DRM Content Drives Availability On P2P Networks 211
jgreco writes "The music industry once feared that going DRM-free would drive a massive explosion of copyright-infringing music availability on P2P networks. Now, a new study seems to suggest otherwise. The answer is obvious: if you can easily get inexpensive DRM-free content that works on your devices through legitimate channels, most people won't bother with the headache of P2P networks. It appears that users largely turn to P2P to acquire DRM-free versions of content that is distributed with DRM. The MPAA, of course, will not come away from this with the obvious conclusion."
Re:and it's not just the music industry... (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry to pick on your post in particular, but how many years will it be before Slashdotter's stop trusting the editors and reading the contents of the article. We're quick enough to pounce on poor logic when some poor creationist wanders in here, but things like this get waved through? For the benefit of those that are article-phobic, the methodology used is as follows: Count all the files available on a torrent network (not accounting for quantity of downloads at all, mind you, just whether they're available) and classify them according to type. Notice that music makes up 10% of the counted file types and movies and TV shows 46% of the file types. State that music can be purchased DRM free online and state that movies cannot be, and conclude that this is the reason why. There are various other throwaway misdirections such as "music used to be the only reason to use P2P". Well, we didn't used to have the bandwidth to download DVD rips, did we?
:)
Does Slashdot have a maximum post size, or shall I list the reasons what's wrong with all this article? Any statisticians want to take some cheap shots?
A Perfect Example: (Score:5, Informative)
No dice.
The digital copy is DRM'ed up the wazoo, (and the quality is severely lacking) and will only allow itself to be played from certain devices and no streaming allowed. You must also register with the home servers before you're allowed to take the copy of the file off of the disc and it is limited to being on that one hard drive. You cannot reinstall it if you lose your data somehow.
So what did I do? I "acquired" a Blu-Ray rip
Eat me, movie industry. Offer me something that fits my needs, not yours.
Re:A Perfect Example: (Score:3, Informative)
I have several blu-ray discs, PowerDVD, a computer with the guts to play the format, and I've never played one on my PC. Every time I try to play a BR disc, PDVD always spends several minutes trying to download new "updates" (generally >48MB), and then usually fails with some error. Now, this is on a machine that has only a remote control, so doing anything mouse-centric or requiring KB input requires marching into a different room and plugging in a keyboard. If I download an mkv of the same movie from us...et (first rule and all that), the worst I have to do is run it through MKVtoolnix to get the english track as the default, since W7MC still doesn't quite understand the container can have multiple audio tracks. Half the time, I download the movie first, and if it's a "keeper," I buy it when it becomes available. I have the slysoft software to rip myself, but it's more work and the files are quite a bit larger. I own over 300 movies, and probably have 20 or so I haven't bought - most of those I haven't watched yet (just too busy). Getting a disc with the movie "in the clear" so I can load it onlo the media PC, and a pre-compressed version for the car/ipod would be great, but I'm not holding my breath.
As for the "digital copy" - I haven't even tried it. From the description on the front, it looks like you can just copy the file to your device. From the back you realize that it's practically useless unless you don't mind installing something from Macrovision (never to be trusted) and only to very specific devices. No thanks - that's way to much F***ing with my well-honed, efficient system.
Re:and it's not just the music industry... (Score:4, Informative)
I think you'll find that they copy something without paying for it. That's not a trivial distinction, no matter what some people want you to believe.