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."
It always made sense (Score:0, Interesting)
For someone concerned about this quarter's profits and protecting their existing business model, it _always_ made sense. A modest investment in DRM protect this project's profits. And you could point to other projects that made far less profit _for your projects' mangers_ as examples of where the lack of DRM hurt their profits. It's only in the longer term, year after loss of business due to the most burdensome of DRM, such as Sony's built-in rootkits on CDROM media, that it could be shown to cost business. And let's be honest: most of the people who amass large Bittorrent libraries were never going to pay for all that music, or all those videos, anyway, so it's not as if those "lost sales" were going to ever exist as sales, anyway: most people will never all watch all the media they've stolen. So the "losses" without DRM are also quite exaggerated.
There are times, and environments, where DRM has been very successfully used. Large scale commercial software, such as clusters of VMware servers, or high cost software such MRI analysis tools, have been very successfully DRM managed. Red Hat's strange "it's yum, but not really" licensing to get updates? That has blown goats. Anyone sane using Red Hat makes one local registered and runs a local yum mirror from it, using that for all their other hosts, instead of that butt slow and bandwidth sucking "RHN/yum" mess. And no, "Red Hat Staellite Server" is a messy mirror of the same butt slow RHN mess. Calling it "spacewalk" does not help, it's a lot of "open the pod bay doors, Hal" arguing with the licensing management.
Richard Stallman (Score:1, Interesting)
2003 called, they want their article back (Score:2, Interesting)
It'd be nice if these articles were a little less narrow minded, a little less circle-jerkish, and would, at least, acknowledge the fact that piracy has been a huge problem for the industry. Looking at the industry's decline in revenue, I can't say that Jack Valenti's statement about the Boston Strangler looks all that silly anymore. See this graph to understand what I'm talking about (and this graph is a few years old, I'm sure it looks even worse than this, now): http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000/music-industry.jpg [businessinsider.com]
Re:Old skool history of copy protection (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I've never owned a game console, but watching things it seemed to me that the reason the Playstation greatly outsold the Nintendo 64 was because the Playstation used crackable CDs while the N64 used cartridges. The weak DRM was a winner for Sony, while the game makers had their piracy losses offset by the bigger ecosystem.
However I don't think this is a good argument that content makers lose more than they gain from DRM. Weak DRM can be a net gain for publishers if some of the gains had by making piracy inconvenient is given back to users as lower prices or automatic updates.
Re:No Shit (Score:4, Interesting)
DRM is bad.
I was watching this recently posted video [youtube.com] of Ray Kurzweil interviewing Robert Freitas, a "nanobot theoretician", about the current state of nanotech. Freitas suggested the use of DRM techniques as a way of preventing the malicious use of nanotechnology. Seems like a "good" application to me. There's another video [youtube.com] of RK interviewing Eric Drexler whichh is also interesting.
Re:What is this DRM of which you speak? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not at all. Matter of fact, it will make the "public" incarnation stripped of DRM just that much more valuable.
I will post AC because I am going to reveal something a lot of us already know, but the business types have not caught onto it yet.
This is an example: I have two old DOS CAD systems which I still use to this day. Both of them originally came with dongles. I debugged one of them personally, the other I used a crack for de-dongling it. I could not have any trust for a program that relied on a single point of failure which would render the thing inoperable, just as I would never buy a delivery truck for my employer if I knew the water pump in it was special and no aftermarket product was legal. Which means a failed water pump would render the whole truck inoperable.
I would feel just as foolish building an executively appointed luxury hotel, deliberately designing it so when the toilet plugged, the cleanouts were inaccessible, and the entire hotel would be rendered inoperable. It seems only someone with a business education, not an engineering mindset, would buy into such a ridiculous thing.
Now, I do not have an MBA, but there seems to be a whole bunch of people out there which seem to completely lack the common sense to never buy a critical part of a business that cannot be replaced should it fail. To me, the infrastructure that allows a business to access its information certainly qualifies as a critical structure. To think that anyone would even consider having their access to their own information revokable by an arbitrary third party to me is absolutely inconceivable, yet there are people out there, with a business education - no less - that will accept such a thing.
When I see business accept such a thing, my respect for ones who buy into this drops by orders of magnitude.
I think of them more as the foolish kid who buys into some shell game some huckster is playing on them, and they yet have to figure out they are simply being had.
Re:No Shit (Score:4, Interesting)
_THIS_. I hate DRM in all its forms. I want it to go away.
They have done DRM right
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).