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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."
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?
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! --
The news is not that DRM is bad. The news is that people outside of IT are realizing it.
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
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.
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.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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.
Who is John Cabal?
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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!