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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."
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.
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.
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds -- Albert Einstein
_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).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!