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."

Comments

Re:Old skool history of copy protection

[Mandrel]

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.

I've never owned a game console, but watching things it seemed to me that the reason the Playstation greatly outsold the Nintendo 64 was because the Playstation used crackable CDs while the N64 used cartridges. The weak DRM was a winner for Sony, while the game makers had their piracy losses offset by the bigger ecosystem.

However I don't think this is a good argument that content makers lose more than they gain from DRM. Weak DRM can be a net gain for publishers if some of the gains had by making piracy inconvenient is given back to users as lower prices or automatic updates.

Re:No Shit

[FunkDup]

DRM is bad.

I was watching this recently posted video of Ray Kurzweil interviewing Robert Freitas, a "nanobot theoretician", about the current state of nanotech. Freitas suggested the use of DRM techniques as a way of preventing the malicious use of nanotechnology. Seems like a "good" application to me. There's another video of RK interviewing Eric Drexler whichh is also interesting.

Re:What is this DRM of which you speak?

[Anonymous Coward]

And will it stop me from downloading music and films from the internet?

Not at all. Matter of fact, it will make the "public" incarnation stripped of DRM just that much more valuable.

I will post AC because I am going to reveal something a lot of us already know, but the business types have not caught onto it yet.

This is an example: I have two old DOS CAD systems which I still use to this day. Both of them originally came with dongles. I debugged one of them personally, the other I used a crack for de-dongling it. I could not have any trust for a program that relied on a single point of failure which would render the thing inoperable, just as I would never buy a delivery truck for my employer if I knew the water pump in it was special and no aftermarket product was legal. Which means a failed water pump would render the whole truck inoperable.

I would feel just as foolish building an executively appointed luxury hotel, deliberately designing it so when the toilet plugged, the cleanouts were inaccessible, and the entire hotel would be rendered inoperable. It seems only someone with a business education, not an engineering mindset, would buy into such a ridiculous thing.

Now, I do not have an MBA, but there seems to be a whole bunch of people out there which seem to completely lack the common sense to never buy a critical part of a business that cannot be replaced should it fail. To me, the infrastructure that allows a business to access its information certainly qualifies as a critical structure. To think that anyone would even consider having their access to their own information revokable by an arbitrary third party to me is absolutely inconceivable, yet there are people out there, with a business education - no less - that will accept such a thing.

When I see business accept such a thing, my respect for ones who buy into this drops by orders of magnitude.

I think of them more as the foolish kid who buys into some shell game some huckster is playing on them, and they yet have to figure out they are simply being had.

Re:No Shit

[cheekyjohnson]

_THIS_. I hate DRM in all its forms. I want it to go away.

They have done DRM right

Does not compute.

Also, I'm fairly certain that certain games on Steam don't have any DRM whatsoever and can be used without Steam (though, they're probably a minority).