DRM Has Always Been a Horrible Idea 281
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."
Re:um, yeah... so? (Score:5, Informative)
Mounting evidence at Baen Books.
http://baen.ghostwheel.com/#RIAA [ghostwheel.com]
The more stuff they give away, the more money they make. Rest in peace, Jim Baen.
DRM has driven piracy for decades (Score:4, Informative)
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:Anonymous Reader (Score:4, Informative)
That horse left the barn months ago.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/16/riaa-mpaa-would-like-to-scan-your-hard-drive-for-infringing-content/ [techcrunch.com]
I pirate after I bought my first BluRay (Score:3, Informative)
I purchased Futurama on BluRay after having purchased a reader for my PC. I was unable to watch the discs because of copy protection.
This is the best argument for NOT paying for the content ever invented, that's for damn sure.
Re:Just because some DRM doesn't bug you does not (Score:5, Informative)
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:No Shit (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikia.com]
Re:Nope, absolutely wrong (Score:4, Informative)