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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?"
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not black and white. There aren't two distinct camps: those that always legitimately purchase, and those that always pirate. There is a significant band in the middle of people who will pirate if it's easy and buy if it's not. Non-perfect DRM still performs it's function of increasing the number of people who pay for the product.
The problem with DRM is that it turns everything into a rental.
I'm not sure that is necessarily true, but even if we accept the premise, I don't see a problem with rental as long as everyone knows up-front what the deal is.
It doesn't matter if you've paid for a cheap subcription, a low unit cost, or a high unit cost. All of it is a glorified rental and most people don't realize this.
You think someone signing up for a Netflix account with a low monthly fee doesn't realise that they're paying for a limited-time subscription and instead thinks they're buying a copy of everything they can watch on Netflix?
Or that someone who pays a one-off charge to watch a major sporting event on pay-per-view thinks they're buying a permanent copy they can share with friends?
This especially true for any content that is tied to a particular service. The service goes away and so do your purchases.
Part of the problem every time this debate comes up is that too many people assume purchasing is the only sensible way to consume content. It never has been and probably never will be, and my major point is that alternative arrangements aren't necessarily a bad thing for either consumers or producers.
I'm not arguing that if you're making a purchase, on the understanding that you're buying full, permanent access to a work, and someone's DRM scheme then screws up and stops you getting what you paid for, that's somehow acceptable or desirable. I'm just saying you're only looking at a small part of a big picture, and in some of the other parts, there's a case for some sort of DRM.
Corporate shills are so busy screaming about "artists" rights that they have forgotten that the rest of us have rights too.
You do, and one of the most powerful is the right not to pay someone for access to their content on terms you don't like. If everyone stopped buying DRM'd works tomorrow, DRM would be gone on Monday. If customers made it clear that they were willing to pay more for a work as long as they could have a permanent copy, chances are the market would figure out how to price full sales vs. other access models or someone else would come along to fill in the gap.
What you don't have is a right to enjoy someone else's content on whatever terms you feel like or to enjoy it without compensating them at all for their work to create it. That's illegal whether DRM is used or not.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
There is an economic analysis out there (sorry, don't have the URL at my fingertips) that compares book authorship/publishing/reading in strict-copyright 19th century England with no-copyright 19th century Germany.
I've only started reading it, but perhaps this is the source you're referring to: No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion?
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
The only people who see ads claiming piracy is bad are the people who paid for the content.
Someone else said it first, but it bears repeating:
The flaw with voting with your wallet is this: it isn't obvious. The company doesn't know why you stopped buying their products; from their perspective, you just disappeared. Was it piracy? Was it a competing product? There's no way to know unless you explictly tell them. This is why voting with your wallet sends an ambiguous message, if any at all.
This argument is absolutely stupid. It sounds interesting for about 5 seconds, until you realize it's absolutely wrong.
Everyone has this common generic culture now.
You haven't been ever outside the USA, have you?
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.
So, not everyone needs to see the same movies, listen to the same music, and so on
You apparently haven't been noticing what's going on in the world around you for the last 20 years. Back in the 50s-90s, in the USA at least, people (of the same age group) generally DID listen to the same music. With the internet, that's all changed. Now the Top 40 doesn't rule things the way it used to, and there's all kinds of indie music available on the internet. If anything, the internet has fractured "common culture", so that people don't listen to the same stuff like they used to back in the days of Top 40 radio. Things are actually totally backwards from what you say: pre-internet, people (in the USA) were much more homogenous, and listened to the same music, watched the same movies, etc. Now, they've spun off in all directions. I can watch movies from France and Finland on Netflix now with a few button presses. Before the internet, I had no access to such things. Maybe you don't remember the days before 1995, but I do, and we all watched whatever crap Hollywood decided to shovel us. It didn't matter if you were in California or Maine; the movies and music were all the same, from sea to shining sea. That's different now. Now everyone has a different subculture.
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.
What a pile of elitist drivel. "Professional tastemakers" gave us all kinds of bullshit like tailfins on cars, beehive hairdos, Backstreet Boys, the butt-ugly cars of the 70s, Britney Spears, and many more abominations of good taste than I can possibly count. They deserve to be devalued, and they should be doing other jobs, such as cleaning port-a-potties. If you really think the internet has made things more homogeneous, then you're totally blind. If anything, it's allowed people to ignore the more stupid trends, and adopt better ones no matter where they came from.