Slashdot Mirror
DRM Has Always Been a Horrible Idea
An anonymous reader writes "For years, the reaction of the big entertainment companies to digital disruption has been to try and restrict and control, a wrong-headed approach that was bound to backfire. But the entertainment companies were never known for being forward thinking whether it was radio in the 20s or cassette tapes in the 70s or VCRs in the 80s or Napster in the 90s. The reaction was the always the same. Take a defensive position and try to battle the disruptive force. And it never worked. And DRM was perhaps the worst reaction of all, place restrictions on your content that punish the very people who were willing to pay for it, while others were free to use it without restriction. It was an approach that never made much sense, and it's good to know that mounting evidence proves that's the case."
Sherlock.
And anonymous reader posts a piece with the only link leading to Ron Miller's (Whoever that is) opinion on his blog.
Anonymous read -- Ron Miller, is that you trying to drum up traffic to your blog?
Wow mister obvious! I never would have guessed that!
I expected a blog post with lots of citations and historical information... instead it's just some random guy's opinion... Hey, I have opinions too! Maybe I should submit them as slashdot stories?
And the guy doesnt even mention current events. Fail.
Last time I checked Disney was still raking in the cash and redefining copyright length to ensure their cash flow.
DRM does not work for a specific product, but backed with a vast array of lawyers and donations to lawmakers, it manages to persist and have a fairly high ROI - enough to give major bumps up to CEO pay.
Will it be defeated eventually? Sure.
Will it be defeated earlier by those who tend not to pay tons of money without thinking? Sure.
But it is intended to be an irritant to defeating reasonable copying. And on that score, for those markets that have the money to pay easily and the attention span of a gnat, it works fairly well.
Personally, I hate it, but that's another matter.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And will it stop me from downloading music and films from the internet?
Yet another random opinion piece on how DRM sucks? I'm as anti-DRM as they come but stories like this were old a decade ago. No maybe if the article was something Jack Valenti wrote before he croaked, that would be worth talking about. But this is just another drop in the ocean.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
They have won half of the battle by getting you to call it "Digital Rights Management" a term made up by the entertainment industry.
The reason we have piracy; when Copyright lasts longer than a single human lifetime, nothing ever produced during your lifetime will ever be released to enrich the public domain, therefor there is absolutely no benefit for an individual to participate in copyright.
Netflix, Amazon, Steam, Hulu; these are a ruse to weaken and ultimately control piracy. They License for a set term their works to said services and can Revoke those contracts at any time as has been demonstrated today by the lively article about Disney removing already-paid-for streaming content from Amazon.
It isn't "Mainstream Media" it's "Media Monopoly"; Get it Straight and stop using their words to make their crimes sound better than they actually are.
Because those works cannot ever be copied, there will always be a dwindling supply; Imagine Star Wars, Ghost in the Shell, or Iron Man being forgotten and all copies of them being tossed down the memory hole 100 years from now. This has already happened with old movies from the 30's through the 70's and is starting to happen to what was made in the 80's and 90's.
VCRs in the 80s
VCRs are from the 70s, kiddo.
For someone concerned about this quarter's profits and protecting their existing business model, it _always_ made sense. A modest investment in DRM protect this project's profits. And you could point to other projects that made far less profit _for your projects' mangers_ as examples of where the lack of DRM hurt their profits. It's only in the longer term, year after loss of business due to the most burdensome of DRM, such as Sony's built-in rootkits on CDROM media, that it could be shown to cost business. And let's be honest: most of the people who amass large Bittorrent libraries were never going to pay for all that music, or all those videos, anyway, so it's not as if those "lost sales" were going to ever exist as sales, anyway: most people will never all watch all the media they've stolen. So the "losses" without DRM are also quite exaggerated.
There are times, and environments, where DRM has been very successfully used. Large scale commercial software, such as clusters of VMware servers, or high cost software such MRI analysis tools, have been very successfully DRM managed. Red Hat's strange "it's yum, but not really" licensing to get updates? That has blown goats. Anyone sane using Red Hat makes one local registered and runs a local yum mirror from it, using that for all their other hosts, instead of that butt slow and bandwidth sucking "RHN/yum" mess. And no, "Red Hat Staellite Server" is a messy mirror of the same butt slow RHN mess. Calling it "spacewalk" does not help, it's a lot of "open the pod bay doors, Hal" arguing with the licensing management.
http://striderweb.com/blog/2011/07/on-e-readers-and-the-future-of-the-baen-free-library/
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
We don't have to look far into the past as to what happens when DRM enters the picture.
Take the humble Commodore 64. The most common home micro of the 80s.
Lots of users. Lots of software. Lots of piracy.
What happened in the end is that lots of companies making software made lots of money, despite the piracy, until the computer faded into obscurity with a dwindling userbase that had moved on to more powerful computers.
All DRM "disk copy protection" was eventually broken, and just about all game software ever released for the computer is downloadable online (you know where to look). The end result is that we have a nice digital archive, complete with emulators, left for historians or anyone who wants to relive what it was like to use the machine in the hight of it's heyday (or simply to see what all the fuss was about playing "Impossible Mission" or something)
If it wasn't for the pirates and crackers willing to ignore the ridiculous copyright law time extensions, copy programs to different countries where they were not available for sale (over the pre-internet BBSes) chances are we might not have a digital archive, or at least be missing important bits. By the time the copyrights expire, the magnetic media, if anyone still had any left, would be corrupted by bit rot, and the equipment needed to read it may not be in a working state or readily available.
So the Commodore 64 avoids a digital dark age, but I have my doubts about some heavily DRMed content going forward.
In many cases, if something is heavily DRMed and people do not make the effort to break it, it will likely be lost to the digital dustbin of time.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
What else needs to be said
DRM is probably the single greatest driver of privacy that their is. It has never particurlarly been very good at stopping people from accessing content. What is has been good at is creating artificial barriers that allow for greater market segmentation. It does things like allow for different regions for DVD's and Blu Ray's or making photoshop so expensive in Australia it used to cheaper to fly to America, buy a copy and fly back. DRM just has to be enough to make something clearly illegal and frustrate most users.
It gives an excuse to force people to provide marketing information to be able to use a product that they paid cash for. It creates a market in file trading from unusable media is used to justify the greatest land grab of civil rights in history (Trans Pacific Partnership AKA SOPA 2). DRM is an excuse to change the very concept of "I own that' to "I lease that".
You pair that with laws that will put people who break it into prison and now you have a society that is firmly in the grip of IP based companies. Throw in the patent wall that makes an upstart like Compaq all but impossible nowadays and you have an oligarchy that can effectively never be challenged due to insurmountable legal costs. You can't go around them with DRM or you go to prison, you can't fight it in court because it's a treaty and you can't beat them as a competitor. As long as they don't become a monopoly they are untouchable for decades at best.
Just remember that Obama was the president that drove the greatest takeaway of civil rights in history...
At least battlefield 4 didn't have a shaky launch due to its DRM
...but DRM is amazing! I mean, CDs last forever, Tapes last several generations... but DRM licenses die with you! You can sell the same thing to EVERY freaking generation!!!
Yawn. Anther anti-DRM rant on Slashdot. The summary is boring and looks like Slashdot just randomly picked a comment from any article on piracy from within the past 15 years and reposted it. The article itself isn't even all that well thought out. Honestly, it looks kind-of amateurish. It talks about how revenues went up after DRM was removed. Of course, it ignores the fact that music has always had a giant analog hole, so there's an easy way to bypass any DRM.
It'd be nice if these articles were a little less narrow minded, a little less circle-jerkish, and would, at least, acknowledge the fact that piracy has been a huge problem for the industry. Looking at the industry's decline in revenue, I can't say that Jack Valenti's statement about the Boston Strangler looks all that silly anymore. See this graph to understand what I'm talking about (and this graph is a few years old, I'm sure it looks even worse than this, now): http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000/music-industry.jpg
Because most of it's pathetic and can be stripped from the content in seconds. But the suits think it's effective so they release content with their laughable controls. I buy their content, strip it clean, and access the content how I want to. I buy movies, rip the content off the disc, and store it on my media server in a platform-agnostic format that I can play on my media player, laptop, desktop, tablet, phone, etc. I buy ebooks, strip the drm, store it on my media server, and read it on my computer, tablet, or phone.
Without the false sense of security created by crappy DRM, there would be a lot less content available.
Watson.
sorry for my comments, I'm drunk
Let's extend this logic to other things. PC sales are more numerous than Mac sales, therefore Macs are being pirated. Right? Is Game of Thrones in theaters? Do you get HBO for free?
Did your forget Don't copy that floppy, or do you think copy protection wasn't yet invented in the days of physical media because it was somehow buttmagically not copyable?
And delaying it increased their profits, so all their actions are really in the best interest of all*.
* Of their shareholders.
will no more change the business practices of those who believe in it than would evidence indicating a theology's internal contradictions change the minds of that faith's adherents. The DRM believers will go out of business still clinging to their belief that 'they wuz robbed'.
Except that gamers who use Steam are generally conscious that the vast majority of games use DRM, but give it a pass because Valve is "nice".
Hot chicks aren't on slashdot unless they're being paid to post.
Trust itself may not sell copies, but mistrust will undoubtedly cost you sales. If people aren't even willing to listen to you in the first place because they don't trust you, then you have no chance without somehow locking customers in. Which is in itself evil and reeks of anti-competitiveness.
No. Since it's beaten eventually. DRM's not even about making the initial sales anymore.. It's about retaining control, post-sale, as a means to rake in even more cash, by protecting their future, inferior products from being trampled by their existing ones. If a useful feature becomes a problem for their new/current business model, it gets removed and the users are shit out of luck. MMO/SaaS is DRM just like the the most invasive versions of starforce, TAGES, or safedisc. Fuck them all.
Trust may not sell copies, but DRM destroys trust, both in the vendor, and in the product's availability post-purchase.
Another way to look at it: it attempts to withhold the key from the legitimate user, while the pirate has the skills (or a crack written by someone who does) to strip it away.
DRM is simply an artificial barrier to entry. A good investment requires a company with a good product and a high barrier to entry. In the 80's they had it good. It was too hard to copy movies and songs. Then it started becoming easier and easier and now it is almost as easy as a click and watch, or click and listen any content. So they are trying to stuff the rabbit back in the hat after it has procreated. It is game over.
I use Steam. I don't like that it inconveniences me. Offline mode works most of the time, but when it doesn't, I get f---ed! I realize most folks have internet available all the time, but I work in remote locations, and often don't. Last winter I was one week into a four week trip when Steam decided it would not work without going online. Fortunately I had some non-Steam games and was not completely out of luck. Leaves me feeling I would be better off pirating.
you had me up til you threw president obama into this.
Yeah DRM is evil! It must be stopped!
"Well the Democrats are involved in pushing it on you to a greater degree than ever before thanks to money flowing in from hollywood"
*blank stare*
Say what now? I just want to stop DRM! And vote for Democrats 'cause they so awesome!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Artsy people usually don't want to be confused with facts. So no matter how much evidence there is, it won't make any difference to the publishers.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
DRM only works when it's not intrusive, prohibitive, or makes you feel like a criminal. Good examples: Steam, iTunes - both have DRM in them, but both of them work, pretty much charge a fair price, and above all *they make it easy* Bad Examples: Anything Sony does (yeah ok, I'm being facetious, but it's not far off), DVD/BD zone-locking - that's just greed at work. Worst Examples: What happened with Bioshock 2 (?)... "no, you have installed this three times, you must be a pirate, yarrr!" - pretty much any DRM system used by EA (SimCity anyone?), Oh and Assasin's Creed on the PC when the authentication servers went down.
I purchased Futurama on BluRay after having purchased a reader for my PC. I was unable to watch the discs because of copy protection.
This is the best argument for NOT paying for the content ever invented, that's for damn sure.
Damn, and here was me thinking that there were plenty of places you could pay to stream music and movies - places that are making decent coin. Or do you think they have managed to shut down every single torrent/file sharing site?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
DRM is misapplied by design. Because my computer/reading device has to be able to decode it. Therefore I can decode it. It's just a question of figuring out how, be it scanning memory or playing around with a soldering iron on the motherboard. And of course only one person has to figure out how to break it. Then everyone can break it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
gog.com pushes that argument into the dustbin where it belongs.
"mounting evidence proves that's the case"
Since when does "Evidence" carry any weight? Religion? Effectiveness of Death Penalty? Fill in your favorite Blank?
I love how slashdotters all want privacy and encryption but DRM is somehow bad.
And it never worked.
From LIRC, the stock prices on near every [old] media company is up like what? 50%? Them just saying the word DRM and having folks jump works for them to their advantage.. and people still buy the content (think bluray)
Yep it never worked and their losing the battle... all they care about is profit and they people like the author/EFF chasing them around with DRM issues. Hell look at the Amazon-Disney case.... even Google Video... some people paid and now they have to pay again (since those services/media were pulled).
Anyone able to install a copy of that?
I don't get it, I've never seen DRM on anything I've downloaded from The Pirate Bay EVER.
Popular downloading sites have shown that people won't buy if they're given a choice. Indeed, compare the number of console games sold to the number of PC games sold
Bullshit. Diablo III sold getting on for 15 million copies, almost all on the PC.
Steam do not release sales figures. Steam is at least 50% of the PC download market, and do not release sales figures.
Wow, I know it must have taken a lot of courage to come out and take a stand against DRM here on Slashdot, but you just went ahead and did it, didn't you? Some day I'm sure there will be an epic song about this event which most of us won't hear because it's protected by DRM.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If you invest in DRM for your product you are making two bets. That your DRM creators are some of the smartest people in the world. And that even when people do figure out how to crack the DRM that it will slow people down enough that impatience with the cracking process will cause them to give up an buy.
But it is highly unlikely that you have hired the best in the world. And any DRM process that is effective enough to slow people down consistently will probably also be a pain in the ass to manufacture.
I suspect that people who create and sell these DRM systems promise the world and get paid a fortune. But seeing that the code in this post kills the DVD DRM it certainly shows that very very very smart people are going to look upon any new DRM as a new birthday puzzle.
s''$/=\2048;while(){G=29;R=142;if((@a=unqT="C*",_)[20]&48){D=89;_=unqb24,qT,@ b=map{ord qB8,unqb8,qT,_^$a[--D]}@INC;s/...$/1$&/;Q=unqV,qb25,_;H=73;O=$b[4]>8^(P=(E=255)&(Q>>12^Q>>4^Q/8^Q))>8^(E&(F=(S=O>>14&7^O) ^S*8^S>=8 )+=P+(~F&E))for@a[128..$#a]}print+qT,@a}';s/[D-HO-U_]/\$$&/g;s/q/pack+/g;eval
That's why, when deciding whether to put any on the digital version of my novel, I decided against it. I'd rather risk someone finding it and enjoying it for free than risk anyone being frustrated because of DRM.
Also, frankly, I don't care about consumers. My only real worry, if you can even call it that, would be against someone trying to resell my work as their own, which is covered adequately by copyright protections. I don't care if people get a free copy for their personal enjoyment. (Though of course I'd be thrilled by recommendations or reviews if they found it worthwhile.)
That's how it should be. Anyone obsessing over the consumer end of the deal has their priorities seriously out of whack.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
The problem with DRM is that it's inherently the opposite of everything good about computing. The Internet in particular is nothing if not a near-infinite collection of bits and bytes that can be copied and shared at will; in other words, the information superhighway we've been talking about for years. DRM proposes to solve one problem by introducing more problems. The problem is, since information on the Internet is infinitely copyable, none of it should have any inherent value. Finite demand divided by infinite supply equals zero. Trying to solve this by artificially limiting the supply, which is what copy-protection naturally does, limits what the end user can do with the product in a few ways that have been expanded upon by a lot of people who know more about the matter than I. Mainly, the dilemma is that you cannot keep people from copying something illegally without keeping people from copying it legally. Copyability being one of the distinct advantages data has over every other medium since the beginning of written records, this is an issue. By causing customers that disadvantage, you make it measurably better for a potential buyer to simply download a cracked version of your 'good', to pirate it. That way, the customer bypasses copy protection and can do as he pleases with whatever he just downloaded, which he couldn't do with the protected version. This obviously isn't a good idea. You might notice that some software has disadvantages to using pirated versions. One main disadvantage is that you aren't able to get automatically-updated versions of the software after the fact, and another is that you aren't entitled to using certain services, such as the case with pirated video games. The reason for this, and the answer to the piracy conundrum, is that both are services rather than goods. Updates to software provide something that was once impossible to a consumer, the steady improvement and future-proofing of their purchase for the foreseeable future. An antivirus software can adapt to growing security risks, a video game can update to take advantage of new computing technology (and the users' wishes, which is even more important), and countless other products can see huge improvements in their value by adding regular updates as a service, rather than a good. Access to online services like EA's online servers, for example, does the same thing in a different manner, giving the consumer a service rather than a worthless, infinitely-copyable good. You might notice that Netflix is built on this model. In exchange for a strikingly low monthly fee, the customer gets access (a service) to every movie and television show Netflix can get the rights to, in a way that takes up no storage space (an advantage over piracy) and now even provides access to proprietary shows that don't exist on the more traditional TV networks. Netflix doesn't need DRM because they don't sell movies. They provide access to a movie-watching service, and even in the case that a cracker gave access to a way to download movies from Netflix's servers directly, it wouldn't change anything about what Netflix does. It doesn't invalidate what they sell. To put it simply (in our internet-speak, tl;dr), the Internet is enough to tear down the existence of information as a good, and will give rise to the industry of information as a service. And of course, the industries affected will resist at every turn along the way.
Leaves me feeling I would be better off pirating.
Not so easy gringo...fortunately there exists services like GOG.com. Download the full installer (and a heap of bonus material), archive on your favorite storage medium, own forever and play when you want.
Copyright, when it was introduced, was a kind of attempt on the part of publishers to hold onto some of the control that they used to have over their works by mere virtue of the fact that previously it had been too diificult, error-prone, and expensive to try to copy somebody else's work. It was a large money sink with very little commercial benefit, so previously, it was not a problem...
Then the printing press came about, and a lot of that changed. Suddenly it was possible for people with access to sufficient, but still definitely very finite resources to copy a work in a manner that would be economically practical at scales that were achievable without much additional cost beyond the initial investment of a printing press.
Enter copyright... a means to artificially try to limit what the general public was permitted to do with a work that claimed such protection. Basically, copyright was a kind of informal contract between society and the publisher which went something along the lines of if society agrees, even if simply out of courtesy, to respect the original publisher of a work and refrain from copying it, the publisher will, in turn, be given sufficient incentive to trust that they won't try to do likewise to future works, thus offering some incentive to continue to produce new such works. In exchange, of course, the public would receive access to the work, and be enriched by it, where it would otherwise be kept in very strict confidence, perhaps seen only by a very select few or the elite. Laws were eventually created to protect this publisher interest, but in the end, it was still just a publisher trying to control something that they could not possibly control once they had actually gone and published a work anyways.
As copying got easier for the public to do, and copyright infringement started becoming more of a problem, publishers began to lose confidence in the protections that copyright alone once appeared to offer them (although such control was really all just illusory the whole time... it just happened to have backing by the law), and started trying to resort to other means to protect what they perceived were their interests. Unfortunately, DRM, which restricts the circumstances under which people who might legitimately purchase such a work can access it, ultimately amounts to exactly the same sort of self-censorship that copyright itself was designed to prevent... it limits the public availability of the work, and in turn, limits how much society can be enriched by it. With laws that actively protect DRM, as copyright was once protected, the situation can only get even worse.
We made a seriously wrong turn somewhere along the line... and I can only pray that somehow, some way, we can fix this thing before the damage becomes irreversible.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The trick to Steam's success isn't that it provides 'convenient' DRM. It doesn't. Steam doesn't allow client-free downloads and it becomes markedly more difficult to use without a steady Internet connection. But Steam makes up for this by giving the users a couple services that improve the overall experience. First off, Steam has automatic updates run through a single program. That's something that you can't get by pirating any of the games. Secondly, Steam Workshop, for the few games it's actually implemented in (Skyrim and Portal are the success stories), allows access to something fairly useful and convenient for modding games. Then, when you add in Steam Sales, easier installation and add-on installation, and verified access to online portions of games, it's more obvious that Steam isn't just a way to download games. Installers like it in the past never got off the ground because they failed to give a real tangible addition to the games it sold. That's the same reason Origin will never really get off the ground (instead of giving the users something they want, it forces them to download a bloated useless program to use what they already bought without providing any new service whatsoever). If all it did was download games, nobody would use it, because with the slightest bit of work and know-how, you can do the same thing without it for free. What Steam does right is add just enough of a reward to players to keep them coming back. It's a lesson that other companies might try to learn if they want to stave off the 'threat' of piracy in the future.
..and the message reads: You can't stop the signal, Mal.
I like your title because "controlling the uncontrollable" is precisely the misguided intent of DRM and copyright, both of which become completely outdated with the expansion and proliferation of the Internet. Fortunately for those of us who don't rely on digital media for a living, providing purely digital (or even in some cases digitizable, as is the case with CDs) content is no longer a sustainable practice, with or without DRM. Without DRM, there is no advantage to providing content for pay, as your product is worth absolutely nothing in the digital world. With DRM, there is in fact a disadvantage to doing so-- The customer has to deal with DRM, even after paying for it! In both cases, the customer gains nothing by paying for a digital product, and in the latter case the customer actually loses some of the conveniences of infinite copyability. Either way, the customer is better served pirating the information, but there are certain things the original provider can make that give the customer incentives to buy the product, which is the direction the entire media industry is headed, whether it knows it or not.
DRM isn't only for stopping copyright infringement; it's also sometimes used to force people to buy approved hardware/software so they can use what they bought. As far as I'm concerned, you should be given a choice: Either you have DRM, or you have copyright. Since everything is meant to go into the public domain eventually, and DRM interferes with that, you shouldn't be able to have both.
This is because you have this outdated notion that you own your computer. But you'll soon find that you won't for much longer. You'll pay for the hardware and the right of executing software on it that the hardware will keep out of your hand. And, good luck going to the hardware when you have silicon locked decription keys.
Of course, there is still the analog hole...
Computer scientists are scientists. They study the theory of how computers can possibly work. They discover the tools nature gives us for building computers.
Software and hardware engineers take the results of computer science and use it to build computers. They create new tools for us to use for our specific purposes.
Information technologists take those tools which engineers have created using the discoveries of the scientists, select the best tools for the job at hand, and make sure that those tools keep working.
IT is to SE is to CS as an auto mechanic is to an automotive engineer is to a physicists studying the mechanics and thermodynamics of theoretical engines.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
There was nothing DRM about casettes or videotapes. What the hell are they talking about?
For one, copyright ends. DRM doesn't code in when it ends.
For two, laws of copyright define what rights are due to the copyright holder, NOT THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER.
For three, if the copyright holder wishes to take rights that they do not have right to do, then they must offer consideration for the exchange of rights or removal thereof. If there is no consideration (and "playing the game I let you buy" is NOT a consideration, else what is the money for? The materials? 10c.) then there is no exchange.
It happens because people are too poor to buy the products. Not everyone has a stable job that pays well enough to consume media. As another poster said before - 77% of the American public are barely scraping food and rent. Do you really expect their pirating of media as 'lost sales' or should they just magically become richer in this crap economy?
They started back in the early days of VCR tapes and spread like a bad case of herpies because they had an aggressive sales force spreading their own brand of FUD to industry players.
Today, Macrovision is still one of the biggest players in the DRM world. Reject anything from them no matter how mundane.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...but DRM is amazing! I mean, CDs last forever, Tapes last several generations... but DRM licenses die with you! You can sell the same thing to EVERY freaking generation!!!
Seriously, I'm afraid that my huge music collection is of very little interested to the people who I think would inherit it. However, if my heirs could sell my complete media collection on eBay to the highest bidder, and give the money to some charity, that would be a nice idea. Maybe I should put that into my well. Would be interesting if record companies could make any claims that would take money from a charity. Note: There would be no copying involved whatsoever!.
The basis of our economic system is our right to sell our products in the way we see fit. Thus, content providers have the right to put any DRM system they want on their products. If we don't like DRM, then we simply shouldn't buy those products.
We don't have any right to pirate content, because piracy is theft: for any pirated product in use, the creator is missing a certain amount of money.
The argument "a pirated product is not a lost sale" is a bad argument, because it is a tautology: "a lost sale is a lost sale".
I can agree with not having DRM on content that we purchase, but you have to have DRM for rental to work. Most people don't want to purchase every movie they see.
Sure, there is sometimes a DRM-free option, but for a given title available only on Steam?
What happens to my ability to play fallout 3 in July when Microsoft shuts down games for windows live servers?
That goes both ways. gog.com has stuff Steam doesn't and the overall quality of games is much better on gog.
If it has DRM, I don't buy it. I don't steal DRM or non-DRM either.
Get it through your head, publishing industries, I don't *need* your product and if you make your product unpleasant with DRM, you don't get my money.
This also applies to price-gouging: I will NOT buy a 20 year old song for $0.99. I'd pay $0.05 or $0.10. However, I will NOT "buy" songs from Russian sites at those prices because I don't consider the Russian sites to have legitimate rights to the songs in the first place. So I do without. Because I don't NEED your products.
Fair price, no DRM, and my wallet will open for you like a floodgate--anything less and you get NOTHING.
The fat-cat entertainment industry deserves a huge boycott anyway.
Come on consumers: abandon the price gougers and go for the real entertainment values, you can get hundreds of hours of good interactive entertainment from computer games for $50, why shell out ANYTHING for low-quality high price crap like today's music and movie industry produce?
--PeterM
"(...) trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet."
It was an approach that never made much sense, and it's good to know that mounting evidence proves that's the case."
If you read through the article (I know, this is slashdot), you'll see that sales of obscure albums did go up a few thousand when DRM was removed. But the big sellers, where the real profit is for the record companies, were not effected. On the other hand, sales didn't go down. So maybe DRM isn't helping or hurting. Just makes it a little more inconvenient for people who want the product but don't want to pay for it.
1) Where the "shelf life" of the item is so short that by the time the protection is defeated, it's no longer relevant.
2) Where the protection is so hard to defeat that #1 is a matter of months or years instead of hours or days.
Here's some examples:
1) Hot new video uses a form of DRM that is expected to last a week or two before being fully broken and "almost no time" before a low-quality (1080p-equivalent) is on the Internet. The studio plans on releasing a 4K 3D DVD the same day as it is released in theaters, and they don't want piracy of the 4K 3D version to cut into 1st-week movie revenues.
2) An industry-specific, high-dollar, low-sales-volume software vendor is concerned that unscrupulous potential customers in certain countries might pirate it instead of buying it. He uses a strong form of copy-protection that involves hardware dongles, signed code, code that expires and that needs to be "refreshed" every few weeks, etc. to protect those customers who could afford it but who might pirate it. His only competitors in the business use similar forms of copy protection. Due to the nature of the product, "this year's" product will be of limited value next year and essentially useless except for retrieving historical data in future years. In fact, it's a standard industry practice to "give away" versions that are 2 years old "for evaluation purposes." The industry has found that, while there are occasional efforts to break the piracy, the protection has never been broken within 1 year of a new release.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I would argue that although I agree with some of your conclusions, I would disagree that the customer gains nothing by paying for a digital work.
What a person gains by paying for digital content is trust... trust from the publisher that their interests will continue to be respected in the future, and in so doing, provide some incentive to the publisher to continue to provide publications that can continue to enrich society. Copyright is supposed to be a trade... the publisher is supposed to get something, and the public is supposed to get something. DRM is not a trade at all... it's the publisher invoking self-censorship so that instead of permitting society to be enriched by the works that they make, instead only a few actually may benefit, because the publisher has placed arbitrary restrictions on the manner in which the work may be used.
Now to some people, the trust that they might gain by paying for the work may not be worth what is being charged for the work... but really, that is an entirely subjective evaluation, and it's unfair to suggest matter-of-factually that a person always gains absolutely nothing by paying for such works.
As I said, however, your conclusion is one I can definitely sympathize with... certainly with the presence of DRM, a customer is *always* better served pirating the information... and I would only argue that this might be a ubiquitous truth about digital content only to the same extent that DRM itself is quite universally used by publishers (which with most works these days, it unfortunately seems to be).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Logging into my bank account is drm?
Otherwise, yeah... I agree with what you are saying.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
There seems to be this idea - and I've been guilty of it myself - that the world is black and white.
In this case, the argument is DRM either works 100% or it works not at all. As "working 100%" is obviously wrong, it follows that it does not work at all and is in fact a stupendous waste of money on the part of the people who commission ever-more-complex DRM systems.
But what if DRM was never meant to work 100%? What if it was only ever meant to slow things down - for instance, to ensure that you can't find a good quality version of a new movie on the Pirate Bay the first weekend it's in the cinema? To ensure you can't pirate a game on the day it's released in stores - and for maybe a couple of weeks after?
So please, stop with the "DRM is bad" drivel when you all want it on your software. If you put a restriction on what I can do with your code, it's no different than content owners telling me what I can do with their content.
Without DRM how can I play the came of you encrypt, I quest and hunt for a solution? Real life questing is so much more fun than
any silly game and DRM breaking is so fulfilling.
Educate yourself:
http://www.craphound.com/content/download/
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.