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

No Shit

[thatkid_2002]

Sherlock.

Re:No Shit

[houstonbofh]

The news is not that DRM is bad. The news is that people outside of IT are realizing it.

Re:No Shit

[Hatta]

Freitas suggested the use of DRM techniques as a way of preventing the malicious use of nanotechnology. Seems like a "good" application to me.

Me too. That sounds like a well intentioned application that would be wonderful to realize. The problem is that in the real world, DRM of any sort only restricts legitimate users. This has been true with every instance of DRM anywhere in the world, ever. Would you trust DRM to protect us against nanobots with that track record?

Of course not. So his point stands, DRM is bad.

Re:No Shit

[fractoid]

When you study business, management, or basically anything "non-technical" you don't give a shit and just want the nerds to go sit in the back room and do whatever it is they do so the computers magically keep working.

Re:No Shit

[Artifakt]

I don't see this as 'doing DRM right', so much as 'doing it less wrong'. Many of us tolerate Steam's DRM because it's less annoying than what other companies want to use, often much less annoying. Compared to Steam, some of the other DRM schemes we've seen are nightmarish. But saying Steam's DRM is good is still only true in the sense that brushing and flossing and having your teeth cleaned every 6 months is much less annoying than a root canal - it doesn't mean we actually wake up mornings thinking, "Oh swell, I get to have my teeth cleaned today!".

            You list several things Steam does that are advantagious, but any company distributing content online should give you the benefit of not having to search out discs, that's a core function of their business. Sequentially reinstalling games after a drive failure or three, and having it generally work smoothly and 'painlessly', is something that becomes more critical to get right because of DRM, as people also sometimes need to redownload and reinstall if the DRM itself screws something up. When DRM has just done something annoying to the customer, you want the experience of fixing it to be as pleasant as possible so the greater experience of your business as a whole doesn't leave a negative impression.

Re:No Shit

[Opportunist]

That pretty much sums up how people feel about DRM. They also feel like that about security, btw.

It must not cut into what they want to do. It must not disrupt their experience. People don't mind DRM, just like they don't care about security. They're fine with either as long as it does not keep them from doing what they want to do. Within reason, of course. DRM will keep them from distributing copies, security will keep them from installing malware.

That certainly bugs a few users. But, and that's the important thing, not the majority of them.

While on the other end of the scale there is crap like the stunts that UBIsoft and EA have been trying to pull, with perpetual connection to servers for single player playing. Which predictably backfired to the point where you could not play their games if you bought them while your buddies who copied them could play them just fine. That does bother them. That bothers them like the overzealous security suite that keeps them from starting their games because they use some warped loader or because it doesn't like how the anticheat module hooks into the data stream to the server.

Steam found that sweet spot where most people put up with it. It's actually even more convenient for most people than the old "put the original CD in" DRM. Simply because you don't even need to have your CD ready. Steam also offers additional value, another key element if you want your DRM to take off.

DRM by its very definition lowers the value of the product to the user. At the very least it creates some kind of inconvenience. It forces you to do something to get what you want, even if that only means you have to insert that damn CD (which you can never find when you need it) or that you can only install it on one computer at a time. Steam offers that additional value, by keeping games up to date as well as setting some standards. Sadly not in terms of quality of the game, but at least the games have to install smoothly to be part of the fold. Something that can sadly not be said for all such services.

Re:No Shit

[AntiSol]

Ummm, No: What rights you have depends on your local laws. Sounds to me like you should read up on your rights.

It has never been considered copyright infringement to make a backup of something or to transfer it to another medium. DRM attempts to prevent exactly this. this is established all over the place. For me, the following excerpt from wikipedia seems relevant:

In late 2006, Australia added several 'private copying' exceptions. It is no longer an infringement of copyright to record a broadcast to watch or listen at a more convenient time (s 111), or to make a copy of a sound recording for private and domestic use (e.g., copy onto an iPod) (s 109A), or make a copy of a literary work, magazine, or newspaper article for private use (43C).

What DRM really does is two things: 1) waste resources on your computer providing absolutely nothing desirable and nothing that can't be bypassed in seconds, shortening its lifespan and increasing its energy consumption, and 2) piss off legitimate users who want to do things they're legally allowed to do, turning their customers into their enemies. Good job!

Re:No Shit

[Jaysyn]

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).

That is correct. The amount of DRM that goes into a Steamworks game is controlled by the publisher, not by Valve.

http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games

um, yeah... so?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:um, yeah... so?

[Runaway1956]

Mounting evidence at Baen Books.

http://baen.ghostwheel.com/#RIAA

The more stuff they give away, the more money they make. Rest in peace, Jim Baen.

Define worked

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

Old skool history of copy protection

[Neo-Rio-101]

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.

Re:Old skool history of copy protection

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

A fitting end, obscurity.

Only if you believe that creative works are owned by their creators rather than become part of the culture once published and thus owned by everyone in society. If you believe the later, than any creative work lost to DRM is a loss to all of us.

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.

DRM has driven piracy for decades

[onyxruby]

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...

Re:DRM is technology misapplied

[Dunbal]

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.

Re:Just because some DRM doesn't bug you does not

[jones_supa]

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.

Re:2003 called, they want their article back

[FireFury03]

Source: "Slashdot: In a new Rasmussen poll, 75% of American adults would rather read a book in traditional print format than in an ebook format. Only 15% prefer the ebook format (the other 10% are undecided)." http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/07/21/1143210/poll-shows-that-75-prefer-printed-books-to-ebooks

Actually, the licencing policies of ebooks are the primary reason why I still read paper books instead of ebooks: I actually quite like the ebook format, and all other things being equal I would probably switch to ebooks.

However, with paper books, you buy a book and read it. Then you hand it to your partner, who reads it. Maybe you lend it to some friends to read. It sits on your bookshelf for a while. Then you have kids and in 20 years' time they read it and possibly pass it on to their kids. Maybe you decide to sell it for a small amount of pocket change. Conversely, if I buy an ebook from Google Play, I can read it... that's it - its tied to my Play account, I can't move it into my partner's Play aggount for her to read, I can't lend it to any friends, even if Play is even still around in 20 years time I won't be able to hand it on to my kids, and I can't sell it. In theory, I *could* lend my partner my entire tablet (tied to my play account) so that she can read it, but even this is explicitly disallowed by the Play T&Cs, so strictly speaking I can't even legally do that.

To my mind, this so greatly devalues the product that I'm not interested in handing over money for it. And, frankly, I'm surprised that anyone wants to buy an ebook with these terms attached to it - all of the things I've mentioned that I want to be able to do with my books are *normal* and acceptable things that most people have been doing with books for generations and I'm surprised that people aren't totally shocked and dismayed when they find they can't do any of this anymore with ebooks they had "bought".

Sounds like a lot of feel-good pirate nonsense. The music industry started selling DRM-free music years ago. It continues to decline.

Does it? The last figures I saw (admittedly around a year ago) seemed to clearly show a decline in album sales and a steep increase in single track sales. Even without copyright infringement this wouldn't surprise me at all - for CDs, except for a few selected tracks that are (expensively) made available as singles for a short period after their release, if you like one or two tracks you have to buy the entire album. Now, you can buy just the tracks you like, so is there any surprise that album sales are being rapidly surplanted by singles sales?

Also, its worth remembering that the economy has been utterly screwed over the past few years, so not entirely surprising that people might be cutting back on the amount they spend on nonessentials.

I think it's time to all admit to yourselves that *some* people will pay for stuff and some people are going to try to avoid spending money on music and movies so they can by expensive clothes, iPhones, expensive laptops, and other physical stuff.

Absolutely - some people are going to spend money on entertainment, irrespective of how badly they are treated by the industry, and some people are going to avoid spending money on entertainment (either by illegally copying, or simply by not consuming the products at all), irrespective of how well they are treated. The people the industry needs to keep happy are the middle-ground - the people who want reasonably priced entertainment and don't want to get screwed over - make the products too expensive, or artificially break them with DRM and the business from these people will be lost.

I do think that DRM is possibly doing a good job of training people to copy content who otherwise wouldn't - if you keep buying content and keep finding that the only way to do re