A Brief History of Failed Digital Rights Management Schemes 149
antdude points out this article at opensource.com on the "graveyard" of digital rights management schemes — the death of each of which has left customers out in the cold. An excerpt: "There are more than a few reasons digital rights management (DRM) has been largely unsuccessful. But the easiest way to explain to a consumer why DRM doesn't work is to put it in terms he understands: 'What happens to the music you paid for if that company changes its mind?' It was one thing when it was a theoretical question. Now it's a historical one ..."
Some changes were quite good ... (Score:5, Insightful)
What happens to the music you paid for if that company changes its mind?
Well in the Apple iTunes case the audio quality was improved and the DRM was also removed.
What do you mean it didn't work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What happens? (Score:1, Insightful)
Apple's FairPlay didn't "fail" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What happens? (Score:3, Insightful)
Extra? Whats extra? The story is unchanged.
All they've done is add irrelevant data. Its still the same movie.
Paying more for HD makes as much sense as paying more for a 320kbps MP3 instead of a 160kbps.
Or paying more for for a car because the speedometer shows your speed in hundredths of a mph.
Re:What happens? (Score:3, Insightful)
But why on Earth do you still assume you've got the right to download it for free?
Why on Earth would he assume he doesn't?
Re:What happens? (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of the first vinyl LP albums that I bought years ago have become unplayable due to scratches and hard usage. Contrary to what LP album manufacturers want you to believe, LP records won't last forever.
Well, something like that. The mythical "100 year compact disc" certainly was never believed, and all forms of data storage have problems. To get a very long lasting CD, it needed to be essentially an "archival quality" impression onto some durable material, preferably a metal like gold. You can buy such materials, but they are very expensive and generally are not in common usage because the expected life span of those discs aren't all that long.
DVD discs, and Blu-ray discs even more so, have even higher data density and thus are even more prone to accumulated errors.
From an historical perspective, the only way that any information has been preserved over long periods of time is to keep copying that information, preferably to distribute that information widely as well to as many people as possible so if a few copies of that information are lost it can be recovered from the redundancy alone. That certainly is the only way ancient texts such as the Greek literature like the Iliad and religious texts like the New Testament and Talmud have been preserved over the centuries.
It is also a part of human culture, where ideas are over time weeded out. This includes music, where the really bad stuff has simply been forgotten over time. Sometimes good stuff is lost too, but that is part of life. The reason why "classics" are so fondly remembers is that the awful stuff that was being made at the same time isn't remembered.