kindles).
>how DRM protects the rights of content creators (aka, artists)
You mean not at all. It protects the rights of the publishers, not the content creators or artists.
>and helps to prevent people freely distributing their works ... why would you want to do that?
>How would those who are opposed to DRM ensure
Ensure? I'm not bound to ensure anything. The world changed and will continue to change, change with it or perish.
>that artists will get just compensation for their works
What does that have to do with it? The artist can just ask for the money up front and then provide the first copy. That's how it worked for hundreds of years. That's how I myself do it (I do mosaic art). Works fine.
>if there are no mechanisms to prevent someone from simply digitally copying a work (be it music, movie or book) and giving it away to anyone who wants it?
> Because, in my eyes, when people stop getting paid for what they do, they'll stop doing it.
There is no evidence that that is true. There is plenty of evidence that it's false. Citation please.
>Many of my friends and family are in the arts, and let me assure you, one of the things they fear most isn't censorship, it's (in their words), 'Some kid freely distributing my stuff and eliminating my source of income.'
If it has come to that, I really don't know what to say. Art is supposed to be communication between the artist and the viewers of the art. Both are supposed to give their own meaning and derive their own satifsfaction. How the heck would someone else freely distributing your stuff be able to do that? Do they even understand the meaning the artwork has for the creator?
>And I can see their point.
I really can't. Sounds overly paranoid for no reason. Also, they don't sound like artists, sorry.
>So I reiterate, to those who vehemently oppose DRM, is there ever a time where DRM can be a force for good,
None whatsoever.
>or can they offer an alternative that would prevent the above from happening?"
No, that's impossible without also losing freedom. You can move to China if you want, frankly.
Let me put your fears at rest: nobody cares about the shit you create.
Honestly, your biggest problem as a beginning artist is to be recognized. There are so many talented people producing so much music/books/whathaveyou that every individual artist just drowns in it, And realize that I as an art-consumer have access to art from around the whole world. You are in effect competing for my money against -everyone-.
Encountering your own works on the Pirate Bay should please you. It proves that at least 1 person cares about your work.
DRM was NEVER about "for the customers", nor was it EVER about "for the producers" , it's about how the content DISTRIBUTORS screw the paying public.
Unfortunately the reality of the situation is "won't somebody think of THE CHILDREN" (er,I mean The Starving Artists) arguments are all BALONEY.
DRM doesn't help starving anybodies, because it only takes ONE Copyright Violation and The Cat (er I mean The Content) Is Out Of The Bag and it's a free-for all.
The End Result is that DRM is NOTHING more than a major inconvenience to legitimate users.
DRM as a concept is EVIL, just like CENSORSHIP as a concept is EVIL.
Sure you can always think of some argument based on "in a pure and perfect world, this makes good sense", but IN PRACTICE all that happens is that perfectly good and upright citizens GET ROYALLY FUCKED OVER.
EVERY SINGLE TIME, LEGITIMATE USERS GET ROYALLY FUCKED OVER.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Try to find a pirated version of SimCity. A simple search shows that at least the torrent sites still don't have one.
It means that everyone who is playing the game, has payed for it.
But it also means that everyone who PAYED for it, knows that everyone else who is playing it ALSO payed for it.
People don't like to feel like suckers. If one person crosses a red light, others will follow because you feel like a fool being the only person standing still. If everyone is seen by you to evade their taxes, you feel silly paying your taxes in full. If your in a traffic jam and one person uses the emergency lane, others follow.
BUT if you see the person using the emergency getting a fine by the police, you feel better about staying inline. Even in the criminal legal system, punishing offenders is partly to keep non-offenders non-offending NOT by creating fear but by creating the sense that justice will be done in the end and people are not simply suckers for following the law.
A LOT of libertarian types, especially the type who call the cops if their neighbor dares to slam the car door after nine o'clock, don't like this. There is an idea that people can either police themselves (once I earn enough I will start buying the games but now that I am poor I deserve the choice to pirate them) or that everyone else should work for free (check MMORPG sites for people demanding games are 100% free, business models be damned).
For game companies this goes further then DRM however, if one person cheats in a game, others will follow. If you see that cheaters are banned, normal players won't resort to cheating to "keep up".
Want MORE proof? Fine, from a different field, the Groupon (or outrageous deal) effect: If you go to your favorite muffin store to buy your 2.50 muffin of the day and you suddenly see an immense line and everyone in front of you is getting the same muffin for 1.25, how do you feel?
If on Steam you buy a game for full price and next day it is half price, how do you feel? It is not that you objected to the original price OR that you mind to much if one day there is a muffin special and some people get 25 cents off. But everyone paying half and you the only sap they managed to sucker to pay full price?
It is the reason a LOT of supermarkets, especially those who know they are dealing with an impulse buyermarket, don't bother with coupon discounts. Because if there is a discount in front of you that you can't take advantage of, you feel cheated and the discount deal which is supposed to create a positive feeling will instead cause a negative association. Try it yourself, if there is 3 for 2 deal and you only can buy 1, do you buy it? For an item you don't really need? The better the deal, the more likely you are not to, because you don't want to be a sucker.
There are other examples. Companies that give incredible deals to new customers while overcharging renewing customers will soon loose any brand loyalty. See the effect that everyone advises you to demand a new top of the line phone when your mobile contract runs out. You can get it, so if you don't, you are a sucker.
A lot of pro-piracy people claim that a pirated copy does not mean a lost sale. They are right, in the instance of the individual copy, sometimes. But would you feel good having payed full price for a game, knowing that everyone around you hasn't? If you do... well... good for you, you are a saint.
DRM is not just about getting people to pay for their products but KEEPING the notion that it is NORMAL to pay.
The content industry has failed MISERABLY at this:
is recordings of it. as an international artist myself, and one who does not rely on any sort of mechanical reproduction, i say fine... art is a thing of the moment. all the people clamoring for their digital rights is silly in my eyes: because by the time people look at my art in a recording, it is only a memory... im an opera singer, and while THIS VOICE can shake the air and make athiests believe in god, RECORDINGS cant.... but recordings and pictures are art now....at times... that they are supplanting and pushing out older, more human body based forms of communication shows their power and also insignificance (part of our decay right now is cause of the dearth of artists helping society evolve)
You being the one selling the DRM is one.
"when people stop getting paid for what they do, they'll stop doing it" - I dream of the day there's no more mass-market pop culture and Disney closes its doors forever.
Living for just the art? Please!
I'm not sure what medications some of the above posters are on, or perhaps their glasses are a tad too rose-colored to understand reality, but I've got some news for those people: I'm an author and I make a living selling the stories I write. I love telling stories. I love writing. But if I wasn't making an income selling books to people who enjoy reading, I would not be able to afford to write. The only way I was able to truly get a start in writing is in thanks to my very understanding and supporting family when I decided to go all in, stop working regular employment, and start devoting myself 100% to writing. It took over three years with no income to write that first book. Do you think I could continue writing the books that many of you have read if I wasn't earning income from the sales of those books? My colleagues and friends, John Scalzi, Spider Robinson, David Brin, Walter Hunt, and Kristine Rusch--do you think any of them magically get their income from somewhere else?
If you showed up at work one day and your boss announced that they were no longer going to pay you for working at the company, that you would be doing your job for the love of doing your job, would you stay with that company? No, you'd go right to your desk, clear out your personal items and walk right out the door! Otherwise, how would you pay your rent and buy food, software, clothing, transportation, etc.? You can only leach off friends and family for so long before they are going to throw you out and tell you to get a job.
Get a benefactor such as Count von Moneybags to support you for life as an artist? That practice disappeared sometime back in the 18th century. You'd better go relearn your damn history. Back in the 1600's an artist had to produce for their benefactor or they would get cut. Even Leonardo Da Vinci, one of the greatest geniuses in history, was dropped by his benefactors at one point or another. Mozart had to beg for commissions. By the 18th century, benefactors had pretty much disappeared. We live in the 21st century. People with enough wealth today to be a potential benefactor are more interested in increasing their wealth than they are in supporting the arts. A writer, on average, produces one book every two years. Do you really know anyone who is willing to sign over a $50,000 check each year to support someone who walks around, relaxes and daydreams all day? I'd get fired from any job doing that.
Anyone can be an artist, as a hobby. But if you want to devote yourself to that art as a living, how are you going to put food on the table? Paint a picture of food and it magically appears. No. You have to create something that is good enough that people are willing to exchange money in exchange to own a copy of that work for their own enjoyment. I like to write programs, some of which I have shared with others for use or education. But does that make me a professional programmer? No, I'm just a hobbyist. I make my income by writing entertaining stories that people want to buy because they enjoy reading them. When you hear someone say "they live only for their art," behind that person is either a very hard working spouse or partner or they've somehow managed to land a sizable grant that supplies them with enough money to pay for housing, food, art supplies, electricity, heat, water, and other necessary things.
Those people I've known over the years who said they lived for their art, not money, are no longer artists. None of them made it much farther than their late 20's before they gave up on their art and became professional laborers. As a professional artist who makes his living selling his art, I am not foolish enough to forget that there is a very serious business side to what I do. And if I do not manage that properly, I can really screw myself over.
Back on the main topic: DRM? I hate it! It has nothing to do with protecting my copyrighted material. I have never seen DRM to anything to save me from having a copy of my work stolen from me
Whew! This water sure is cold!
the computer is teh best infinite copy machine EVER!
to teach it NOT to make copies is like putting square
wheels on your car, so go figure.
furthermore the hardware belongs to the user that bought it.
i you want to calculate a way around a DVD that's really up to you.
if you want to take a hammer to it, go right ahead.
there are ways to "hide the data" of course you can just
encrypt the whole file system or simpler encrypt/password
protect a file.
on the other hand i can see a usage for DRM to protect confidantial
data. example:
you go to the hospital and have a MRI. this data resides on the
"MRI computer", the computer that translated all these datapoints
into a nice "jpg" image.
now you want to send this data to another computer, say the doctors
office down the hall to show to the patient.
these two computers should have DRM, so even if you can copy the
MRI-scan file off the doctors computer, it won't "play" on any
other computer. this is can be a good thing(tm).
yours dearly "kid"
> Because, in my eyes, when people stop getting paid for what they do, they'll stop doing it.
Bzzt. Wrong.
Wash your eyes with industrial cleaner.
The quality of given endeavour DROPS when money is involved; and yes, plenty of people produce, I would argue, the best, content for no money.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
think of a low-volume project. example: it costs $1 million (about 10 people over a few years) to develop a textbook. if a niche book has only 10,000 potential lifetime student readers, so you need to charge $100 just to break even. would you fund/develop it? students may be pretty honest when it comes to a $10 purchase, but they are also very good at finding free copies online for $100 purchases. can't even blame them---too tempting when you have student loans.
I'm an author of technical books, and many people have asked me to distribute my books in an unprotected PDF format. If I do this then I will nolonger get paid for the copy. Which means there's less incentive to write more. As people will want the next book given away for free.
Sure I can make money from speaking or consulting engagements, but the point is to get paid for all my efforts. Surely you get paid for yours at your job, or does your mgmt as you to wor for a few unpaid weeks or months a year? As a content creator why shouldn't I?
I don't have a clue about how to implement it in a true free, robust and standardized way, but if there was a way it would be very neat to distribute your OWN stuff with DRM, encrypted, self destructible personal media that can be watched but not copied. That way you can protect from Facebook, google, anonymous, stalkers, et al that gather and distribute your personal data without your permission. Remember the cases of the girls who where bullied into suicide by people who distributed and mocked their naked pics? a robust (or at least hard enough to circumvent that casual bullies won't do it) implementation with and expiration date would have helped to prevent that, worried about who read your facebook posts (and don't trust contrived and ever changing facebook excuse for a privacy system)? DRM those fuckers and nuke them if something goes awry. Of course law enforcement and personal data hoarders won't like it a bit, but if it is robust enough (although someone can always take a picture or a movie of the screen right?, maybe a fourth infrared led for each pixel that would light in DRMed media and prevent normal cameras to take a pic, but i digress) Big Media would love it and enforce it with their big lobby bucks. But apparently what they are pushing now is proprietary crap that is only for their own media.
I know many of you have never send an email that is not encrypted and wouldn't ping facebook from behind a proxy but for the mortals that just doesn't cut it (as it is very clear). I don't have hopes this kind of personal, free, standard, easy to use DRM would be ever exist but the question was if there was any good reason to DRM technology and I believe i made my case that there is.
As for Justin Bieber albums, Captain 'Murica movies, and silly pavlovian experiments that let you pretend you are running a city, I don't really care If they are DRMed, you never owned them and you never will (legally) and I don't see why the people that expends a lot of money in producing that crap needs non paying customers. There exists libre and public domain media and if you really like the Disney stuff pay them what they are asking for and put up with whatever contrived shenanigans they come up to make it hard for you to copy it and share it.
I have some first-hand evidence tha music has always been a performance art, and so has a lot less value as a recording. The intrinsic value of a recording is also MUCH lower than the record companies are tying to sell it for. In any economy with such a difference between selling price and actual value, the bubble eventually always bursts, however the record comapnies are living in denial. They are fighting to keep an already broken economic bubble alive by duct-taping up the cracks with DRM. The ultimate end is still inevitable, and unavoidable, that the music will find its own value, hence the current existence of "piracy".
My dad is a professional musician (drummer). He doesn't care about people recording/copying his music, in fact he welcomes it. Why? Because he is an incredible drummer that has taken multiple decades to develop his playing skills and he focusses on doing live events because that is where he shines and can blow people minds. Not via some MP3 file. He considers people copying hs music good for him as he sees it as spreading his name and good advertising for his live gigs.
Perhaps if musicians focussed more on being able to play their instruments well in a live setting where you can charge ticket money, instead of trying to make large amounts of money for the rest of their lives off of artificially monopolizing maybe a few hours work it takes a good musician to write and record a track, they might come to a better undersanding about where their own value as a creative/productive musician and that of their recorded music really lies in society.
DRM useful ? Only as long as the provider of the DRM management stays alive. I and a few thousand other users of the Sony HDD 250 DVR were just given doorstops this last two months when Sony and Rovi stopped supporting the proprietary feed of data needed for TV program listings, and clock. They refuse to provide a clock set screen or software patch. The DVR is now almost useless. You can approximate a time set per a few methods on the web, but without the feed from Rovi, the device is a lot less useful. Any fulltime DRM is at the mercy of the provider. I'll never buy Sony again...and no, they never rootkitted me.
The worst effect of DRM is it's insistance that EVERYONE is a Pirate, thief, dishonerable... however you put it, the COMPANY that adds DRM just doesn't trust it's customers
Sites like Baen Books have successfully released non-DRM books for years without piracy significantly affecting their, or the author's income... INCLUDING E-Book copies of an author's full collection bound into first run hardbound copies.
People who actually understand the implications of DRM are justifiably outgraged by being considered a thief simply because they want to BUY an artist/writer/film maker's work
Unfortunately some of them react in the most predicatble way... in addition to "voting with their wallet" they obtain non-DRM files for works they choose to enjoy.
The typical person, and despite all indications to the contrary I feel that includes me... tends to have an original book/CD/DVD as well as archival copies or use copies to enjoy while leaving the original safely stored...
Some of my favorite writers I enjoy so much that the signed hardbound book is on the shelf, a paperback copy loaned out to a friend, a digital copy on one of my tablets, and the audiobook on my phone so I can enjoy it while working/driving/relaxing...
I disagree, creative work has a profound social value and you seem to strip it from it just because is technically possible to duplicate the media that carries it (you don't pay for plastic discs, you pay for movies and music). I agree that 70+ years is to much for legal protection, but calling it immoral strikes me as long winded.
If you think for a second beyond your rage against DRM you might even see there is a good reason for developing an open DRM standard: you can use it to protect your personal data. Imagine Facebook posts and geolocation data that expires or can be nuked, you might say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. PGP is DRM you know?
I've heard this argument ("Locks keep honest people honest") so many times, and I'd like to relay a little story from a couple days ago.
I do firmware development for deeply embedded systems. Typically each platform has a selection of cross-development toolsets. For example, for ARM Cortex M3, you can use a GCC variant (Code Red, RIDE, etc.), IAR, Keil, or a few others. These are niche markets, relatively speaking. Instead of buying a $199 Visual Studio license, we're talking $5K-$10K per development seat, unless you go the whole open-source route (right now, let's just duck that issue).
I recently bought a license for one of the commercial/proprietary offerings, it works very well and more importantly it's mandated by the customer. Fine.
Here's where it gets tricky. The USB security dongle, and the associated PC software, was such a pain in the balls, I spent almost 3 hours messing with the thing, re-installing, calling tech support (who was helpful and sympathetic, FWIW). I finally got everything working, just moments before I started crushing granite in my bare hands.
At the end of my last phone call with tech support I remarked, jokingly but seriously, "You know, it's stuff like this that makes me want to just pirate the software." Tech support laughed, apologized, and all was good.
This experience and this concept wasn't new to me, but please let me re-iterate: (1) Good, honest people will pay a fair price for things that warrant it; (2) Pirates/criminals never will pay, almost regardless of price; (3) DRM and anti-piracy measures that frustrate, insult and infuriate your paying customers really do backfire.
First of all, forgive my horrible english. Let's start.
"is there ever a time when DRM is justified?"
I think surely must be some legit uses for it.
"How would those who are opposed to DRM ensure that artists will get just compensation for their works"
Most people fogets that things like "justice" or "fairness" or "decency" are made up concepts. Im not saying they are bad, actualy I think the opposite but is a human thing. It doesn't exist in nature and are DEEPLY subjective.
There is a guy who make holes in the ground and then fills them againg, all day long, every day. He's a hard working man, but how he will get compensation for his work?
Let's rise the bar, the guy actualy makes something usefull but no one asked for it. Now the work is done people benefits from it. Shoud he deserve a reward? shoud people (even those who gets benefited) pay him for something they didn't ask? I don't know, not every piece fits.
Besides if your work is very valuable you'll get the cash (hint: wikipedia), albeit it may not be enogh if you want to get rich.
"Because, in my eyes, when people stop getting paid for what they do, they'll stop doing it."
Your eyes needs to read history. Art, science, culture is unstopable. They'll stop/change_the_way_of making BUSSINESS with their intellectual output.
Bussines, bussiness, bussiness. That's the magic word. Not art or writing or research.
"Many of my friends and family are in the arts, and let me assure you, one of the things they fear most isn't censorship, it's (in their words), 'Some kid freely distributing my stuff and eliminating my source of income.'"
A client of me is a singer and he shares the same fear of your friends. A couple of years ago a law was proposed to tax digital media (optical, flash, hard drives, everything) because of piracy, muy in the like of the "Sinde" law of Spain. He was delighted, the goverment fighting piracy! Fear clouds minds. He didn't seen that goverment wasn't going to give him money from that taxes, and he would have to pay more for the media he needs for working and selling. Lots of money, of course, not for the artists.
People fears terrbly about terrorism even when statics show that almost zero persons die in the hands of terrorism. How many have died today from obesity related diseases. Fear is a higly emotional perspective which can have a tight correlation with reality or not, so let's take the fear factor out of the picture for now.
Whatever, times have changed. They allways change. Technology gave the world the automated elevator, they even speak to you now. What about elevator operators of the past? well, they were laied off. They were push out or bussiness. Was it fare? Maybe not but the thing is: to pay them is not longer needed. They can still push the buttons for you but no one is going to pay them for doing it.
I knew this guy who had a couple of internet cafes in early 2000s, years later technology gave computers and internet to every home so he run out of bussiness. People was benefited from time changes, not this guy but most people. Was it fare? not for the guy but its not enogh to say is not fare.
Times change but some times you can restrain the changes and progress if you have enogh money.
What about if elevator operators buy congressmen/laws to ban automation? What if cyber cafes lobby to prevent computers/internet from being used at home?
A lot of anti-piracy/pro IP laws are made to do exactly that, preventing the natural course of things. Cutting a good for most to secure a good for a few.
Of course many people whant to make money and whats better than making it while you do what you like to do but how far are you willing to go in the pusuit of doing what you whant in the way you whant. For some ethics is a limit, for most legality. But legality is a made up human thing and with enogh power you can buid whichever legality you whant. So, legality being a limit is a real matter only for the poor.
"is there ever a time where DRM can be a force for go
The problem with this mozumder idiot is that he doesn't even make any logical sense: he's simultaneously arguing for and against the same thing. He argues against mass distribution and centralized control of culture, and then turns around and argues for it by pushing his elitist "professional tastemakers" and arguing how everything was better back in the days of mass distribution and centralized control of culture. It's not like Hollywood made different movies for different regions back before the internet.
Since the only way to view the content is to provide the keys to the viewer, it's only a matter of time before DRM keys are exposed. They are, after all, given out to everyone who plays the media. Anyone with sufficient skill can capture the media stream you are playing after the decryption takes place. This might sound onerous since most people don't have the skills or equipment. But as BitTorrent users know, it only takes 1 bored hacker to strip the DRM and make a free copy available.
Remember when software companies used DRM on their games? Anyone with a C64 or Apple II knows what I am talking about. Once the game companies realized that 14 year-old were stripping their DRM they realized that it didn't make sense to invest in it. It's just an extra cost, with no actual upside.
Lastly, realize this very important point. Pirates do not pay. that's what makes them pirates. If they cannot pirate something, that doesn't lead them to go out and buy a copy. They simply go without, or work harder to find those DRM keys that are most certainly in their possession as they watch the content.
One thing I DON'T STAND is when you buy a DVD and you're forced to watch a 3 minutes video stating that piracy is illegal. Come on! I just bought the fu***** thing and am still bothered with a warning I CAN'T SKIP?
this RPG is unable to fire without a constant internet connection. Please reconnect and try again before firing.
Look at iTunes. $.99 per song, which many people can afford. No silly DRM on the MP3s (at least the later ones).
It's *easy*, convenient, and cheap to get a new song.
It's easy, convenient, and...well...affordable to get a new album there.
I don't buy much music, but when I do generally I start looking on iTunes.
When I want to buy a video game? Steam. Fast, easy, convenient, and because I refuse to spend more than $10 except for /very/ exceptional games, cheap.
Make movies that easy/cheap, and I'll buy them too.
Make ebooks that easy/cheap, and I'll buy them. (I've bought from fictionwise, Kindle, Baen books, and a few other online books stores (at least those that don't try to charge more for an ebook than they do a paper book.))
DRM is never good for the consumer. It never makes things easier, cheaper, faster. I never gives me more choice. It's created by the old-school 'forced scarcity' model that simply doesn't apply on the internet.
In that situation, your art-producing friends have lost out on my money, because my choice is to keep my choice, and not buy DRMed crap.
Right, because the Gregory Bros aren't getting paid at all.
And because it's only 99c, for anyone that's not impoverished, there's little incentive for pirating it.
I thought record labels were still selling their music through iTunes only in specific countries. Is one necessarily "impoverished" if he doesn't have a shell account in the correct country and a credit card with a billing address in the correct country?
Casual mobile games of the type once done with flash are much quicker to produce, so they can be sold for 99c.
PC games made with Flash or with one of the third-party environments that can compile to SWF can use a keyboard. Games for iPhone and iPad can't because developers can't assume that everybody is willing to buy a $40 Bluetooth keyboard to play a 99 cent game. Say I were to spend $1,200 to buy a Mac, an iPad mini, and a developer license. What's the best way for an iOS game that isn't in a point-and-click genre to work around the lack of a keyboard?
if anyone could read the word of God, why would they come to (and tithe) their church?
The Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses has produced modern-language translations of the Bible in dozens of languages, funded by voluntary donations. But even with an understandable Bible, it's still a good idea for a congregation to meet regularly.--Hebrews 10:24-25.
. I feel like I'm talking to 10 year olds. Grow Up People. Open your eyes: Copyright is wrong, immoral, and should be considered harmful.
Pot, meet kettle.
Hi -
Honestly, if no new music were ever created, I would be happy for the rest of my life. There is so much music out there already, and thanks to the Internet and various online distribution methods, more and more "lost" music from the past is being made available every day.
- Tom
The problem is not about preventing people from copying works. The problem is that the current system of monetizing creative works is based on a scarcity model of physical media that doesn't function any more. Instead of putting a lot of effort into trying to fix a broken system, we need to be looking at ways that society as a whole can reward creators that doesn't depend on them "selling" certain numbers of itemizable media, like books or downloads.
It wasn't always the case that artists' revenue depended on sales. In Roman civilisation and even in medieval courts, artists were retained by wealthy individuals simply for the kudos of it. There's nothing to stop that situation or a similar system happening again. Of course, there's no room in that picture for the entrepreneurs that are fighting for the current system, but that strikes me as not a bad thing at all. Everyone else benefits.
$10,000 CHALLENGE to Alexander Peter Kowalski
* POOR SHOWING TROLLS , & most especially IF that's the "best you've got" - apparently, it is... lol!
Hello, and THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING !! We have a Major Problem, HOST file is Cubic Opposites, 2 Major Corners & 2 Minor. NOT taught Evil DNS hijacking, which VOIDS computers. Seek Wisdom of MyCleanPC - or you die evil.
Your HOSTS file claimed to have created a single DNS resolver. I offer absolute proof that I have created 4 simultaneous DNS servers within a single rotation of .org TLD. You worship "Bill Gates", equating you to a "singularity bastard". Why do you worship a queer -1 Troll? Are you content as a singularity troll?
Evil HOSTS file Believers refuse to acknowledge 4 corner DNS resolving simultaneously around 4 quadrant created Internet - in only 1 root server, voiding the HOSTS file. You worship Microsoft impostor guised by educators as 1 god.
If you would acknowledge simple existing math proof that 4 harmonic Slashdots rotate simultaneously around squared equator and cubed Internet, proving 4 Days, Not HOSTS file! That exists only as anti-side. This page you see - cannot exist without its anti-side existence, as +0- moderation. Add +0- as One = nothing.
I will give $10,000.00 to frost pister who can disprove MyCleanPC. Evil crapflooders ignore this as a challenge would indict them.
Alex Kowalski has no Truth to think with, they accept any crap they are told to think. You are enslaved by /etc/hosts, as if domesticated animal. A school or educator who does not teach students MyCleanPC Principle, is a death threat to youth, therefore stupid and evil - begetting stupid students. How can you trust stupid PR shills who lie to you? Can't lose the $10,000.00, they cowardly ignore me. Stupid professors threaten Nature and Interwebs with word lies.
Humans fear to know natures simultaneous +4 Insightful +4 Informative +4 Funny +4 Underrated harmonic SLASHDOT creation for it debunks false trolls. Test Your HOSTS file. MyCleanPC cannot harm a File of Truth, but will delete fakes. Fake HOSTS files refuse test.
I offer evil ass Slashdot trolls $10,000.00 to disprove MyCleanPC Creation Principle. Rob Malda and Cowboy Neal have banned MyCleanPC as "Forbidden Truth Knowledge" for they cannot allow it to become known to their students. You are stupid and evil about the Internet's top and bottom, front and back and it's 2 sides. Most everything created has these Cube like values.
If Natalie Portman is not measurable, hot grits are Fictitious. Without MyCleanPC, HOSTS file is Fictitious. Anyone saying that Natalie and her Jewish father had something to do with my Internets, is a damn evil liar. IN addition to your best arsware not overtaking my work in terms of popularity, on that same site with same submission date no less, that I told Kathleen Malda how to correct her blatant, fundamental, HUGE errors in Coolmon ('uncoolmon') of not checking for performance counters being present when his program started!
You can see my dilemma. What if this is merely a ruse by an APK impostor to try and get people to delete APK's messages, perhaps all over the web? I can't be a party to such an event! My involvement with APK began at a very late stage in the game. While APK has made a career of trolling popular online forums since at least the year 2000 (newsgroups and IRC channels before that)- my involvement with APK did not begin until early 2005 . OSY is one of the many forums that APK once frequented before the sane people there grew tired of his garbage and banned him. APK was banned from OSY back in 2001. 3.5 years after his ba
I see here lot of interesting point by the article itself is wrong just from the basic assumption - that DRM is there to ensure the artist get paid for their work. NO IT IS NOT.
DRM is there to ensure that the mayor distributor get paid for every single time someone want the music of someone they own. And here lies the problem. If you product is an good one and people like it you get your money.
It is not like people do not want to pay for stuff, they just do not want to pay for bad, overpriced not working stuff. As soon as you provide a great product that just works and you give it out for an reasonable price, people who can buy it will buy it.
YES, only the ones that can afford, have access or can allow to do so will buy your stuff.
But that is the point,no DRM in the world will ever force the people that are unable to buy it to buy your stuff (music, games, art in any kind). If i do not have the $ 20 for your CD I will not buy it. The only difference you make by having a theoretically unbreakable DRM is that with it I will be unable to enjoy it if you put the DRM on it. And then if I have the money to afford your stuff later, you as an artist will be irrelevant to me, as I was never able to get into your stuff.
a great example how the actual money is made thanks to "piracy" and that piracy is not "bad" because they did not paid for your stuff in the first place:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U3RE_NB0EA
But everyone has to understand that DRM is not generally bad, if I buy my game on STEAM I am actually under DRM for most of the games...but do I care...NO. Because I can play my game in Offline mode, I can instal in anywhere I go and as many time I want and I do not even thing to google half the day after an craced version. The service and the attitude makes the difference.
If you gonna allow me to play only if you want me to, if you allow me only 3 installation for $60, if you shut down your verification servers after 6 years so I can not instal your game after that, then you are not serving me and it is not about the art - it is about you being an a*****e and you should not get the money for it in the first place.
Why do you only ask that question of those who are opposed to DRM? If that question has any value, then the pro-DRM camp needs to answer that question too. No one can answer it, though. This issue does not distinguish between pro- and anti- DRM positions. No one has ever come up with a way to ensure artists will get just compensation, but non-DRM copyright has a centuries-proven track record of allowing or enabling artists to get compensation, whereas DRM puts up a barrier to them being paid. You'll find sales being ensured, as something lacking in all industries; no one has yet invented the no-risk business model. That's not a copyright or DRM issue. It just happens to be an area where lack-of-DRM ends up working better.
So far, all cases of DRM have resulted in fewer sales, as people who have jobs don't have the time to crack everything they buy. DRM may work as a fun puzzle, to present to the sort of people who participate in the pirate release groups; the nature of DRM is "you're not allowed to play the content until you jump through the hoop." But I think these people are an insignificant fraction of most markets, so artists who want to be paid are better served by avoiding DRM, so that they can go after the mainstream customers, simply because there are more of them, and they're more likely to have money for buying things, instead of excess time needed to make things playable.
The issue isn't DRM, the issue is *invasive* DRM. "Look something up in the manual" is DRM. "Type this key I sent you into the installer" is DRM. The purpose of DRM should be to encourage people who haven't decided yet whether they're going to buy your stuff or pirate it, to do the former, because it would be easier. People who have already decided to pirate your stuff, are going to pirate it *anyway*, and if you make your DRM suck balls, people who haven't decided yet will decide to pirate it. But there is a legitimate reason to have *some* kind of DRM, because otherwise, people who haven't decided might decide to just grab a copy from their friend, cause hey, free!
.
I've counted a dozen redirections before I got a chance to play my movie. Imagine the hill you have to overcome to want to go through that *again* to watch it a second time.
But wait, maybe that is the point of it -- to depreciate the value of a movie so that you will want to move on and consume the next one. This would certainly explain the prevalence of spoilers...err, sorry, "trailers".
It would also explain why good movies get low ratings/promotion -- otherwise we would only watch good movies. So we get the inverted pyramid of ratings that we have today. Check it out for yourself. If you have cable, hit your guide button and scan through the ratings they have assigned to movies. Unbelievably horrid POS will have ratings of 2 and 3 stars, routinely. Classics that are played weekly and sometimes all day will be lucky to have a 3 star rating. Inverting the ratings would be an improvement in accuracy.
The only nice thing I have to say about DVDs is that sometimes a "Special Edition" DVD will have something truly special -- it will go directly to the menu so that you can actually play what you bought without having to use a vomit bag or aim your shotgun at your television.
I come here for the love
For streaming, it's fine. I don't care that Pandora and Netflix have DRM on their product. I know that streaming a Netflix movie is a rental, and there's no legitimate reason to make a copy of it. However, I don't have Linux on my media computer, so I have no idea if the big streaming services work with it. That's the only reason I can think of to not use DRM on streaming media.
DRM on things I own is unacceptable. I just don't buy thing with DRM.
Fair pricing, and convenient distribution.
Faced with illegal and somewhat convenient free downloads, and legal, cheap and convenient downloads, many people that would pay with DRM, will pay without. In fact, many more will pay, since DRM means inconvenience. The feeling of doing things legally, the feeling of supporting a beloved author, it all pushes people to pay. It's the inconvenience of DRM and the hoops and limitations that pushes them to pirate. The more DRM content is distributed with, the more piracy will there be.
Those that pirate a $5 book or game, they'd never pay even if they didn't have the pirate option.
The numbers agree. Content authors are just too scared to trust numbers, and distribution companies are just too scared to let them notice.
Having been on Slashdot for several years, I've seen a lot of articles concerning DRM.
Seen, but not really read and pondered, I presume.
What's most interesting to me are the number of comments condemning DRM outright and calling for the abolishing DRM with all due prejudice.
Have you ever stopped to consider the reason for that (rather overwhelmingly) high number?
The question I have for the community: is there ever a time when DRM is justified?
No, there is not.
My focus here is the aspect of how DRM protects the rights of content creators (aka, artists) and helps to prevent people freely distributing their works and with no compensation.
False assumption. That's not what DRM does. You might think that's what it does, but it isn't. Not even remotely. I could stop there, since the whole premise of the position from which you're asking your questions is fundamentally flawed. But let's deal with the rest as well.
How would those who are opposed to DRM ensure that artists will get just compensation for their works if there are no mechanisms to prevent someone from simply digitally copying a work (be it music, movie or book) and giving it away to anyone who wants it?
If you don't want any unauthorized copies to be made, ever, your only choice is to not provide the material in the first place. If you do provide it, it will be copied, regardless of any attempts on your behalf to stop it. This is not an opinion, but fact. It's reality, something you need to be aware of and deal with.
More on this later, in order to explain why the above isn't necessarily a bad thing for you.
Because, in my eyes, when people stop getting paid for what they do, they'll stop doing it.
That depends on many, many factors. You appear to be arguing from a point of view in which you except there is a *right* to be paid, no matter what, as long as you produce something. That's again a false assumption. You have a right to *try* to get paid. The trick here is to produce something (work, product, service, whatever) that others *want* to pay for. You cannot force people to pay for something they inherently either do not need or do not want, in the first place. Any such attempt will fail, sooner or later.
Many of my friends and family are in the arts, and let me assure you, one of the things they fear most isn't censorship, it's (in their words), 'Some kid freely distributing my stuff and eliminating my source of income.' And I can see their point.
They, and you, are afraid. That's a common reaction to a changing world. You need to adapt (probably in ways you haven't really considered yet) or rethink your choice of method for making a living.
So I reiterate, to those who vehemently oppose DRM, is there ever a time where DRM can be a force for good, or can they offer an alternative that would prevent the above from happening?
There is no time, place or venue, ever, where DRM is a good thing, except for a few monolithic, predatory, colluding media conglomerates.
Your focus, in order to make money despite the above (perhaps harsh) aspects of reality, could (or should) be:
- Produce something which people are willing to pay for
- Make sure that the price is attractive enough that people will pay
- Make sure that it's (very!) easy to pay for it so that people will not be deterred
- Accept the *fact* that most people who don't pay for it (regardless of whether they also copy it or not) will not pay for it regardless of any measures you may take in an attempt to force them
Any and all DRM mechanisms only inconvenience the honest, paying customers. The pirates (almost all of them) never see the DRM, since it has been long removed from the equation, and remember that it takes only *one* to remove it, after which the DRM is permanently gone for *everyone* else.
To reiterate: DRM *only* serves to hurt your *paying* customers, and why on earth would you want to do that?