The Day Against DRM 320
Qubit writes, "DefectiveByDesign.org, a campaign by the Free Software Foundation, is making Oct 3rd a Day Against DRM: 'Defeating DRM is all about awareness. The direct actions that we have taken are all about this. Today we are asking you to let the people around you know that DRM is bad for our society. Let's create space for the debate. Do we want handcuffs and locks on art and knowledge? As our friends at Disney recognize, if there is this debate, we will have won.'" Bayboy adds an article from eWeek mentioning that members of DefectiveByDesign.org are going to descend on flagship Apple stores in New York and London to protest the company's embrace of DRM. And Another AC writes, "In honor of the Day Against DRM, DreamHost has released a new service called Files Forever (for Dreamhost customers only during beta) This seems to be basically an iTunes Music Store that anybody can sell any sort of files through... as long as they have no DRM. Dreamhost handles all the payment processing and stores the file forever, offering unlimited re-downloads to end users who buy files through the service. When somebody buys a file they're even allowed to 'loan' it to others for free!"
Very useful... (Score:2, Insightful)
Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why Apple? (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess, it's all about location and convenience, rather than actually going after some of the really bad DRM offenders. Apple just happens to be the one unfortunate enough to have stores that are visually appealing and easily recognizable to consumers.
The intentions here may be good, but the execution is nearly at hypocritical levels.
The only way is through economics. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a very good possibility that in the near future, people will start changing their music players, like the new MS Zune. When this happens on a mass scale, and people have to re-buy their music, there will be a huge number of pissed off people, and people will finally realize why DRM is bad. Until something threatens people's wallets, no one's going to care.
I'm not all that impressed.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Until Apple did this and proved the business model was really viable, the only other real visible options for people were illegal downloads of MP3s (of sometimes dubious encoding quality) from p2p networks like Napster.
It seems obvious to me that somewhere in the development process, Apple did some bargaining for rights of the end-users of the music
Microsoft's "Fairplay" DRM and its upcoming use in devices like the Zune seem like a much more worthy target of attack. Fairplay is used by practically all the music services BUT Apple - and is getting more and more restrictive in every update to Windows Media Player that's released. Unlike Apple, MS seems to think it's ok to keep "turning the screws" to lock it down beyond what early adopters were told the rules were.
Re:Why Apple? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why Apple? (Score:2, Insightful)
I honestly don't think that DRM will make mainstream dissatisfaction with people until a true "ipod killer" come out and suddenly Aunt Susie gets mad and feels 'ripped off' that her Apple DRMd music won't play on her non-ipod.
Re:I'm not all that impressed.... (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't think Apple was all that "pro DRM" at all.
Perhaps you need to review the evidence that your Apple juice is spiked [blogspot.com].
There's more to their embrace of DRM than whatever is happening in ITunes. The TCPA shit is on the Intel chips too.
Re:The only way is through economics. (Score:3, Insightful)
> When this happens on a mass scale, and people have to re-buy their music, there will be a huge number of pissed off people, and people will finally realize why DRM is bad.
Excellent point.
Ideally, then, we would end up with dozens of incompatible DRM schemes in the marketplace, overwhelming the public with obstacles and confusion.
Thus, each time a new and incompatible DRM scheme is introduced, it will help to cause the collapse of all of them.
Here's a case where the failure of the industry to converge on standards could actually help us.
Re:Why Apple? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Would some one please explain... (Score:5, Insightful)
care less about drm on music since the most I do is listen to the radio. The issue is that people only want fair
use of the product they bought. They want to be able to play it a unlimited amount of times in the device of their
choosing. Say for instance I want to listen to some tunes and I can only get it in MS DRM protected files which don't work in my car stereo or on my linux machine, you see now we got a problem.
You cannot technically DRM protect content in a way which will allow legal fair use for the purchaser of the product.....period.
Re:What?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why Apple? (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone at one of the big companies (Universal?) said, "once consumers know about DRM, we fail" (or something like that). The only reason there isn't outrage at iTunes is that it's pretty transparent unless you're trying to convert away from iPods. Unlike a great number of the other stores out there, especially pre-PlaysForSure. My dad bought a track, it wouldn't work, spent all of $0 more there. If that had ever been the case with iTunes, Apple certainly wouldn't have the same market share (and, more likely than not, the media companies would have just given it up). Now that it's effectively little more than vendor lock-in, most people are pretty much screwed no matter what.
What is your point? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're trying to assert that most people would pirate music rather than paying for it, unless they physically prevented from doing so by their own property, then you are wrong. Contrary to the RIAA's twisted statistics, piracy is not decreasing sales. At the peak of napster's popularity sales at the register were rising, not falling. The falling numbers the RIAA liked to quote were wholesale numbers. This can be traced to the stores streamlining their inventory and stocking systems as a result of the internet. At that time, music stores near colleges did have falling sales, but so did book stores near colleges, and both correlate strongly to increases in internet sales of the same item. Subsequently, the decrease in sales that have been seen, are largely in the "oldies" adult market - and yet if you look at the statistics for what types of music is being pirated, it is clear piracy is not to blame for that. The threat of piracy is overblown, and unsubstantiated.
So no, most people are not selfish assholes, just you. But hey, congratulations! It is the minority of people like you that have given the RIAA leverage to strip away the fair-use right of the rest of the people in this country, and bias the laws in favor of further consolidation of the market. You sure stuck it to The Man.
Re:Would some one please explain... (Score:5, Insightful)
(1) DRM never expires. Ideally, copyright is a legal device used to enrich society, to encourage artists to create works based on the understanding that they will be able to profit from said works for a limited amount of time. After this time period expires, the creative works get released into the public domain. Unfortunately, DRM'd files don't do this- the music you bought on iTunes in 2003 will still be restricted in 3003.
(2) DRM will never work correctly without overly restrictive government controls. For example, let's assume that "Brand New Hyper DVD" format is completely uncrackable- the disks can never, EVER be decrypted and copied digitally. So what? Take your camcorder, aim it at the screen, and press record. Voila! Brand new copy without DRM. The only way to stop this would be to force all electronics manufacturers to include complicated measures to insure that they can't be used in this manner- but as we all know the next "DVD Jon" would show up in less than 2 days and crack these measures. The only way to fight this from a corporate/government standpoint would be to force all electronics capable of being used in this kind of pirating scheme to "phone home" on a regular basis to update their DRM software, and to BAN all older electronics without this "feature". See where this is going? Do you want to live in this society?
(3) DRM effectively turns your computer into a police snitch, working AGAINST you rather than for you. Just look at the Sony rootkit fiasco for an obvious example, or read up on the DMCA or broadcast flags or... you get the point.
(4) DRM adds an extra degree of complexity to playback, which constitutes another failure mode. A computer crash can often reduce a DRM'd music library to binary junk unless the user has been meticulous enough to save the mountain of data necessary to identify his/her computer as "the authorized playback device" of said music. Want to switch to a different computer, or swap out some hardware? Good luck- this will probably be interpreted as a "new computer" and your music won't play. Want to play your music on another device like your car stereo or your portable music player? You'd better hope the music vendor was "gracious" enough to bless you with that kind of "privilege".
(5) My fears of a world where DRM has taken over can best be summed up by the following short story. [gnu.org] I'm TERRIFIED that this is exactly the type of world we will wake up to in, say, 2020 if things keep going the way they are...
Re:I'm not all that impressed.... (Score:3, Insightful)
You know it's possible, just possible, that Apple could not love their DRM, but also not love laws being placed on them that would force them to adhere to someone else's particular standards of interoperability. In fact, I could imagine reasons why Apple could dislike DRM but also, once saddled with the responsibility, also not wish to support it on non-Apple stores and non-Apple devices.
Consider this: I'd bet that if someone else tried to program an alternate iTMS interface (besides iTunes), Apple would make an attempt to shut it down. Apple could get the full price of the song, and the DRM could remain intact, only playable in this iTunes replacement and on iPods, and Apple still probably wouldn't like it.
It's my sense, at least, that Jobs likes to keep control of things. He seems to like to keep things simple and consistent and, under most circumstances, limit the variables that Apple needs to deal with. Having other additional vendors in the mix would complicate things, make them messy, and probably increase Apple's support costs. If allow these third-party alternatives without strict control over them, then suddenly, when they want to change something about their software/hardware/services, they'd need to consider how it affects the third-party products. If they don't care and just break things for the third-party products, then they have to worry about the irritation of all the consumers who've grown accustomed to using those products/services.
And besides all that, there's just the threat of the unknown. If they license Fairplay to other players, it might grow into a situation that nobody is imagining. Of course, this is just my personal sense of Apple and Steve Jobs, but they seem cautious and prone to stay closed off and secretive as much as possible, and I believe it's this factor rather than love of DRM that keeps them from opening Fairplay to other vendors.
As to why they don't drop DRM entirely, that seems much more open-and-shut, and doesn't need any of this kind of interpretive guesswork: record/movie/TV companies would not have ever made their deals with Apple unless Apple provided DRM. If Apple stopped using DRM, these media companies would pull every one of their properties from the store.
Now, I don't like DRM either, and I think it is a problem. However, it's a problem that requires for its solution that we change a lot of societal factors. One of the chief factors would be to change IP law (i.e. copyrights) to something for which DRM was unsuitable.
Re:Would some one please explain... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is probably true, but the example you gave is not a good one. Being able to play content on multiple different players is not fair use. See for example:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Us
"In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and 'transformative' purpose such as to comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work. Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner."
You see the kind of thing that is covered by fair use: being able to "comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work". It means things that are educational and/or political.
It certainly does not mean having more fun with the copyrighted work than the owner wanted to allow you! If he says you can only play it on a certain device, that is his right. That is fully protected by copyright. You do not have a fair use right to expand on that just for your own enjoyment and pleasure.
So ironically you have made a correct statement but for totally incorrect reasons. The real problem with DRM is that it makes excerpting for commentary, criticism and scholarly or political analysis extremely difficult. If a teacher wants to play a few bars from a pop song and demonstrate that the melody or rhythm is based on tribal or classical influences, he may be thwarted by DRM. If someone wants to capture a frame of a movie and use it for parody purposes, DRM could make that difficult. These are protected, fair uses and DRM gets in the way.
But being able to play content in different ways than the copyright owner wanted you to? No way is that fair use. He has every right to be able to charge you extra for that right, just as with other ways of enjoying his work.
Re:Why Apple? (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting counter-argument, but in doing so, they are implying that the worst offender is also the most popular one. So, while public is busy watching these guys go after Apple, who's watching what's going on with Microsoft or Sony? Anything that takes the spotlight away from the really bad offenders only helps them accomplish their goals more covertly.
By making Apple the sole poster-boy of DRM, the "Day against DRM" is not really changing anything. People everywhere are still going to buy their DRM infected media from other sources without another thought. And come November 17th, people will still line the streets for the Sony PS3, blissfully unaware of the DRM nastiness hidden inside, just as long as they get their instant gratification out of the brief "cool factor" period.
Re:Would some one please explain... (Score:3, Insightful)
DMCA, not DRM is the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
There are those who claim that DRM cannot work without legislation, but I don't think that's completely true. Yes, for music and video content you can work around DRM, but it is often difficult and the quality of the result may be inferior. And for games and software, DRM can work in theory. The new proposals for Trusted Computing could also strengthen DRM without requiring legislation.
We should work to oppose this kind of legislation as it expands into more countries, and eventually work to roll it back in the places where it has been passed. Perhaps more technically effective DRM will make it easier to remove the legislative crutch.
Re:Would some one please explain... (Score:1, Insightful)
Some people don't like to read on screens. Some people CAN'T read on screens. People with low resolution devices might not be able to read your document with the same ease as others. Why should you be allowed to discriminate against users because of their hardware, needs, or preferences? If I have an 8-bit colour video card, your document might well look markedly inferior to the printed version. Why do you think you should have the right to stop me from printing a copy to read in bed, or on the train? What is so magical about your work that you get to dictate it must only be viewed electronically?
You want to stop printing so that you can control distribution? Copyright laws already cover that.
Re:Would some one please explain... (Score:1, Insightful)
Civil disobedience (Score:3, Insightful)
we should have a day against DMCA, not a day against DRM.
There's an even bigger problem with people blindly obeying silly laws without questioning their legitimacy. In most parts of the world, people simply ignore crappy laws they don't deem just. Yes, they get thrown in jails by those in power every now and then; but it's rather rare, because effectively, you can't jail 20% or more of the population: who would pay taxes then? In a democracy, civil disobedience shouldn't be needed; but do we really still live in a democracy, when outfits like Disney and RIAA can buy laws like DMCA?
Re:Would some one please explain... (Score:3, Insightful)
And it can't be. That's the whole point of fair use: it protects uses that are fair, given the circumstances involved. It is impossible to say that making backup copies, for example, is a fair use. In some circumstances it might be. In others, it might not be. A court is capable of looking at the facts and making a decision. And other courts might disagree given the same facts, it's such an infamously nebulous concept. This is routine. But no DRM system will ever be able to do what a court does.
But by saying "fair use" can't be specifically defined you're saying: "Hey copyright holders! You can't enforce your laws because you don't know if 'fair use' for me means 10 copies or 1,000 copies or 1,000,000 copies."
No, and now you're just being an idiot. Fair use can't be defined. But if a copyright holder thinks that a particular use is not fair, and you think it is fair, then you go to a court, and they make the final decision that both of you are stuck with. And so it is perfectly easy to enforce the law.
Not to mention the argument that you are agreeing to their terms of purchace, and they can tell you to use whatever device they damn well please. Again, the free market agument comes into play.
Copyright already deals with a government-granted monopoly, and artificial scarcity, so the idea of a free market has flown right out the window from the get-go. As for terms of purchase, let's remember that the law of sales, contract law, copyright law, etc. are laws, and thus may be changed. Some terms may simply be unenforcable according to the law, either substantively (i.e. a particular term is objectionable) or procedurally (i.e. the method by which the term was put forth wasn't the correct one). And others that are enforced now, may become unenforcable in the future. Where there is a conflict between what the law says, and what DRM says, I'm going to side with the law.
Re:Would some one please explain... (Score:3, Insightful)
But you forget: copyrights are limited in scope. For example, it is not an infringement of copyright to rent a DVD you own to someone else. If DRM interferes with this, it's no different than DRM interfering with something that wouldn't infringe copyright simply because the copyright has expired. The main limitation we're concerned with is fair use, because literally any use, under the right circumstances, is a fair one. (And conversely, no use, under the wrong circumstances, is fair)
What is the likelihood that today's DRM will still be effective then, and that the DMCA and similar laws will be unchanged?
Who cares? Copyright is a very forward-looking law. It is meant to assure a net public benefit in the future. If this is uncertain, then the law is not a good one.
Imagine if a town issued bonds to build a water tower, but they wouldn't promise that the bonds would ever mature. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. Without this certainty, no one would be stupid enough to buy the bonds, and the town wouldn't raise the money for their project.
DRM is quite similar, except that people willing to tolerate it are in fact being foolish enough to do something else, like throw money away in the example above.
Re:Would some one please explain... (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess people like you dont think that JRR tolkein deserved a single penny for writing his books? you think that Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, iain Banks, George Lucas, gene roddenberry, all these people should have become plumbers instead. increasingly, everything that we create is becoming reproduceable in digital form. You seem to think that nobody that creates anything that can be digital work should be paid. how quaint.
I guess you dont understand the concept of fixed and marginal costs, or basic economics. Or that the people who create all this 'art; need to be paid for their work, else they too will have to go become plumbers. I'd rather live in a world where great art and information was actually produced, rather than a world where everyone did manual work because its the only wat to ensure they get paid.
People like you are entirely the problem.
Not sure on this one (Score:2, Insightful)
I think it's not so much the DRM which is bad, it's the way it's being used and the people who are using it. For instance in Napsters case, I believe DRM is being used to enforce a subscription model where the user never owns the music they download and loses it as soon as they stop subscribing. Then there's the RIAA and the MPAA who see DRM as a tool which they can use to control the one channel of distribution that they currently don't fully control (the internet) so that they can continue to take advantage of artists and consumers.
I think that Apple have always used software to sell their hardware and if iTunes were to start selling vanilla MP3s iPod sales would, inevitably, take a hit. So they've arrived at the happy medium - just enough DRM to package the iPod product with the iTunes service into a Solution (I'm pwning the marketing-speak!) without completely removing the right to own the music and to make copies of it.