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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?"
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
On the other hand, DRM treats your paying customers like would-be criminals.
Right.
;-)
Music: Once I had collected 400 vinyl records. Then came the CD. I said to myself, well, more convenient format, same quality, so I'll just by all the stuff again on CD. (*)
And over time I did, plus all the new stuff that was released.
Then came the time when I bought CDs and they wouldn't play in my car player. Geat.
Conveniently at the same time Napster et al came up.
So music industry lost me for quite some time.
Film: I used to rent lots of (tape) videos, and was mildly annoyed by the FBI warning at the beginning, but fortunately the VCR had the fast forward button.
Then came DVDs and first it was all fine, skip the annoying stuff and then go right to the beginning of the movie.
Then they had the clever idea of having to watch all the intros and copyright stuff (and advertisements) being mandatory.
Great idea again. Movie industry lost me then.
As for games, I can't say much, I did buy the few games I was playing, but I never was much into games, but the recent EA disaster should say enough.
*) Audiophiles relax, buy a few monster cables, throw in a few homeopathic pills, lean back and enjoy the distortions of your tube amplyfier (also called "warmth").
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
Actually, pirates have actively benefited from it, in their own little world. A game with no DRM is a ho-hum release, but whoever can ship the earliest and most comprehensive stable release gets major props. Without DRM, there'd be no competitive spirit in the pirate world.
Of course, there are then spam/ad site owners who try to monetize on the reputation of certain pirate groups. 99.9% of game pirate groups do not try to pull in any money from their work, claiming either players should purchase the games for themselves and support the creators, or that games should be free. There's interesting social dynamics in that whole world, but more interesting to this discussion is that it all exists due to DRM.
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.
I've written DRM that is good for the "customer" (user). It's a bit bizarre, though. More like reverse DRM. It's purpose is to ensure that the software isn't "pirated" and sold for money, instead of downloaded for free, as it should be.
I'm one of the authors of BootMii and The Homebrew Channel for the Nintendo Wii. It's a free (as in beer) piece of software that you can use to run untrusted code on your console (what people like to call jailbreaking these days). Before it had any kind of security, we found out that scammers were selling it (in violation of our license) along with "piracy packs". We added a big "scam warning" to the installer to clue users into the fact that the software is free, and if they have paid for it they have been scammed. However, the scammers started telling users to use the same tools used to pirate WiiWare games to install The Homebrew Channel itself - this bypasses our installer and the scam warning. So we added DRM that ties each install to a given console (if you try to copy it, it still works, but then you get the scam warning every time you try to use the software instead, until you reinstall it using the proper installer). There's enough obfuscation to stop the (generally clueless) scammers from working around it.
I'm nominally very anti-DRM, but I've thought long and hard about this and I really can't see a significant downside for users. It doesn't affect normal users in the slightest, as far as I can tell. It doesn't actually prevent anything from working (sometimes, you can damage system firmware such that The Homebrew Channel is one of the few or the only option left to repair it, and you can't run the installer - we never want the DRM to accidentally close off a user's last hope for their console, so it's designed to be extremely annoying if the check fails, but not actually stop working). Of course, it doesn't prevent you from installing it on as many consoles as you want - just use the installer (which is a great idea for many other reasons anyway - it's so paranoid about system checks and safety that it has never bricked a single console in millions of installs) and you're fine.
So, how do we compensate artist without DRM? And compensation does matter. I have seen both Peter Jackson's The Hobbit
What an interesting choice of example. Did you know that Peter Jackson (and the Tolkien estate) had to sue the production company (New Line) for millions of dollars in unpaid royalties because New Line claimed that the Lord of the Rings trilogy made no money? This is a) in spite of the trilogy grossing over a billion dollars, and b) both Jackson and the Tolkien estate being smart enough to insist on royalties on gross revenue (and merch) in their contracts.
DRM doesn't seem to have done much to help the artists, does it?
(Indeed, the only reason New Line settled as quickly as they did (after about two years) was because LoTR made them so much money they were salivating over the prospects of making The Hobbit and needed to get Jackson and the Tolkien family back on side.)
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.