DRM is being abused (Score 1)

DRM is being abused by the content suppliers. If they do this because they are forced by the copyright holders to do this, is beyond the scope if this reply, as I only see the content suppliers use it :) I'm a big movie fan. A big music fan too. I'm also a student and can rarely spare the money to buy a CD and/or a DVD every month because the prices are so outrageous. So yes, you can say, I *DO* download music and movies. I have a few subscriptions to rental sites, so at least I give them back *some* money. Or at least, I *had* subscriptions. All of them have started implementing DRM. An sich, I have little trouble with that - I'm not a warez spreader. So I get the movie, and DRM allows me to watch it for 7 days. If I payed something like E 1 for that 'rental' that is fine by me. Still cheaper than going to a real rental and a lot faster (lightning fast university network). In that case, I could accept DRM. However, in reality, I cannot accept DRM. Why not? Because I can't transfer the movie to my harddisk/dvd player and watch it decently on my tv because that is not allowed. Even if I want to copy it to my laptop to watch it in another room that isn't possible because most of the buggers require you to reverify the license everytime you watch the movie. Requiring you to have a working internet connection on the device you are watching it on. As for music like iTunes, I think DRM is simply absurd. If you pay E 1 per song, you should own that song. Seeing the costs that are cut by not putting it on a CD, dividing the result by the number of songs typically on a CD, you pay the correct price and it should by all means be yours to do with as you please. DRM's idea is good and can in certain situations be justified, but the implementation is far to restrictive. Because of that, I will never accept anything DRM'd. IMHO, they had their chance to protect their stuff in a reasonable way, got greedy, and screwed up. Bye bye DRM. Added to that, I have to use WMP to play those files. Can't play them on *nix. Can't use a decent media player. Yeah right! I've even tried to build my own player to support DRM by the official libraries - guess what? Microsoft controls who gets those libraries and who doesn't. Absurd. Now back to CD's and DVD's. New copy protections come out on a regular bases. They all have some form of copy protection making it difficult for you to play them on your PC unless you use media player X. Don't know about you, but my PC is my music center. And yes I do rip every CD I have to MP3 and put it on my harddisk. There's no shuffle like a shuffle with 10000 songs on it. They try to prevent that to! You know that is actually illegal in some countries? I'm sorry dinosaur media companies, but you're going extinct. Nowadays, you leave me no choice but to use P2P to get my music and movies, because if I give money to you to get it, I won't be able to play it everywhere and anytime I want to. You know, until one or two years ago, if I downloaded things I really liked, I really did go out and buy it! Since they started pulling all this crap I stopped doing that. Give us back our rights to the things we buy and maybe we will actually buy something. And the worst thing is, that all this stuff is based on the rediculous notion that if there was no P2P everyone would buy all that music and movies! Surely they must realize that the heavy downloaders who get a hundred songs or movies a month don't have E 2000 lieing around each month to actually buy it. (Ok this has gotten a bit long and unstructured, but I hope you all get my point)