Explaining DRM to a Less-Experienced PC User? 195
An anonymous reader asks: "I have a question for Slashdot users eager for a challenge. How would one explain – at a casual level – the concept of, and problems with, DRM to someone who is competent using a computer, but with little technical knowledge?"
there's hardly a casual explanation (Score:5, Interesting)
This topic has been kicked around by
To date, I have not seen anything approaching a casual description of DRM. In fact, I've seen mostly confusion about and around it. If I were trying to explain to the uninitiated, I would take the tack of describing anything DRM'ed as potentially unusable on one or more devices you own. The fact there is so much turbulence swirling around DRM is an indicator how it hasn't gelled.
Actually I've tried to explain to casual users. For example, I tell Tivo users (who can be extremely passionate) programs on their "Now Showing" list would not be guaranteed to stay around for as long as necessary to be viewed; or may not be viewable more than once; or may be "eaten" as they're viewed, leaving the ability to backtrack and rewatch segments no longer allowed. That usually gets them going.
For CD listeners, I describe CDs that may or may not play on their computer, but are extremely likely to fail on any older CD player, in their car, or in their home entertainment system.
The more I can drive home with examples what DRM looks and feels like, the more I find a spark in the unitiateds' eyes. They don't like it even when only getting a sense of DRM. They don't like it at all.
I think that DRM can't be described casually, and is so amazingly complex, confusing, and potentially onerous lends even more amazement it could ever be allowed to be implemented.
Re:there's hardly a casual explanation (Score:5, Informative)
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Place a curse on those SOB's at the MPAA and RIAA and there damn DRM [i-curse.com]
Re:there's hardly a casual explanation (Score:4, Funny)
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*scratching head* Sorry if I did something to offend...
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One must have copied the other, as there's no way at all they could both have already known about the video. You know, the one on the world's most well-known public video-sharing website... <:-/
I've got it in one sentence (Score:4, Insightful)
Feel free to submit proposed revisions.
Re:I've got it in one sentence (Score:4, Insightful)
Change "you feel like you should be able to do" to "you should be able to do". There is no reason the technology should prevent you from doing any of those things. Thus, the sentence becomes:
It might be worth mentioning that it allows producers to get higher profits by selling an inferior product, if the person you're explaining it to asks why producers would want such a thing.
Re:I've got it in one sentence (Score:4, Insightful)
But you can make it even shorter...
DRM is what keeps you from doing everything you want to do.
End of story.
Re:I've got it in one sentence (Score:5, Funny)
Shorter: All your songs are belong to us.
:-D
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Actually:
DRM is what keeps you from doing everything you paid to do.
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Yes, the technology and the law are both somewhat complicated to the uninitiated, but the casual explanation is:
DRM is about restricting the ability to copy, transmit and execute digital media. Pro-DRM forces want the sellers of digital works to have as much power as possible to limit copying, transmission and execution by those who buy the works. Anti-DRM forces want the purchasers of digital works to have as
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For example: I want the ability to move a DVD or HD-DVD to a "$5 100G SD card" 15 years from
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Re:there's hardly a casual explanation (Score:5, Insightful)
To date, I have not seen anything approaching a casual description of DRM.
I'm not sure that's necessarily so. While I use Linux and will not use encumbered media (at least none on which I can't trivially break the "locks", and even then I avoid it as much as possible) most of the less geek-oriented people I know will eventually run into trouble with it...and then they ask me for my help. At this point, you can give them a few basics (lock-in, not wanting things copied, etc.) However, what they inevitably take away from these discussions is exactly what I'd hope:
DRM is what is causing my problem.
At that point, they lump it in with all the other things which cause problems even though they don't have a full technical understanding of what they are. This particular heap also includes viruses, spyware, adware, and good things like that-exactly the classification DRM belongs in.
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Q: Why won't my audio file play?
A: Because they want you to pay for it again.
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Wait, I thought that was MS Word? (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, you typed a dash at the beginning of a line! It looks like you're creating a bulleted list: and I know that what you really want is for me to reformat the line into a bulleted list with completely new and different formatting from what it had when you started typing
Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
That's DRM in a nutshell. It's actually worse than that but the metaphor degrades somewhat beyond that.
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Also good if your friend speaks German or Chinese (or a bunch of other languages).
A bit light on real-world examples, though.
Maybe a little too metaphorical but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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What's so bad about private libraries? You usually have to pay something to get into those as well.
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Re:there's hardly a casual explanation (Score:5, Interesting)
Refer them to a video [zdnet.com].
From the page:
This was torrented a while back. Maybe someone will put it on Youtube. It is quite funny and makes the point well.
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How about this little book "The Pig and The Box" [blogspot.com]? It was written to help explain DRM to kids.
Renting versus buying. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Your SOOOUUUULLLLL!!! (Score:3, Funny)
Two words (Score:2, Informative)
Seriously. I've tried explaining the matter to my friends and girlfriend. Those two words saved my life.
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someone please revoke this guy's geek license...
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For further reading you might want to direct them to Michael Geist's site which goes into detail. He was recently featured on Slashdot for his 30 Days of DRM. I wrote about it as well here [abandonedstuff.com].
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DRM is not meant to be consumer friendly, but giving the illusion that it is. I stay away from the stuff by actually buying those circular plastic things, though the ones without the 'copy protected' logo. For this reason there are albums I would have bought that ended up staying the shelf. Trying to explain this to non-computer users or even a number of people in IT ( !!! ) is not always easy. Some people just don't want to know, or simply don't care. The other p
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Simple (Score:2)
Next!
Tom
Re:Simplistic (Score:4, Insightful)
DRM takes away your rights and freedoms to protect against the minority who would infringe on their [producers] rights.
The very real fact is that the government grants you copyright protection which INCLUDES fair use. DRM is a way of abusing the monopoly of copyright without honouring the other side of the deal. In all honesty, DRM applied to copyrighted works should be illegal. It isn't. Hmm, I wonder why that is...
Tom
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Yeah, it's an accident that a 100 million dollar studio keeps losing track of their works in progress... right, cuz a firewall and SSL server would be so hard.
Tom
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You're an AC, who are frequently annoyances, trolls or idiots.
Anyone can register, for free, if they aren't afraid of the reputation-tracking aspects.
You do the math.
Go Go Gadget Inappropriate Metaphor! (Score:5, Funny)
Cars (Score:2)
DRM Is (Score:2)
DRM is saying that if you have the legal right to do something, but Sony or Disney or AOL decided that you shouldn't, you can be arrested for doing it.
Montage (Score:2)
YouTube to the Rescue! (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1H7omJW4TI [youtube.com]
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Simple (Score:2)
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This works for all women from bible-thumpers to soccer-moms to ultra extreme femi-nazi's.
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Easy (Score:2)
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Close.
"You can't use it." (unless you fork over the cash to buy our hardware to play it on)
Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
"Someone else gets to decide when and how you can play music you bought, watch the movies you're bought, play the games that you've paid for."
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Yes, I'm aware that there's more to getting to choose when and how to use it than that. However, that doesn't make a world of difference to a person who only wants to use the media in the manner suggested by the distributor.
DRM could be fair. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's very close to what I would have come up with.
I think one of the confusing things about these kinds of debates is that the pro and anti side focus on the intended or feared consequences. Thus, both sides tend to talke past each other. You've made a succinct statement of the anti-side's view. The pro side would put it this way:
"People won't be able to steal movies and music and resell them."
The problem with planning for the future is
Pop in a random DVD (Score:3, Interesting)
if($subject == devotechristian) {
include "american pie" . $previews
}
Then tell them it will only get worse and that DVD was just a begin. Or tell $random_audiophile he won't be able to make back up copies of his "high quality master"...
MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Insightful)
DVDs are exactly the kind of thing to use to explain DRM to the general public. Start with skipping commercials, and then move on to region coding, CSS, Macrovision (I couldn't transfer my old VHS tapes to DVD using a $200 VCR/DVDRW machine because it mistakes a bad-quality tape for the Macrovision signal distortion), etc.
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but i can't skip the fbi warning...
A Right to Read (Score:3, Informative)
Right to Read [gnu.org] explains the problem with the associated moral dillemas and pulls at the heartstrings. But it is serving as a sort of Animal Farm for DRM advocates, who seem to point out how much they can gain in the short term by enforcing these schemes to make people more money.
Basically, you have to ask the guy about whether he'd be allowed to own anything. DRM is taking America (and a few other countries) into a dark age where there is really nothing you can buy - you can only rent it or lease it,with the owner living downstairs and always prying into your life. Somewhat like Three's Company Too, but except Mr Roper isn't really one person, but a composite of the company director board.
But let me put my example up - I never bought new textbooks. In my college, it is customary to buy the books off your seniors, with the associated writings on the margin, underlined points and the odd love letter hidden in it. But as Right to Read illustrates, information when it loses its physical form becomes a commodity which can be sold over and over again to the same induvidual - for different uses. Meaning that, if I had an ebook DRM based textbook, all of them would have expired by now - while I still retain some of the CS books which have changed the way I think about computers. OR playing quake1 on my new Radeon box, I don't know if I'll ever be able to play Doom3 legally once the Steam servers go offline.
DRM exploits the transience of information in the digital world to squeeze water from a stone, without adding any extra value to the customer (other than the carrots required for them to bite).
Oblig. UF quote [userfriendly.org] (where's pitr these days ?)House Analogy (Score:4, Interesting)
I have included a rough transcript of the analogy below.
==
For our purposes, we have a digital file, which is represented by a house.
We have digital rights management (DRM), which is represented by an elaborite door and lock system which is operated by a rather burly doorman.
Now for the cases...
Case 1: You own the house and the doorman is under your control.
(This is similar to you creating a document and applying your own DRM to it.)
You are the owner of the house. You can tell the doorman to keep people out completely, to let certian people in so that they can see your model train collection in the basement, to let certian people open your refrigerator and take a beer... what ever you want, when you want.
Case 2: You rent the house, but the doorman lets you do what you want
(You get a document and the terms of usage are unlimited.)
You may rent the house, but the doorman lets you do anything you want.
Case 3: You rent the house, but the doorman has strict orders on what you can do
(You get a document with moderate DRM)
You are a tennant, but you can't repaint the walls. The doorman, unknown to you, has been forbidden to let your friends drink your beer.
Case 4: You rent the house, but you have no control.
(You get a document with extreme DRM)
You live at the house, but the doorman can do anything he wants to you. Whenever you put beer in the frige, the doorman is the only person allowed to drink it. You are allowed a dog, but the doorman only allows it to poop in your bedroom. Occasionally, you wakeup and the entire place is redecorated by the landlord. You want to move, but the contract you signed prevents it until a replacement house is built.
Would you buy your music on 8-tracks? (Score:2)
someday it will stop working. Then you get to buy it again. Remember records? Tapes? DRM is disposable.
Don't buy
Disposable Restricted Music.
Doomed Regrettable Muck
Digitally Reduced Mush
Doubly Repurchased Music
Damned Retarded Munchkins
I gotta make a script for this!
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Eventually we are all dead.
8-Track tapes were disposable media for play in your car.
They broke, they jammed, they melted, You paid for the convenience, not for permanence.
All physical media can be lost to some trivial accident, all physical media degrades in time, all physical media demands storage and maintenance.
Suppose I decide I
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Your freedom.
If he wears a tinfoil hat after this description.. (Score:2)
Car analogy (Score:5, Funny)
The big corporations who control the media, they're the piston. The cylinder is your ass.
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It's easy! (Score:5, Insightful)
See this Napster/Sony/Microsoft/FooDRM media file you "bought?" You do not own it. You cannot make backups. If your PC/Phone/MP3 player dies, so does your music. You cannot lend it to a friend. You cannot make mix CDs for your car. If you upgrade your MP3 player, you may have to "buy" it again. If your MP3 player/PC/etc. is stolen or dies, you also lose your music. If you get sick of the DRM'd music you "bought" you cannot resell it to someone else who will appreciate it. You "bought" nothing.
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they don't care (Score:3, Interesting)
i work in a college. i have student employees. they just don't care. but here's where they do care. we have ruckus, which is drm'd wma files. they don't like that they can't play them on their ipod and consider it to be a fault of ruckus (granted, they have to buy a subscription to play it on a supported playsforsure player, of which the ipod is not one of them, but that's apple's fault, not ruckus's). they think it's stupid. they also don't like that they technically (although we found this to be untrue) cannot even listen to the music without a valid subscription (which is free during hte school year and costs money during the summer). but they don't care about their apple itunes drm... go figure.
so there's almost no point in trying to explain it to them because they just don't care.
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when i hear that term, it immediately makes me think "your average computer user that uses a computer for itunes, web browsing, and email", not "you not-so-average computer user who wants to know more about computers but isn't a 'computer guy'".
the definition i think of doesn't really care about drm so long as they can get play music on their ipod. i work with these people on a daily basis. they just don't care. it'd be nice to think that they do, but that's not the case
just take a lesson from metallica (Score:2)
Here's what I do (Score:2)
I've explained this to a few people over time, and everyone seems to get the picture. What it usually boils down to is me telling the other people, "DRM gives companies control over your computer so that they can arbitrarily decide what you are and aren't allowed to do with it." People hate to hear this.
I didn't see a link to the kid's book (Score:4, Interesting)
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I'll definitely be printing them out for my little niece -- she's not reading yet, but she will be soon -- and sending the author a donation. That'll be easier all around than sending for the printed v
The point? (Score:3, Interesting)
If a person buys a song off of iTMS, then their expectation is that they'll be able to play it on their iPod and in iTunes. For this reason, it would be pointless to "educate" the user about the DRM - because they don't care that they can't use it with non-iPod, non-iTunes modes of playback. It's about as likely to get them to care about DRM as it is to get them to care that they can't play VHS tapes in a DVD player.
In general, people aren't stupid - even if they don't understand computers, they can still understand basic consumer skills. If a vendor of DRM'd software explains what the terms of the DRM are, and the user pays for it anyway, then it means that the user has no problem with buying a limited product. A DRM'd file is not a broken file, however much the Slashdot crowd may disagree. The file does exactly what it says it would do. The user doesn't care about being able to convert it to a different format, doesn't care about being able to send it to a different computer, doesn't care about what happens to the file when it goes into the public domain. The user has no problem accepting files that you can't do these things to, because the user never wanted to do any of those things anyway, and the user was never led to believe that any of these things would be possible. The user is not being cheated, any more than you'd be cheated if you had bought a copy of a single-player game, and was shocked to discover that it does not feature a multiplayer mode.
So, we can clearly see that the point of this exercise is not to convince average users that DRM is Evil and that the vendors of DRM'd software are trying to cheat them. This raises the next question: what is the purpose of "educating" non-tech users about DRM? Is it just for the purpose of creating market forces that will enable us to buy non-DRM'd music (even if it costs more)? Is it an attempt to create a grass-roots resistance against the encroachment on technology rights by whatever government-controlling conspiracy it's popular to believe in this week, who no doubt want to make unlicensed software of any variety illegal? I'm not seeing it, here.
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The lock-in issues. It has been proven time and time again that DRM does little to protect the actual media, even in iTunes you can just burn it to a cd and re-rep it. Apple on the other hand makes lots and lots of cash from the ipod-itunes lock-in and they protect it using DRM (in the same way as HP tries to use DRM for their ink-cartridges). That mak
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I don't understand why the market has to be in such a lock-in when it comes to DRM media. As an example I fly RC helicopters and in that bussines everybody is copying everybody. I'm not even talking about lookalikes, I'm talking about verbatim copying of parts and even complete helicopters (The sam
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Apple has about 90% of the portable player market (in America), it's probably safe to asume they have about 90% of the market for music online also. Apple was able to strike a deal with the companies to sell music online for the iPod. No other company have been able to do that. Apple has unfair advantage because of DRM.
Remove DRM from the equation and there'd still be many of the same problems we see today, only with copyright l
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John Gilmore Article (Score:2)
Short and simple (Score:2)
Copy protection was the old days. (Score:2)
DRM isn't about copy protection any more. Now it's more about renting, instead of buying.
"Sooner or later, you're going to have to buy all your music and videos again".
The challenge is... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you tell someone "When you buy from music from iTunes, you'll only be able to play it on all of your computers, all of your iPods, and all of your CD players.", chances are they aren't going to understand just how "obviously" oppressive and stifling that is.
Tell them (Score:2)
Getting kind of Zen, you know? (Score:4, Insightful)
DRM is ripping music you bought so it works on the player they don't want it to.
DRM is downloading a crack for software you bought, so you don't have register it.
DRM is changing a CMOS bit so your wireless card works in a system it isn't type accepted for.
Anything you have to break to make it work is DRM.
Why Explain it? Show it! (Score:5, Insightful)
In years of trying to make my girlfriend, who is a strategy consultant and all-around pretty competent 'business' PC user (i.e. knows her way around Windows reasonably well, knows end-user apps, etc.) and a very bright person, I couldn't get her to care ("I buy all my music/films".)
What'd it take for her to understand why this is important and to listen to me on how it works? Well, we're spending a year on another continent and all of a sudden, her DVDs don't work in the player in our furnished apartment. Oops. Boy, was she pissed. Boy, did she want to know how it worked, why it sucked and how to get around it all of a sudden.
Same with why Windows is broken ("but it just works for what I want to do.") Until it didn't "just work." Same with data privacy ("I don't have anything to hide") until someone stole her credit card number.
The phrase you need to remember is "show me the money" or, in consulting terminology, "where's the 'so what'?" Most people won't care or give a rat's ass until it affects them directly.
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How I would explain it (Score:2, Insightful)
That means that if you buy a CD with MS' DRM, you won't be able to listen on it on: - many CD players, including those built into stereos (car
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Of course the situation becomes tricky when it doesn't inform the user. But in that case, it's not a bad technology, just a bad product.
DRM is sugar cubes (Score:3, Insightful)
Who forbids it? Why the company that sold you the sugar cubes offcourse. Why do you have to obey them? Because DRM tells you too and if you do not you go to jail for longer then for rape or murder.
That is DRM. It is like trusted computing, wich really means, we don't trust you computing. DRM and Trusted computing are about the seller telling the buyer what he can do with the product. This is a totally new idea.
As said, nobody on the world would think of it to suggest that a sugar cube wich is clearly designed to be put into hot drinks cannot be used in any other way as the buyer sees fit. I can literally do anything with the sugar cubes I buy that I want with the only hindrance that the act may not be against the normal law. The seller has NOTHING whatsoever to say about it.
The REAL problem is belief (Score:3, Informative)
I mean, I can see that it's unbelievable. That the claims of people opposing DRM sound outlandish. And they do sound completely insane. The most insane thing about it is that they're true.
Generally, I've met 3 reactions:
1. Claims of impossibility
These people usually go "They can't do that". They don't understand that it can be done. They stopped taking a close look at technology with compact cassettes and think that everything works like they did. I.e. that there is just a 'cable' coming out of their player and that this cable can be jacked into a recording device, and that this has to work all the time because, well, it has always worked this way.
2. There will be a recorder
Actually a subgroup of group one, those people usually counter with the motion that for every kind of protection so far, someone has made a program or device that "took care of the problem". What they fail to see is that it's illegal to create such a program or device. Another thing they can't believe, that it can be illegal to program something. Honestly, it is hard to believe...
3. There will be a crack
Finally the group that tells you "so what, someone's gonna crack it". While they are most likely right, I don't really see why I should go into illegality to execute a right I have.
That's more the problem with DRM. It's not that people wouldn't listen. They just don't believe.
DRM is like DVD region coding on *everything* (Score:2)
The pig and the box. A kids' book. A modern fable. (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't know if this has been mentioned here before.
There is a very nice book written for kids with great illustrations available at "The pig and the box" [blogspot.com].
from the page: The Pig and the Box is about a pig who finds a magic box that can replicate anything you put into it. The pig becomes so protective of it, and so suspicious of anyone that wants to use it, that he makes people take their copied items home in special buckets that act as... well, they're basically DRM. It's like a fable, except the moral
It depends on who they are (Score:2)
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What you mean is:
1) Go to iTunes Music Store
2) Buy a protected AAC file from the store
3) etc...
AAC is not a proprietary file format, nor is it DRM-encumbered by default. The iTunes Music Store (NOT iTunes... it won't DRM tracks that you rip) uses a DRM wrapper around an AAC file... but these tracks aren't standard AAC files.
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I like to call them Defective Recorded Music.