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GOG Launches FCKDRM To Promote DRM-Free Art and Media (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: GOG, the digital distribution platform for DRM-free video games and video, has launched a new initiative designed to promote content without embedded DRM. The platform aims to promote GOG and other companies with a similar ethos, including those offering DRM-free music, books, and video. "DRM-free approach in games has been at the heart of GOG.COM from day one. We strongly believe that if you buy a game, it should be yours, and you can play it the way it's convenient for you, and not how others want you to use it," GOG said in a statement. While Digital Rights Management is seen by many companies as necessary to prevent piracy, GOG believes that its restrictions are anti-consumer and run counter to freedoms that should exist alongside content ownership.
DRM is easily circumvented BS, harms legitimate users, and should be removed from the landscape.
aaaaaaa
Given the broad move towards content streaming, and Kindle Unlimited, I'm not hopeful that people will increasingly move towards ownership of what media they consume. Noone cares about DRM of Netflix streams because they accept that they can't do whatever they want with the stream. Steam now allows refunds, so if the DRM prevents the game from working, you can refund it. Legally it's the EULA and not the DRM that prevents you from owning your media, and that practice is a larger problem that doesn't seem to be going anywhere either.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The value of a product is by definition what someone else is willing to pay for it. Not your asking price. Not even how valuable you consider it. I treasure the wedding ring of my grandmother and wouldn't sell it for millions, even though the average jeweler would probably only pay a few 100 bucks for it. And that is actually the price I could sell it for, not a dime more.
The argument many companies field for DRM is that without, their product becomes easy to copy and hence worthless because it can be multiplied at the whim of the one holding it. What they fail to understand is what they're competing with. They are competing with the product being offered for free. Not legally, true, but for free. You cannot compete with 'free' on price. Unless you'd be willing to pay people to take your product, something that has rarely been done in history, at least without the added requirement to actually use it and pay that way in some other fashion.
What you can compete on is convenience and value. DRM now devalues your product, in the eyes of the customer. With DRM, I cannot easily transport it from my laptop to my desktop, I have to enter keys or insert some physical medium somewhere or, in its worst incarnation, I have to be online all the time and maybe can't even play sensibly the first few weeks after launch because the servers the DRM wants to connect to are overtaxed. These are all problems a cracked version does not have.
A cracked version of even the most fiendishly DRMified product can be used on any computer at any time by any person without jumping through any hoops. At worst it may even be that the buyer of a genuine copy cannot play because the DRM-Servers are not responding while someone who did not buy the game but instead got it from an illegal source can.
This is the main danger of DRM to your product. Because here is what happens: People talk with each other. User A who bought your product, and now cannot play, talks with User B who copied it, and who will show User A how to get a copy himself. User A doesn't even feel guilty because not only did he pay good money for a product he cannot use, he feels cheated by you and has exactly zero problem with a potentially existing conscience copying the game. He paid for it, so according to his moral attitude (and, frankly, probably almost everyone else's too) he has the right to use that game. This is how he learns that copying a game isn't that difficult.
Next time he omits the step that is of no value to him. I.e. buying the game that he then has to copy anyway to actually play it.
DRM damages your product in the eyes of the one paying for it, i.e. the one whose opinion about the value of a product actually matters. Whether you consider it more valuable with DRM is irrelevant.
Steam, GOG and various other online distribution channels have proven that people are willing to pay for games delivered with convenience and hassle-free. Knowing that you get the game you want quickly and easily, not having to store it locally while you don't play it, being able to transfer save games easily between computers and even to other players, a centralized modding repository and so on, these things are of value to people, and they convince them that they're better off paying a few bucks for a game rather than downloading what hopefully is the game, fiddling with it to make it work and then spend some more hours trying to figure out how to add mods or integrate someone else's save games.
Add value to your products and people will buy them. Remove value and people will find other ways to get them in a more valuable version.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'd like to think that people are moral enough to generally act in good faith when the other party is acting in good faith. I believe that applies to software and piracy. An example would be opening the source to products once they're essentially obsolete. Or require a one-time online activation when a product is installed, but releasing a patch to remove the need for online activation when the servers are taken offline.
Copyright length also needs to be shortened and be different depending on the type of work. Software tends to become obsolete very quickly relative to other works, so limit the copyright length to something like 15 years. Films and TV don't become obsolete as quickly, and there are TV shows that have run longer than 15 years. A copyright length of 30 years might be more reasonable, but after a time, such works still seem dated. Written works don't become obsolete in the same way as software and film so they probably deserve a longer copyright. Something like 50 years might be reasonable.
I suspect the only real solution is to reduce copyright lengths because too few businesses see the wisdom of acting in good faith and expecting customers to do the same. It's unfortunate.
Would you pirate from a business that pledged to open source a product a few years after the original release? I'd like to think most people would say no.
They manage to thrive, even though every one of their releases immediately ends up on the torrents and other channels to download.
That says more about the actual value of DRM than it does about piracy.
There are two problems with copyrights and related rights, and both aren't DRM.
The first problem is that the original meaning of the copyright contract - right to monopoly sales (and profits) for a LIMITED TIME in exchange for placing the work in the PUBLIC DOMAIN once the limited time is over - has been destroyed. The LIMITED MONOPOLY is today being called "intellectual property" and the effort to make it perpetual has only increased.
The second problem is that what was essentially a CIVIL matter - the violations of the LIMITED MONOPOLY, has now been turned into a CRIMINAL MATTER.
Thus, the society, which feeds the "IP lawyers" has been shafted twice. Once by giving up its rights on the "copyright" contract, and then by paying for its enforcement.
DRM is just the icing on the cake of misery we suffer at the hands of the "IP lawyers".
No steam lock-down installer bullshit, no DRM, awesome games, great deals, an abundance of great old and new games, a website not built by complete morons ... All in all a very, very good e-commerce offering for digital goods.
This is how it should be done. I'll probably support their initiative for that reason alone.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The EULA is the only way you have any rights to the software *at all*.
Without a EULA, the software would be subject to the statutory rules of software copyright. In the United States, these rules carve out exceptions for the owner of a lawfully made copy to do the following:
- resell that copy (17 USC 109);
- copy the software into RAM to execute it (17 USC 117(a)(1)); and
- make private backup copies, but not distribute those copies to others (17 USC 117(a)(2)).
I purchased Carmageddon TD2000. It was an expensive game when it came out. I had a pretty beefy computer back then (for the day) but the game play was so laggy that it was basically unplayable. It was so unplayable that I read the entire manual. I noticed something that stuck a note in my mind. There were two lines (don't remember the exact words so I am paraphrasing it) that were at odds of each other. The first said that the game is copy protected. The second said that you are entitled to make one back up copy of the game. They had an email address so I emailed them about it. I asked since I am allowed to make 1 legal backup copy, but the game is copy protected, how do I do it. I was shocked when I got a reply from them. It only had two words in the email (other than my quoted text). It just simply said "You dont". Pretty much summed up what corporate thinks of the people who buy their games....
No, it isn't. Just because somebody snarkily re-acronyms something doesn't make it the truth.
I buy PC games from GOG. No GOG, or at least another DRM-free store, no sale.
If we want DRM to die, we have to change the supply/demand curve so that happens. It has to become a death knell to release your game without a DRM-free version, because people won't buy locked down shit. We have to support companies that release DRM-free games... which many are doing nowadays.
People need to stop this mentality that they need game X. You don't need it. It's a luxury item, and there are hundreds of other great games you can play instead. If you bend over and take it, companies will keep abusing you.
IT's basic econ. Reward what you want more of, and punish what you want less of. Support DRM-free everything in the marketplace, games, music, art, software, whatever. GOG has been doing the right thing by PC gamers for many years now.
And do the platform support that transfer?
In niche industries where each customer pays tens of thousands of dollars per user or small work-group for specialized software, DRM works.
However, the "rights management" is the contracts and the lawyers, and the "digital" is the large number of digits in the dollar amounts in the penalties laid out in the contracts. Severe violations can result in a lawsuit that can bankrupt the customer.
In such cases, the customer may even PREFER that software help enforce the contract to make it more difficult for a rogue employee to bankrupt the company through a license violation.
Much more common in such industries are is "hardware enforcement" where the software is useless without the hardware. I'm thinking things like million-dollar-medical devices. Where the software can run on ordinary PCs, it may be accompanied by a PC-add-on board or a "dongle" that runs some of the actual code from its own ROM even though that code could have been compiled to run on an ordinary PC. This makes piracy extremely difficult without either reverse-engineering or finding some way to read the ROM of the device.
The rights of one party act as restrictions on others.
If I have the right to life, you are prohibited from killing me. If I control copyright on a work, you are prohibited from copying it without permission.
So they are essentially the same thing, and the initialism has always been Rights.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
because I'm renting it. If there's something on Netflix I want enough to have it permanently I can buy it on DVD/Blue Ray and break the encryption to back it up.
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The rights of one party act as restrictions on others.
In DRM, the majority of people act as the restricted party, not the party with rights. Therefore, DRM is "digital restrictions management" for more parties than it is "digital rights management".
If I have the right to life, you are prohibited from killing me. If I control copyright on a work, you are prohibited from copying it without permission.
The prohibition of murder isn't quite the best example. In the case of copyright, far more parties are affected by the restrictions than enjoy meaningful exercise of the rights. This imbalance does not apply to the prohibition of murder.
A while back there was a discussion on how much effort Nintendo and others put in to make it difficult for people to play old games (Battletoads of course being a classic example of this) legally. If they would take a look at GOG they could see how they could do it, make money, and make the fans happy. There are plenty of games on there that date to the 90s (some even earlier) that people are happily paying small amounts of money for so they can play them on their newer PCs. Nindendo got close to this with Virtual Console but there were some glaring omissions - and of course it is close to shutting down for the WiiU.
Ask yourself this question; would you pay $5 to play your favorite 8 bit NES title on your newest Nintendo system? I know I would.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
CD Project Red, The owners of GOG and makers of The Witcher games included a DRM related pun in the Witcher 3: Quoting from the Witcher 3's Wiki: "During the quest involving Sigo Buntz, Geralt must deactivate the DRM ("Defensive Regulatory Magicon") with the aid of the Gottfried's Omni-opening Grimoire, or GOG". :)
That was funny and not very subtle
No, DRM isn't just icing on the cake. It causes additional, new problems along a whole other dimension.
You described some problems with copyright, but nevertheless a bunch of us think that copyright is basically a good idea. We're better off with copyright, than without it. You have some legitimate gripes about how it got fucked up and I'm not disagreeing, but if copyright were for limited times and civilly enforced, then those problems would be addressed, no?
But with DRM, even repaired copyright would be highly defective. First of all, "limited times" would only be by statute but still effectively unlimited. Worse, though, is that DRM interferes with casual use. Something with DRM is substantially worse than the same thing without it. Ergo, buying DRMed things is a bad idea, because they don't work right.
In a world with sane copyright policy, nobody needs to pirate until there's DRM. And then with DRM, everyone needs to pirate and you are seriously losing out if you don't. As a pirate, my videos all Just Work. They don't have deliberate defects.. And my non-pirated music also Just Works, because it's not DRMed. So I buy music but pirate all my video.
That's not what we want. That's incompatible with copyright being a good idea. DRM is direcly anti-copyright and all people who favor the preservation of copyright should be working to make DRM illegal.
But assuming we can't outlaw it (and I suppose there are First Amendment reasons why we shouldn't), then here's what we should do:
If a copyrighted work has a technological measure which limits access, and this was added with the authority (or even the knowledge) of the copyright holder, it should lose its copyright and fall into public domain. This is a fair compromise, repairs copyright so that it works as intended, while also allowing publishers who trust DRM more than copyright, to try their thing.
But it is the truth
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.