DRM Causes Piracy

igorsk recommends an essay by Eric Flint, editor at Baen Publishing and an author himself, over at Baen's online SF magazine, Baen Universe. In it Flint argues that, far from curbing piracy of copyrighted materials, DRM actually causes it. Quoting: "Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an 'economic epidemic' under certain conditions. Any one of the following: 1) The products they want... are hard to find, and thus valuable. 2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them. 3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with. Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they're the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises. And... Guess what? It's precisely those three conditions that DRM creates in the first place. So far from being an impediment to so-called 'online piracy,' it's DRM itself that keeps fueling it and driving it forward."

Sixth column of a series

Other editorials in the series include

Column #1 [baens-universe.com]
Column #2 [baens-universe.com]
Column #3 [baens-universe.com]
Column #4 [baens-universe.com]
Column #5 [baens-universe.com]

All of which are available in their entirety, despite the "1/3 to 1/2" thing.

Good reading.

However

I have bad news for the author: information still wants to be free

"There are some people out there, possessed by the firm delusion that "information wants to be free"--as if bits of data had legs and went walking about on their own..."

This is a strawman, and dumb. The contention that "information wants to be free" is a catchy way of saying "the properties of digital goods are such that their natural marginal cost is zero or practically indistinguishable from zero."

Bad news for most people who would like to marginalize/otherwise dismiss the free culture argument: the economic basis for the contention that "information wants to be free" is rock solid. Scientific. To escape it you have to resort to name-calling etc., as here.

Re:However

Bad news for most people who would like to marginalize/otherwise dismiss the free culture argument: the economic basis for the contention that "information wants to be free" is rock solid. Scientific. To escape it you have to resort to name-calling etc., as here.

Moreover, there is an information-theory perspective as well, involving the inherent nonconservative nature of information in its most basic forms. Digitization brings "information" closer to that basic form, by detaching it more thoroughly from physical media (books, tapes, etc.) and allows its basic attributes to come forward.

There's nothing you can do to put that genie back in the bottle.

Re:However

I've also been thinking about all this recently from the standpoint of the expense of resources. The use of natural resources, the expense of pollution, the expense of the distribution chain, internet bandwidth, and even hard drive space. It's odd to think about in these terms, since it's usually painted as an issue of consumer rights vs. corporate profitability, or as the desires of the audience vs. the needs of the consumer.

However, the pictures changes if, for a moment, we re-imagine it as a problem for society to solve: how do we efficiently manage the distribution of recorded arts? For the sake of argument, lets disregard the other concerns, such as managing who is authorized to view what, or financial reimbursements to artists. Just think of the problem of distribution of information, as though it's assumed that the information is free.

Suddenly it becomes clear that physical distribution, in this day and age, is *stupid*. We have this huge network at our fingertips, and we're going to waste materials on manufacturing millions of CDs? Many of those CDs are going to ripped to MP3 and then sit on a shelf. For what purpose? We use land and materials to build physical record stores (and Best Buy), we use the materials for the actual media, we pay people to search/maintain the inventory, there's the trucks and the shipping, and all that crap. Think of all the man-time and materials wasted.

Also, users needing to rely on the hard drives in their home computer to store a specific copy of a top-40 hit or a Hollywood movie is nonsense. Right now, the top movie on iTMS is "The Prestige". Consider for a moment if I had bought that movie from iTunes 20 minutes before my hard drive died. Now, why should I need to keep a copy on my local hard drive? The movie has already been ripped, and the data exists elsewhere on the Internet. In order for me to download the movie again would only cost in used bandwidth, but those costs can be mitigated, ironically, by the sheer number of people downloading it. I'm sure that it's obvious to everyone here that the solution is P2P (bittorrent).

It's become clear to me that for a society concerned with using resources efficiently, sharing information via P2P networks is a solution that's almost too good to be true. I'm not just talking about hippy-talk "conservation" in the environmentalist sense. I'm talking about the human resources, the expense of intellectual thought, and the money spent. Overall, those resources, too, would be more efficiently managed through P2P distribution.

Now, some people would complain that jobs would be lost, but that's inherent in using human resources efficiently. Some of the human resources currently spent on these distribution issues are being spent unnecessarily. That we don't break windows makes less work for the window-makers, but breaking windows does not generate wealth. (Yes, I guess I'm suggesting that the MPAA/RIAA have become an example of the broken-window fallacy, and therefore create a net-loss for society)

Re:However

There's one important fact that the free culture argument tends to neglect. Sure, a copy of a movie costs effectively zero. But the original has a cost that's decidedly nonzero. Information doesn't grow on trees, it takes energy to set it in a meaningful pattern that enables all those free copies.

Re:However

it takes energy to set it in a meaningful pattern that enables all those free copies.

And that energy, when amortized over 6,578,462,507 [census.gov] people approaches zero, a fact that copyright fanatics like to ignore.

With copyright law as it currently stands the cost of pretty much any mass market information is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of production. In other words, highly inefficient production with massive losses in marketing, controlling distribution and policing.

I don't know what the complete answer is but I do know that the people who claim that copyright law as it is currently implemented is the only possible way information creators can benefit are fanatics, very likely entrenched interests and middlemen who know full well that they add no value. Parasites in other words.

Intellectual property law is a pure product of the mind and can be anything that we want it to be. Even something as simple as discussing what the correct copyright period should be, right down to zero, should be discussed and scientifically justified rather than the hand waving like "nobody will create without copyright" (that's nonsense) or "copyright is the only option" (that's also nonsense).

---

Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.

Re:However

I would differentiate between intellectual property and property, because when someone takes your property you are deprived of it.
In the natural order of things, someone would need to physically take your property and deprive you of it, yet you can share intellectual property with as many people as you wish and still retain it yourself. Education is fundamental to society, and keeping information (which is all intellectual property really is) secret is detrimental to society as a whole... Imagine if the caveman who discovered fire hadn't told anyone else how to do it?
Societies and the human race have prospered and advanced due to sharing information, but that continued advancement is slowed by the greedy few who want to keep information secret for their own benefit at the cost of society as a whole.

As for scientifically justifying a copyright period, i would imagine by studying the relative pros and cons of each length of time, although it's very subjective depending on what information is being copyrighted.

About profiting off the back of someone else's work... What do you call fair compensation? Many large companies generate huge profits from people's works, while giving those people a miniscule cut. Also, do you think someone should be able to continue making ridiculous profits indefinately? Surely there's a point where it's no longer fair compensation, and now they;re just ripping people off.

Whatever system is used, it should be more consumer-friendly than the current copyright laws... The current laws allow copyright holders to charge anything they want, continue doing so for ridiculously long periods of time, and both restrict supply and discriminate as to who is allowed to buy copies and what they pay. (and yes, i consider media which costs far more in europe and comes out several months after the us to be racial discrimination)

Re:However

Second, you're missing the point. "Real property" and "intellectual property" are different

Ah, I see. So when I wrote "The consequences of taking someone else's property are different in the two cases of course", which part of that point was I missing?

You were missing the point that it makes no sense to speak of "taking someone else's property" in the context of "Intellectual Property," because it makes the false presumption that "Intellectual Property" is actually property. In other words, you're saying "P implies Q," but failing to realize that P is false.

Please read up on basic economics. I would be happy to debate this subject with you, but until you have at least an elementary understanding of that field and how today's intellectual property laws fit into it, I do not see how I can illustrate the hole in your argument logically.

My argument is one based on the physical reality of the universe; economics is irrelevant to it. In addition, you can't use "today's intellectual property laws" to justify themselves; that's a circular argument.

As a starting point, consider that any time and money spend creating a work has an opportunity cost associated with it.

Yep, I completely agree.

Then consider that just because someone shares some information without themselves profiting from doing so, the act may still damage the commercial value of that information to others.

I agree here too.

Combine these two basic ideas and you start to build a more detailed economic picture that shows how a copyright holder can indeed be damaged by others sharing their work without compensating them, even if they still have a copy of the work themselves.

If we first postulate that a "copyright holder" exists, then yes, I can indeed see how he can be damaged, economically. Now, here's the problem: it doesn't make sense, physically speaking, for any such "copyright holder" to exist in the first place!

Your entire argument seems to be based on the presumptions that copyright exists and that it's possible to enforce. You then argue that, from those presumptions, that copyright infringement has negative consequences for the copyright holder, etc. In addition, you explain how copyright is desirable in terms of ethics (e.g. by giving authors fair credit for their work). That's all fine and dandy; I'm not disagreeing with any of it.

All I'm disagreeing with is your claim that "intellectual property" is the same thing as "real property." If we had Star Trek-style replicators, then I'd agree with you (and, of course, extend my claims to include "real property" as well). But we don't, so the fact that "intellectual property" is inherently copyable while "real property" isn't causes them to be different in a very significant way. The consequence of that fact -- which is a feature of physical reality, not economics -- is that your postulates (that copyright can exist and be enforced) are false and the whole argument is moot. In other words, yes, P -> Q, but ~P, so you have (so far) failed to prove Q!

For someone so clued up about logical fallacies, you're very quick to use an appeal to the masses. In fact, your final claim is demonstrably false, given that I am a counterexample. The recent success of legal on-line music services suggests that I am not the only one.

My "final claim" wasn't a claim. Or at least, it wasn't a claim made for the purpose of justifying the rest of my argument. Still, you're right that I overstated it when I said "everyone" (which I meant in a colloquial sense).

Also, which "success[ful] online music services" are you referring to? The ones that don't use DRM (e.g. eMusic, AllOfMP3), the ones that aren't actually successful (e.g. PlaysForSu

Re:However

And that energy, when amortized over 6,578,462,507 [census.gov] people approaches zero, a fact that copyright fanatics like to ignore.

So, next time you want to make a $6 million dollar movie, you can distribute it for free as long as you can get everyone on the planet to mail you 1/10 of a cent up front to help you produce it. Good luck with that.

Re:However

I'd be willing to pay my share plus the shares of nine other people to fund a movie that sounds interesting.

Not wrong, just possibly flawed.

This is perfectly fair, however, what's happening is that the at-risk business model really isn't practical anymore. Once the movie is made, it's difficult to monetize it, because copying it is trivial.

I don't really have any problem with people trying to make movies, or even to make money by making movies. That's a legitimate occupation in my book.

What I have a problem with, is when they try to alter the economic and technological landscape in order to make it easier for them to use a particular business model. That's where I draw the line. I could think of a lot of ways that I could change the world that would make it easier for me to make money, but that's just not how it works. The rest of us basically have to work within reality as it's presented to us, and we have to figure out ways of making money and otherwise surviving within that.

The content producers want to, and are petitioning (read: bribing) government for, is to entrench their business model at the expense of other possibilities, and at the expense of a whole lot of other things besides (not least of which is my freedom to do whatever the hell I want with the equipment I've purchased).

There's nothing inherently wrong with their business model, it just may not work. They're welcome to try, but if it doesn't work, I expect them to pick up and go back to the drawing board and figure out another way to finance movies, if making movies is what they want to do. For them to instead pour a ton of cash into, and generally mess up and corrupt, government, in order to keep a flawed business model around, is unacceptable.

Re:Statement: Insightful. Sarcasm: overrated

The really fun thing about any copyright discussion here is watching one set of people arguing 'What is needed', namely, how we 'need' copyright law, against people who say that copyright law is a violation of their rights, past people who are arguing 'What is true', that copyright law used to rely on a level of inconvenience that is now gone and thus is almost totally unenforceable.

We may, indeed, need copyright law to continue to encourage content producers. That is totally orthagontal to whether or not enforcing copyright law is possible in a digital world.

If you fall out of an airplane without a parachute, you can argue that you 'need' to reduce your speed before you hit the ground, and you'd be correct. You could argue that free-falling is kinda fun, and you'd be right too. Or you could argue that you have no way to do the first thing, and you'd also be correct. Sometimes there is not actually a 'correct' solution.

We may, indeed, smash into the ground so hard we destroy quite a lot of produced content. Arguing that we 'shouldn't' do that is rather surreal, considering we already jumped from the plane.

If everyone works together, they might be able to invent, at least, a hang glider or at least aim for a lake. But we have way too many people arguing about what 'should' happen, without considering that there is absolutely no way to do what they think 'should' happen so perhaps they should aim for something a bit more likely.

Re:However

And why is copyright automatically trotted out as the best way of getting it paid for?

Copyright is extremely inefficient. It deters other innovation (generally by smaller and more creative people and firms) by making borrowing material very hard. Copyright sends many times (about 10x) more money to middlemen (CEOs, advertising, lawyers, trade groups, profits, retailers, etc) than to production. Copyright also leads to monopolies and censorship - both commercial and government. Copyright also leads to more advertising by restricting alternative distribution (compare TV via P2P and over the air), and advertising is a terrible way to raise money for anything.

Just about any other system, including having a free-for-all, is going to work better than the current system.

Re:Sixth column of a series

But DRM radically reduces the value of legally-acquired media, while raising the value of pirated ones. Furthermore, I think there is a strong philosophical argument against the bare concept of DRM, as the rules it imposes restrict our actions to such a large degree as to remove our liberty as moral agents, preventing us from acting as moral agents at all.

The first point is one of utility. Case in point: cleaning out my inbox today, I found a note from the iTunes store that the Good, the Bad and the Queen's album is only $8 for a limited time. I almost jumped at it, even clicked the "Buy this album..." button (I'm a big Albarn/Gorillaz fan), and then, filling in my password, I stopped to think. "This is only 128kbits," I thought to myself. "That sounds kinda chintzy on my headphones. I won't be able to send good tracks to my friends, or upload them to the poolhall jukebox at my school. I won't ever be able to play them on non-Apple DAPs without even more of a quality loss, or make them into ringtones for my friends' phones, or possibly be able to even listen to them at all once Apple gets over this DRM nonsense in 10 years. Shit, I don't even know if this album is any good, the free single was only so-so. I have food to buy. Huh."

The problem with DRM'ed media, and this leads into my second point, is that you don't actually buy anything. If I buy a CD, or download an album off the internet, it is my property: I have the right to use it and abuse it, as far as my own system of morality allows. (For me this includes making mix CDs for my friends, emailing them hott traxx, dropping cool songs on my friends' iPods, playing on my radio shows, and all the uses I described above.) By restricting my use of the things I buy to a predefined set of "correct" actions, DRM removes my freedom to act as a moral agent.

So I fired up Soulseek and—well, you know the rest of the story. I will happily agree that stealing the music is less moral than paying for it (though the profit split of $0.80 to Apple, $6.50 to the RIAA, and $0.70 to Damon Albarn seems a little off to me, as I would really like Damon Albarn to be as rich as he needs to be to keep making music—the people demand a new Gorillaz album!). But for the reasons above I think it's less immoral than what the RIAA and iTunes do to me when I buy into their DRM.

That's my call, as a human being and a moral agent, and I should be free to make it. DRM restricts my freedom to a rigid set of rules, predetermined by a cartel of people completely removed from my life and reasons for action. We get the old saw: everything not compulsory is forbidden; everything not forbidden is compulsory. It destroys the possibility of agency, and in turn the possibility of any kind of moral action.

I: just want to listen to music, where and how I want to. I'm happy to pay for it (and I do, more than I should), as long as my rights of property and agency are respected. They: want to destroy my personhood with an absolute and top-down system of "morality".

Who's the bad guy?

indeed

Couple of weeks ago I bought a movie online, which turned out to be DRM infected so I could not play it under Linux. I had to use Windows and FairPlay stripped the DRM from it to access the AVI inside.

Do you think I care this movie is now being copied by my friends?

Re:indeed

You "used Windows and FairPlay stripped the DRM from it to access the AVI inside"?

There are no DRM'd formats with an "AVI inside". "FairPlay" is a DRM system used by Apple. It is certainly not a thing you can use to "strip the DRM from it and access the AVI inside" anything. There used to be a tool named "FairPlay", which worked on music files and not video files, and has long since been abandoned.

So no, I do not think anybody cares that your imaginary friends are copying this imaginary file.

Cigarettes and MP3s

This article makes perfect sense on every aspect noted. This is exactly why MP3s are so heavily pirated. I must be honest though, I still purchase CDs when I find new music that I like, but I will never ever purchase MP3s with DRM protection.

He's got it right...

I bought XIII and had to pirate it to play it in my laptop (without the CD)

I wanted to buy KT Tunstall's CD, but since I listen to my music on the computer, I had to pirate it (it's copy-protected)

My wife and I have a collection of some 200 CD's, all of which are ripped to my computer, but we haven't bought a new CD in almost a year.

There's a limit as to when we start pushing our customers too far, and they start to push back

THAT IS NOT PIRACY

I know what you are trying to say but you are playing right into the hands of the MPAA and RIAA and the like with these statements.

Ripping a CD you bought to put the music on your mp3 player is NOT piracy. Yes the RIAA likes to call it that, wich is why they want to add a tax on mp3 players and want to force you to rebuy a track for each piece of equipment you buy it on.

That CD you play on your stereo, a itunes track for your PC, the ring tone version for your phone and so on.

HOWEVER that is NOT what you are legally required to do.

As far as downloading a crack to run software that you bought, in free countries were politicians are not in the pocket of industry, this is 100% legal. Imagine it would be illegal for you to take the tape out of a cassette player and put it on a spindle player instead. For that matter, imagine the police tried to arrest you for breaking into your own car.

The actions you claim to have done DO NOT fall under piracy (well unless you did them whole boarding a vessel with a cutlass between your teeth), they are fair use actions that your a perfectly entitled to do.

To even call this piracy is to give the RIAA and MPAA exactly what they want, that consumers think that limits can be put on what can be done with products you own.

Sounds Familiar

It sure sounds alot like the reversed cause and effect of the "War on Drugs" or "War on Terrorism". Will the government ever learn to back off and let the free market guide itself? And yes, I know the *AA's are the ones pushing for more laws and arrests, but they wouldn't be succeeding without the blessing of the government.

Re:Sounds Familiar

FlySafe airlines would have to compete with FlyCheap airlines. Individuals could make their own choices about how much security they thought they needed in the air. A bunch of people would die, and FlyCheap's assets would be bought out by FlySafeEnough airlines.

(what percentage of people interact with 'the war on terror' anywhere else?)

It all depends on what value you assign to the lives of the various other people on the planet; if you use the apparent acceptable rate of car accident deaths(~1/10000 a year in the US), we are spending way too much on anti terror measures(the death rate due to terrorism is way lower than that for US citizens, even if you include 9/11 and soldiers dying in Iraq and so forth). Basically, the free market would ignore it and move on, much to the chagrin of the dead, but to the profit of the living.

Re:Sounds Familiar

The problem is, when FlyCheap Airlines has one of its planes hijacked and flown into a skyscraper somewhere, that's a negative externality. The people in the building never got to choose how much security they needed. Should we allow the CheapNukes Power Plant to store nuclear materials in an unlocked building on the side of the road?

Protecting our interests...

"The sole mistake Americans make is by automatically assuming that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". All other mistakes including sending the military and the CIA are a mere consequence of this one."

Actually, the major mstake we make, as a country, is assuming we have the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. This is usually done to protect our "interests", which in turn is code for protecting the interests of our various companies and corporations. Read "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq [amazon.com]" and you'll see the same patterns repeated again and again and again.

Reductionism rules!

The war on drugs is about ensuring that citizens are addicted to indigenous drugs, and that the profits are centrally controlled.

That doesn't explain why the US government has so aggressively gone after marijuana cultivation here in the US. It also doesn't explain why the extremely powerful tobacco lobby keeps losing in court battles, or how these profits are "centrally controlled."

That's why it's OK for Americans to be addicted to cigarettes and alcohol but not cocaine or crystal meth.

Umm... you do know that crystal meth [wikipedia.org] is produced in the United States, right? You seem to also imply that the only reason cocaine is illegal almost everywhere [wikipedia.org] stems from the fact that coca leaves don't come from the United States. Perhaps that's right, if you assume that cocaine is a benign substance, and there's a globe-spanning conspiracy to keep this beneficial substance from citizens everywhere.

Having everyone addicted to cocaine is a threat to national sovereignty.

By that logic, the fact that so many Americans can't do without coffee should be serious cause for alarm. Time to crank up the Blackhawks, bring the SEALs down to Columbia, and lets take control of those coffee fields!

Having them addicted to meth is a threat to profits.

Is that because meth-addicted people will buy less alcohol and cigarettes?

The free market would have everyone buying cheap meth or homemade shine, or addicted to foreign produced coke.

That would be swell. I like that idea. More addiction for everyone!

As it stands now, they're buying whiskey, cigarettes and cough syrup, which is just the way those on top like it.

Yes, because The Sinister Cabal that runs America has made it so. The tobacco lobby is totally unrelated to the fact that in many southern states, the biggest cash crop is tobacco. Voters there probably don't want to promote the interests of tobacco growers. They've been forced to do so by The Man. Likewise, the alchohol distributors have effectively maintained a monopoly by keeping foreign-supplied beer, wine, whiskey, and every other form of alchohol out of America. Oh, wait. They haven't.

The war on terror, on the other hand, is easy to fix.

Of course it is. Whenever the world is binary, the solution is obvious.

Keep your military and your CIA at home, and there will be no terrorism.

Absolutely right. It wasn't until the US pulled out of Northern Ireland that the terrorism there and in the UK stopped. The Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction were terrorizing Italy and Germany until the US military left Europe. The Basque ETA. The Pakistani groups operating in India. Abu Sayyaf. All of these groups obviously will disappear as soon as the CIA disappears and the US military ends all its foreign presence.

The terrorists are after vengence because they have been and continue to be systematically wronged. By Americans.

Again, you see through the nuance quite clearly. There are no opportunists in the world of terrorism. These are all idealogically committed individuals, ready to give their lives for higher principles. Certainly none of them are using terrorism as a vehicle to further profiteering or mere power grabs. I think we can all agree that any problems that occur anywhere in the world are the result of America's negative influence.

Well, it might be too late now. I imagine there are a lot of orphaned children who aren't going to forget what was done to them.

You're right. All of the Shia children whose parents were killed by Sunnis, and all the Sunni children whose parents

Re:Sounds Familiar

That was what I was thinking -- it's just the same as the War On Some Drugs. Although most recreational drugs theoretically should cost pennies per dose (poppies, cannabis, hallucinogenic mushrooms and cacti, coca and valerian all grow wild, and they're just the ones I can think off off the top of my head), the very fact that they are illegal introduces artificial scarcity and allows dealers to control prices. And such "legal" ways of getting high as there are, are a PITB. There are medicines you can buy from a pharmacy that will get you off your tits (e.g. Paramol {Paracetamol and Dihydrocodeine}; Benylin Chesty Coughs -- two drugs in one really, Original {Diphenhydramine} is a downer, Non-Drowsy {Guaifenesin} is a mild upper; Night Nurse {diphenhydramine, same ingredient as Benylin Original} and the perennial standby, Kaolin and Morphine mixture -- worth faking a tummy ache to be given a dose of) if you take enough of them, and of course there's booze ..... but getting p!$$&d really isn't quite the same thing. It's too dirty a "high". There are legal plant extracts but the reason that most of them haven't been banned is that they aren't really much cop (though Sida Cordifolia isn't bad ..... name's a bit off-putting if you speak French though).

Most of the crime is created in response to the problem of illegality. Junkies steal to buy heroin because it's sold at vastly inflated prices by dealers, they daren't seek help for fear of dropping their mates in the s#!t, and anyway they're already criminals just for having a toot so what's a bit of thieving between friends? Tobacco is more addictive than heroin (to the extent you can compare an illegal drug with a legal one), yet smokers are generally law-abiding. Apart from the ones who are bleeding the National Health Service dry by buying tobacco abroad ..... we should send them to Belgium to get treated if they get cancer ..... but I digress.

Nonsense

Does not make too much sense to me.

1) Legal content can be easily found online.
2) DRM-protected content is cheap - cheaper than their physical equivalents.
3) Users who know what to expect will not be dissappointed. I know I am a happy iTunes + iPod user. Then again I do not spend my time inventing all sorts of scenarios how this model could be limiting my life when it is not.

Re:Nonsense

Many Baen books are available on-line for free. They found that whenever they relesae a free book, sales of all books of that author increase and the sales of the free book takes off. The fact is that people like the value of a real book, while the online version gives them a chance to read some books in a series and evaluate the author.

So whether it makes sense or not is moot. Baen proved that free books increase sales enormously.

Re:Nonsense

1) Legal content can be easily found online.

Only if you use their choice of OS, their choice of browser, their choice of media player, their choice of hardware, etc.

2) DRM-protected content is cheap - cheaper than their physical equivalents.

I'm not to familiar with music, but ebooks sure don't follow this. I've often seen paper books for $60 and their electronic equivalents for $50. Only $10? I don't think so. Publishers claim that the majority of the cost of a book is printing, binding and shipping. All of those costs are gone with ebooks. Now you have server costs (much smaller than distribution costs for real books). So, it may cost slightly less, but is certainly not cheaper considering what you are giving up. Of course, you still have to be using their choice of software (OS, reader, etc), as few outfits provide unencumbered ebooks in PDF format or something.

3) Users who know what to expect will not be dissappointed. I know I am a happy iTunes + iPod user. Then again I do not spend my time inventing all sorts of scenarios how this model could be limiting my life when it is not.

Users expect to be able to use and move their stuff around. That is sadly not always possible. iTunes may be the exception, but I don't know not having used it personally.

And it does something else

Ever since I found out I could not play an DVD-audio on my PC when I have my connected digital speaker system, did you think I ever bought one DVD-audio?

If only the UK goverment realised this.

Honestly, the response to the recent petition to the UK goverment to ban DRM almost sounded like it was produced for the goverment by the RIAA and Macrovision combined. The response in full:

Digital rights issues have been gaining increasing prominence as innovation accelerates, more and more digital media products and services come onto the market and the consumer wants to get access to digital content over different platforms. Many content providers have been embedding access and management tools to protect their rights and, for example, prevent illegal copying. We believe that they should be able to continue to protect their content in this way. However, DRM does not only act as a policeman through technical protection measures, it also enables content companies to offer the consumer unprecedented choice in terms of how they consume content, and the corresponding price they wish to pay.

It is clear though that the needs and rights of consumers must also be carefully safeguarded. It is reasonable for consumers to be informed what is actually being offered for sale, for example, and how and where the purchaser will be able to use the product, and any restrictions applied. While there is good reason to expect the market to reach a balance as these new markets develop, it is important that consumers' interests are maintained in the meantime.

Apart from the APIG (All Party Internet Group) report on DRM referred to in your petition, Digital Rights issues are an important component in other major HMG review strands on Intellectual Property, New Media and the Creative Economy. In particular, the independent Gowers Review of Intellectual Property commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, published its report on 6th December 2006 as part of the Chancellor's Pre-Budget Report. Recommendations include introducing a limited private copying exception by 2008 for format shifting for works published after the date that the law comes into effect. There should be no accompanying levies for consumers. Also making it easier for users to file notice of complaints procedures relating to Digital Rights Management tools by providing an accessible web interface on the Patent Office website by 2008 and that DTI should investigate the possibility of providing consumer guidance on DRM systems through a labelling convention without imposing unnecessary regulatory burdens.

Isn't that what they want?

Step 1: Complain about drop-in-the-ocean piracy for a decade.
Step 2: Get DMCA on your side so you can make a criminal out of anyone at will.
Step 3: Sell defective products. When people are compelled to pirate on a larger scale because the Disney DVD they rented for the kids keeps fading in and out visually and audiably, or skips and dies on a particular scene...
Step 4: Point at all the new, higher piracy figures and dance around singing about how the piracy problem is getting worse and how you need more DRM power.
Step 5: Wait for the sheep to get used to the new order.

Fortunately, it's unlikely this will work. Look at DVD advertisements. I recently popped in Joe's Apartment (it was free and I like bad films) and there was not trailers, commercials, or even a stop at the menu screen. Straight to reel one. A short while back I was watching a new release (I forget the title) and it was telling me all about how the new HD-DVD (or Blueray, I wasn't paying much attention) is going to be worth buying new hardware at shocking prices because the disc will play the film immediately. ...apparently the ads and menu page were snuck into the DVD ISO standard when we were sleeping.

Thus, the cycle is complete; the studios received just enough annoyed customer complaints about the previews, ads, and intro garbage that they started making them skipable, or at least fastforwardable, and now they're going to temporarily give us immediate play back. Aren't we loved?

Frankly, I don't think it's really the ads that ticked people off -- we've been tolerating them since '46. It's the fact that no one who pushes a button on a remote control wants to see a red X or Ø appear. They want action.

Re:Isn't that what they want? Not Quite!

Frankly, I don't think it's really the ads that ticked people off -

Not so fast here. The ads may not have ticked you off the first time you played the disc. But what about the second time? After all, nobody buys a DVD to only play once.

Re:Isn't that what they want?

It's the fact that no one who pushes a button on a remote control wants to see a red X or Ø appear. They want action.

So true. So very true. Whenever I see that, I feel this icky, semi-irrational anger at the device that dares defy me, when I know that it is an artificial block to keep me watching a preview or whatever. My anger is partly directed at the device, partly at the manufacturer, and partly at the movie studio that made the movie.

It's frustrating because I can't actually do anything about it to effect a change. If I stop buying movies made by that particular studio, they'll have no idea why. They may figure that people dislike their movies, they may figure that piracy is hurting sales, or they may come up with with some other reason except the real one, because my reason is beyond what they think will cause consumers grief enough to stop buying.

Instead, they market the "removal" of the irritant as a "feature" of a new format and continue to keep me from convenient device shifting. This is BULLSHIT. I'm done with it, so take note, movie industry players, hardware and content alike. I will never buy one of the new format discs. I'll rent and rip, from Blockbuster or Netflix or whatever. My home media server is the end of the line for them. A post-DVD format disc will never be bought, let alone a dedicated player for the TV. They lose. I'll build a petabyte RAID array to dump ripped movies before I pay them another dime.

They give me an non-DRM alternative that I can download, and I'll return to being a paying customer.

Laws == Crime

The more laws you have - the more crime you'll see.

dvds

It's true for me that the quality of downloaded movies is better than the dvd I can rent at blockbuster. I couldn't beleive all the CRAP that goes on DVDs now. It was an inconvenience before that I had to click play a couple of times through menus to watch the movie, but now there are COMMERCIALS!!! WTF!!! Scroll through a list of movies, double click on a file and have the movie start, vs keeping track of disks (I wont even mention scratched disks), navigating through menu systems, watching 10 minutes of commercials and previews I dont care about. Hmmm. Tough choice.

Must agree here.

I got some coupons for free mp3 that came with chips I buy on regular basis. Big campaing, "free, legal MP3".
So I decided to "cash them in". So I login to the site described on the coupon. "Sorry, but this site requires Internet Explorer 6 or higher".
Then registration process, asking me for granny's dog's name and so on. Then confirmation email. Then it tells me to download their player. Then the files which are not MP3 but some of their own DRM'd format. And of course unplayable in anything but their crappy player. No way to use them in a portable mp3 player, no easy way of burning them to a CD (outside of ripping audio mixer channel) and of course no way of playing them on another computer, even with said player installed (need login). Ah, and no playback without network connection.

Thanks, no "Legal MP3", even for free, please.

Mostly rubbish

Downloading happens because people like free stuff. Trying to analyze the marginal reasons for a few percent of them misses the earth-spanning forest for a few twigs.

1) The products they want... are hard to find, and thus valuable.

Most "rare" materials aren't available in DRM form. What causes the copyright infringement isn't the DRM but the fact that you can't get it at all. If they're available with DRM, then the supply is large: just go pay for it and download it.

2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them.

What is DRMed and also "high-priced"? Songs are a buck on iTunes. Movies are twenty bucks on DVD. It may be more than you want to pay but it's not a vast amount of money.

I can think of a few examples, like the language CDs I like (Pimsleur). They're expensive. But that's the minority of downloads. Again, DRM doesn't cause the infringement; it's the fact that these are expensive to produce and they're of great value, driving up the price. They'd be downloaded even without DRM.

3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with.

Here he's got an argument, albeit a small one. iTMS is extremely convenient on 95%+ of the systems in the world, but not for Linux. And you can't buy its songs and use it on your non-iPod MP3 player.

But again, iPod owns the market, and so do Windows and Mac users. For the vast majority of illegal downloaders, you can't chalk it up either Linux or their MP3 player. Nor to the very few people who want to do something complicated, like edit the music.

Yeah, it happens. But mostly it's the fact that people like to get stuff for free, DRM or no DRM.

Re:Mostly rubbish

Most "rare" materials aren't available in DRM form. What causes the copyright infringement isn't the DRM but the fact that you can't get it at all. If they're available with DRM, then the supply is large: just go pay for it and download it.

That's part of Flint's point. If there's no ebook version of it at all, a for-sale DRM-free ebook version of it is so "rare" as to be unavailable. But if it's available with DRM, then a for-sale DRM-free ebook version of it--which is, again, what people want--is also so rare as to be unavailable.

If I'm looking for an apple, and you offer me a cart full of oranges and say, "See, there's plenty of fruit," it's still not going to satisfy my desire for an apple.

What is DRMed and also "high-priced"? Songs are a buck on iTunes. Movies are twenty bucks on DVD. It may be more than you want to pay but it's not a vast amount of money.

Songs are the exception, and that's mainly because Steve Jobs bullied the music companies into going with the 99 cent price point. You can bet they'd raise the prices if they could. And even Steve Jobs doesn't like DRM any longer; neither does Bill Gates.

But look at some of the books on eReader [ereader.com]. For instance, A March into Darkness by Robert Newcomb [ereader.com]. $17.95 for the DRM'd ebook at eReader, $17.79 for the unprotected hardcover at Amazon [amazon.com]. Granted, this probably isn't the best example because the list price for the hardcover is actually $26, and you can knock 10% off the eReader price by using their newsletter discount code, but it only took me two minutes of searching to find it. If I wanted to look longer, I could probably find a lot more egregious examples. And anyway, with Baen able to sell their ebooks profitably for $5 or less each without killing print book sales, even of their hardcovers, there's no earthly reason an ebook should cost $10, let alone $18, apart from the dual evils of pricey DRM (do you know how much eReader charges for their ebook services? People I know who've checked on it say it's quite a lot) and publishers not wanting ebooks to "cannibalize" print sales.

Agreed

As counter-intuitive this sounds,DRM is actually achieving these goals in the end.
Cheaper alternatives always fare better in the long-term,when they have same or better quality.
Defeating DRM is valuable to every consumer.The companies designing the DRM think they can
protect something,that can be replicated for almost free(the Real cost of a copy,e.g. is the electricity spent copying to harddisk).

Baen Books has always gotten this:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/ us-cranky19.html [ibm.com]

Jim Baen kindly responded to my email asking him why they'd selected open standards and formats: "Because not only are our readers, in the main, not thieves, but because there is nothing there that is stealable." His point is an interesting one: there's not much point in stealing paperback books -- they are pretty cheap -- and you couldn't print out the text for less than it would cost to buy the book. The only people who could possibly be "stealing" are the ones who, for whatever reason, end up not wanting the books and they wouldn't have bought the books anyway.

Jim Baen died last summer, but Baen Books still gives away a huge number of books in completely unencrypted, un-DRM'd formats. I think I have bought well over $100 of their buyable e-books, because I can read them on anything I want, any time I want.

So let me get this straight...

Stealing of Wii's can only occur under 3 conditions...

1> They are hard to find and thus valuable.
2> They are high priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them.
3> It's much easier to steal them than it is to wait and purchase a new one.

Guess what, LOCKS ON DOORS create these conditions in the first place! Oh, if only we lived in a socialist utopia where everybody could just print what they want and then there would be no crime.

Facetious?

You bet. But he's rationalizing theft of property because it's...ultimately... too inconvenient. If Sony wants to throw away their lead by making their products uber-expensive, THAT'S THEIR RIGHT.

If Metallica wants to throw away their popularity by over DRM'ing their music and supporting draconian copy rights, THAT'S THEIR RIGHT.

What's next, it's not right for the grocery stores to demand money for food? So it's okay to steal from them? Because that's what this guy is saying; That it's ok to steal if you feel that you're being shortchanged.

In precis

An excellent examination of the conditions leading to that phenomenon in modern electronic commerce, known colloquially as "fuck that."

DRM Causes Piracy? I agree....

My local library lends DRM infested AV materials, which in it self is reasonable. However, I have a friend who rents material to use on his palm which from what I'm told doesn't support these files. The only viable solution, other than investing in another pocket device, is to copy the media, strip the DRM so he can actually use it. Whats funny is he's actually an honest joe who does delete the material after it's been used, so he's not actually pirating it, only violating the DMCA.

Someone else would likely be tempted to keep these non-DRM copies, which they have to make to play them.

But the record companies _want_ more piracy...

I suspect that the record companies want more poiracy. Then they can get a blank CD/DVD/hard drive tax similar to the one in place on blank audio cassettes.

That's where the steady income lies, for them.

same as old adage

[Guns don't kill people. I do.]

2: The products they want are high-priced....

Principle 2: "The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them"

I can attest to this 100% - in a different, but similar area many are familiar with. My example is my experience with WindowsXP. When I lived in New Zealand, I could not afford the NZD$536 [dse.co.nz] (USD$377) for XP home to keep my CS:S habit alive, so I used a 'less than legitimate' copy of XP. Anyway, when I moved to the US I thought I'd go legit only because after a visit to Frys i saw i could pick up XP off the shelf at (USD$199 [outpost.com]) - almost half the price. Even better I managed to get an OEM XP home for just over a hundred bucks.

Now there's no way I'm paying NZ$536 (USD$377) for an OS. No way. No way in hell. However, I was happy enough to part with a hundy for the OEM version. I didnt know of Linux at the time (now have 3 PC's on Ubuntu), but wanted XP to play CS:S and various other Windows games I'd paid for over the years (because they were well priced!!!)

So yeah, hopefully big business will wake up and smell the coffee one of these days.

basic market economy

It's puzzling to see that music label execs don't grasp the basic principles of market economy. Perhaps it is because their business has largely been a cartel based one.

The real world situation is that you can get an improved service (faster download) a better product (no DRM) for a lower cost (free). Since you can't get cheaper than free and the product can be cloned at no cost their only real two choices are an improved service (larger selection, properly tagged, faster download speed etc) or indirect product revenue via product placement etc

That is simply the reality that they have to accept - few people in their right mind will buy an inferior product at a higher price while getting a worse service. Law suits are pointless against such a force of nature.

No non-interactive media (books, music, movies etc) can be protected as its contents can be cloned at one level or another. Software and similar interactive stuff are a different story as you can run parts of it server-side. For the other stuff for DRM to work, it would require a vanishingly unlikely agreement (conspiracy if you will) by software and hardware manufacturers to eliminate software-based cloning. And even then, there's nothing that can prevent me from hooking up my digital line out to my digital line in, be it audio or video. That battle was lost even before it began.

Instead of using this new medium to provide a new set of services, the music industry have made piracy all it is today - generally a better alternative.

Call me a stickler for language...

But the article asserts that DRM causes more piracy. The summary of the article in the blurb does great injustice to the article by implying that but for the existence of DRM, there would be no piracy. That is frankly false. Piracy has been a problem since well before DRM (that's why they created it), and it would probably be one if DRM ceased to exist.

Personally, I think the key issue with piracy is not DRM, but the fact that piracy and copyright infringement are becoming an acceptable to increasingly commit. The result of this is a situation where the laws of society are arguably out of sink with its values. Situations like this are hard to maintain because we depend as much on societal stigma as we do on criminal punishment to deter most crimes. When stigma is lacking or low, we often try to make up for this by adding criminal punishment to increase deterrence.

The problem with this, of course, is that it creates a paradoxical situation where we punish people more for crimes we care less about (another example, non-violent drug offenses). Thus you end up with a situation where people are morally outraged, even fearful, at the threat of having the book thrown at them for a crime they do not consider "bad" at all.

The biggest problem though for copyright infringement is that society normally deals with "lesser" crimes like these by imposing fines on the violator like with speeding for instance. People speed, and when they get caught they pay the fine, go to traffic school, and continue speeding. To most, the fine and traffic school are just the transactional cost of speeding to them.

However, infringement is inherently tough to solve with fines, because it is an economic crime, not a behavioral one. A reasonable fine, the cost of purchasing the infringed material, would have at best a neutral effect on infringement society-wide. People would just infringe, take their chances, and worst case pay up if they get caught. However setting fines too high, as the current system arguably has them, has an even worse effect though, since your average infringer will tend to infringe more than otherwise, the logic being that "if getting caught for a little infringement is going to bankrupt me, I might as well get my money's worth by infringing a lot." Unreasonably high fines also create a situation where the infringed party inherently knows that the infringer is likely judgment proof (cannot pay the fines), further pissing them off. At this point, society tries criminal penalties as well as fines, which leads us to the current system we have.

Obviously solving this problem is a toughy. We could kill copyright infringement as a crime, much as we repealed Prohibition, but that could create other problems, such as disincentivizing creativty, or encouraging tighter DRM, as creators deal with the ramifications. I offer no solutions, but this is the problem as I see it.

No

People decide to do things. "Piracy", in this case, is something a person decides to do. Each individual has the choice to act or not. DRM doesn't cause piracy. It probably creates incentives for piracy, but the choice still exists.

The whole [some factor] "causes" [some behavior] is simply an assault on free will and an invitation to elite social engineers to take away more freedom from people.

People behave the way they want to.

(Example: Did videogames "cause" the Columbine massacre, or did some kids decide to massacre some people?)

Real Pirates

Whenever I read about piracy, I always remember this scene from Amazon Women on the Moon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I5dVBezF9k [youtube.com]

In a perfect world

Techcrunch lead me to Silicon Valley Documentary, it was offered by a service that did not put any DRM on the file(they used a 5 second pre-roll with my name on it and some sort of watermarking by deleting specific bits in the movie).

Long story short, I paid $8 for the movie file (730X400 Mp4) and watched the movie. I liked it so much I wanted to share it with my buddy. I could have easily FTP'd it to him, but I didn't....instead I sent him $8 via paypal (8.24 exactly...damn them and their 3%) to get the file himself and he did.

Moral of the story, the content producer gave me something I wanted at a reasonable price without trying to limit how, when, where and on what I watch it, I turn have no desire to P2P this...instead I promote it to my friends and tell them where they can get it themselves.

What a difference a little trust makes.

There will always be piracy

2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them.

No matter how low you price a movie or CD, it will always be too expensive for somebody. You can save money on anything by stealing it.

There are two reasons why people pirate media: 1) It's easy. 2) It's free. 3) There are no repercussions (for the vast majority of people who do it). That's it, that's all. It's not a big secret. People want stuff for free. If people could get away with copying TV's or cars for the cost of materials, most would do that also, regardless of legality.

DRM doesn't promote piracy. Piracy was around before computers. Piracy was prevalent before there was any sort of DRM on CD's (and there still isn't DRM on most CD's). The reason DRM sucks is because it's a huge pain in the ass and does absolutely nothing to prevent large scale piracy. That's reason enough to dislike it without making shit up about how it causes piracy. Piracy has been around much longer than DRM.

It's a shame this part of the article was quoted, because it's really his weakest point. The rest of his article basically says, "Selling unrestricted, open media creates more revenue than piracy takes away" which is a much stronger argument.

on purpose artificial scarcity

When it became apparent that making digital copies was a close to free as things can get, all of society should have embraced and adapted it and adapted TO it. Instead, we got DRM and hyperinflated prices, enforced (legally) Luddism. Content distributors seriously dropped the ball and should have just gone on to find something else to do, it is now up to society to drag our technology back from those who are the real thieves, because in the LONG term, our collective use, and our rights in general, of using advanced technology trumps even their copyrights and laws and profits. There are some simple basic precepts here, number one is-humans are allowed to embrace new useful technology. No one group or industry should be allowed to steal it from the rest of the human race, which is exactly what they are attempting to try and do and failing at, but creating misery along the way.

I will attempt an analogy: If tomorrow "we" came up with the zero point backyard Mr. Fusion universal cheap/free energy source, something that would immediately revolutionize travel, heating and cooling, manufacturing, etc, all the things we use energy for now, should we A)severely limit the use, restrict hell out of it, make it illegal in all sorts of situations to use it because the entrenched energy industries and their profits would suffer, or B) use it and get those folks to go on to do something else?

The entertainment and otherwise "digital products" industries (software would have to be included, as well as books, etc, anything which can now be cheaply reproduced by the billions of copies) are going to have to come to grips with the fact that their products in copied digital form are worth barely a tiny bit more than the cost of replication,and as such, that should be the financial cost for other humans to accumulate "copies".

  We are in a transition stage where old world pricing models established back when making copies was actually a lot more tedious and expensive and took some effort, now..it just isn't so. There is obviously still *some* expense, but it is way less than 1% of what it was one generation ago.

  There is no perfect solution that will satisfy everyone at this exact time, there are quite legitimate points of view to be addressed all over in this situation, but the gestalt is-we have made such a *profound and significant* technological breakthrough here that has the potential to greatly enrich all of mankind that we should NOT artificially hobble and cripple it, that is the worst possible way to deal with it.

    DRM, extraordinarily high prices for cheap copies, laws against making copies, crippled and defective by design hardware, etc are all rather silly from a future historical perspective. It really *is* enforced flat-earth styled Luddism.

Product activation

The lack of product activation is a feature worth not paying for.

Or worth paying for if it wasn't excessive. If there was a full featured version of XP that didn't require product activation and it only cost $10 more, that's the version I'd get to run in a VM (Linux is my OS of choice). But I won't have anything to do with any product that requires activation or requires bullshit 'Genuine Advantage' call home spyware. Those are absolute deal breakers. I don't know why people put up with it.

Well duh

I brought stuff from iTunes until the DRM started to piss me off. Then I learned to use utorrent.

Of course it does!

If you make something scarce, it develops a "black market". If you could get the sonds you want, in good quality, maybe with a little artwork or something for $1US, you wouldn't waste time trying to find it on the net, now, would ya?

How do people forget supply and demand so easily? See also: Minimum wage. DRM is an artificial market force, and one that is, or soon will be, broken to allow everyone on the black market to have it.

DRM only created condition #3

Scarcity and legal-market street price are not dependent on DRM.

I can just as easily sell a CD for $2 as $200 with or without DRM, and I can just as easily do a large manufacturing run as a small one.

DRM does make the product less useful and therefore generally less valuable.

If you are going to manage your digital rights, do it using add-on features, such as technical support, exclusive club memberships, or rebate coupons on future products. Don't do it with the base product.

Not surprising

DRM was never meant to stop piracy, that was just a thinly veiled excuse...
DRM is meant to squeeze more money out of paying customers.
The only piracy it will stop, is the casual copying that goes on between schoolkids.
I remember the old games that used a printed code wheel, or made you enter codes from a manual... I lost the manuals so often that i ended up using cracked versions even if i had bought the original games.

Name it: it's Digital Restriction Measures

Forget about the euphemism. Use a name that actually describes what DRM is... Digital Restriction Measures.

Civ 4

I had to pirate a (second) copy of civ 3 to be able to play it under wine. I read in the interview here that they were sticking with safedisc for civ 4 regardless of how many problems it caused for legitimate users. Whoops, looks like you just lost my sale.

dowloaded unusable cd's

Since my slightly-to-intelligent Denon cd player refused to play Sony cd's and Sony did not respond to my emails, the only option I had was or to rip the cd's or to download them. I choose the latter for convenience.

My experience yesterday....

I purchased Supreme Commander last week from Amazon, the first disk didn't seem to have anything on it so I ordered a replacement thinking there was some manufacturing defect.

The next disk was the same, basically Securom stopping me from reading the disk. So the fix was to make an ISO of the disk on one of my Linux boxes and then install from this using my key, and download a no-cd crack. The game now works, but my media is useless.

The only person suffering here is the legitimate end user, if I had pirated the game in the first place I would have ended up using the same methods above, the only thing I get is a CD key for online play. Support has been next to useless, handy tips like remove nero and the like are suggested, if I don't want Nero on my PC I wouldn't have installed it in the first place!

My first act of software "piracy"...

... was in the early '80s. I bought a copy of the game "Wizardry" for the Apple II, and the "copy protection" was so extreme that only way I was able to get a copy that worked reliably was to find one of the local "pirates" and get him to give me a cracked copy. Which he was only too happy to do: he was tickled pink to be asked to write a cracked game *on top of the original diskette*.

Yep, I got my cracked copy on my original foil-labelled serial-numbered floppy. Why not? It wasn't doing me any good any other way.

DRM is just the latest spin on copy protection, and it's just as counterproductive.

Winzip? Mirc?

... And other cheap shareware type programs, all heavily pirated and distributed through pirate sites or p2p, and this includes key makers to unlock the legit shareware versions you download as well as full blown versions that have had any sort of locks removed.

Software is pirated because there are people with the technical know how who want this stuff for free, even if they're quite capable of paying for it. Yes, there are some big ticket items that are pirated a lot like Photoshop, Windows, etc, but there are just as many cheap software products that are pirated heavily, ask any shareware developer about it.

I'm against DRM just as much as anyone else, but lets not start trying to blow smoke up peoples asses like RIAA or MPAA does.

Re:Commodification

No. Bad analogy. Sexuality is simple evolutionary psychology. Given enough females, a male could produce perhaps 150 children a year, while a female could at most produce 1 (assuming no twins or other such anomalies). But for men to pass on their genes they require women. Thus, female sexuality IS a scarce commodity; there's nothing artificial about it.

Re:If DRM causes piracy...

What does lack of DRM cause?

Freedom, in a way similar to a lack of sickness 'causing' health.

Re:If DRM causes piracy...

If there is no DRM, would people all of a sudden decide to go buy stuff instead of pirating it? Doesn't seem very likely to me.


      And of course, you're completely mistaken. I remember back when PC's were brand new, in the late 70's - every single one of us had a pirated copy of Microsoft's "Flight Simulator" program. Guess what - enough people actually paid for it (it was a good program!), and Microsoft continued to push out new versions. The Flight Simulator division at MS is still alive and well today - despite all the piracy.

      Your gut feeling flies into the face of the actual facts. But this is what we've been saying all along - "piracy actualy PROMOTES sales"...

Re:Commodification

The MAFIAA, come to think of it, reminds me of a gaggle of wives obfuscating their pudenda; it decommoditizes tits and vag, in the end, to obfuscate them with clothes.

And then along comes Britney Spears [phun.org] to commoditize again. Although in her case I say decommoditization is the way forward.

Re:Commodification

The MAFIAA, come to think of it, reminds me of a gaggle of wives obfuscating their pudenda;Isn't it commodification, after all, that the industry-Yids fear?

Only on Slashdot would this kind of tripe be regarded as 'Insightful'.

To the original poster - please explain to us how you 'decommoditize' sexual organs (are yours commodities too, assuming you have some?), and who the industry-Yids are, and what you mean by Yid? ?

To those who modded it insightful, I have to wonder what possible nugget of truth you feel could be hidden in this anti-semitic rant which seems to regard all females (and particularly wives?) as commodities??

Re:If DRM causes piracy...

Oddly enough, many would. I would. In my case, for example, content producers are losing their share of my income simply because I won't buy their offerings if they do have Digital Restrictions Management. Maybe I'm an anomaly outside of the Slashdot crowd, but everyone I've spoken to who has had a bad encounter with DRM (and they are legion) has come to the same conclusion. It just isn't worth the hassle, and the risk. Frankly, I don't need most of the products that are currently being DRM'ed. I just don't. Okay, I do buy the occasional DVD, but they'll only keep getting my money so long as I know I can strip the DRM if I so choose. If I cannot do that, I can't protect my investment. Consequently, if the distribution folks ever succeed in creating unbreakable DRM, or preventing me from accessing the requisite tools, my money will stay in my pocket. They have to earn my respect before they can earn my dollars.

Re:Commodification

Of course he gets modded down. I mean isn't calling someone a Jew a great insult in suburban America? its not anti semitic, its just denoting how they handle money, or how they strive to gain money.

Yes, I was being sarcastic, before someone reads that wrong.

Re:If DRM causes piracy...

Absolutely, removal of DRM would increase sales substantially, possibly to a phenominal level.

There are many, many people (like me) who are not buying anything because the DRM means it will not play on all my devices. I have poked around the Itunes site plenty and played the samples, but never bought anything, just said "I would buy that right now if they got rid of the DRM".

It does not apply to me, but I believe there will be substantial sales to people who intend to violate copyright. Somebody may be far more likely to buy a song if they know they can give it to all their friends. This is, I believe, an even larger market than people like me.

In both cases the users if they want the song, are forced to "steal" it, but would likely buy it, partly to be legal and not feel guilty, but mostly because it would be far easier to buy than steal.

Re:If DRM causes piracy...

This reminds me of the old days of the Commodore 64, when the copy protection schemes sent the disk drive head skating over to track 0. The C64 had no sensor to keep the head in bounds, so it would slam against a hard stop, throwing the head out of alignment, quickly ruining the drive (constant realignment gradually made the drive unusable.) Even if you bought a legit copy of software, you had to use a cracked version or you would destroy your drive. Eventually most people gave up on buying the software altogether.

In fact, the reason that most of the people I know didn't buy a copy of XP, and won't buy Vista, is the heavy handed DRM attached to it, which requires you to get permission from Microsoft to run your computer after 5 hardware changes. I can make 5 hardware changes in 5 minutes when I'm testing hardware. There is no way that I am going to spend half the night on the phone calling Microsoft. If I'm having a problem with hardware, I don't need the additional aggravation. I have a legit copy on my laptop--which never changes hardware--but I'll never install one on my desktop machine.

The Individual Sense of Fairplay is the Best DRM

The article introduces the reader to the reason to why the lack of DRM would not lead to mass piracy. It is because people in developed countries are (or at least used to) have a highly developed sense of ethics.

People do not generally "pirate" an electronic text in order to sell it for a profit. They do it in order to get the text itself, for their own use.

There is one major exception to this rule. But that involves people who can operate openly on a mass production scale in countries which do not enforce international intellectual property rights.

DRM came to play because there was a massive effort to engage in automated copyright infringement. We could have completely avoided DRM if cultural institutions, like Universities, came out against mass piracy. Instead the wanks in the academia came out spouting nonsense about how mass piracy was the new social revolution that would transform society.

Since our cultural institutions were lauding mass piracy, individuals wanted to be part of the technology revolution felt compelled to join in on the piracy frenzy.

The market for DRM was created by content owners looking at the mass piracy advocated by our social insitutations and decided that they needed excessively instrusive mechanisms to protect the content they created.

It was the mass automation of piracy coupled with social leaders egging people on that created the need for DRM. IMHO, if it were not for that idiocy, we could have gotten by enforcing copyright with the individual sense of ethics [plusroot.com] as this article contends.

Re:If DRM causes piracy...

There is an amount of DRM rejection which has been around for a long while. For some reason, the world doesn't seem to talk about this, and I don't know what the scale is, although the discussion on the 'net seem to imply it's a big problem.

I gather that in the UK (and elsewhere in Europe), some car CD players refuse to play certain CDs because those CDs have DRM. Nothing has really been done about this. People here seem to just "put up with it", by which I mean they stop buying CDs.

When I get a CD which doesn't play, I check on the internet, and quite often other people report similar problems.

I have an excellent CD by Funeral for a Friend which I really love. The last 3 tracks of the CD don't seem to play in my car, and I just shrug and put this down to DRM. That band (to my mind) is excellent, but what's the point in buying their CDs, since they won't play (I listen to CDs in my car).

These days I really don't buy many CDs because the overhead of working out whether they'll play in my CD player, and taking them back to the shop is a hassle.

DRM has stopped me buying CDs, and reduced my interest in music.

By the discussions on the net, it appears this is happening on a big scale.

Re:In the beginning, there was...

RTFA. The submitter's blurb simplifies Flint's point to the point of incorrectness. DRM didn't and doesn't cause piracy--there would be piracy without it. But it does promote piracy--there is more piracy with it than there would be without it. Flint himself never claims that DRM "causes" piracy.

Re:Commodification

I say be glad. It's better to know up-front where someone is coming from, particularly if they're coming from a hateful place such as that.

Re:If DRM causes piracy...

"If there is no DRM, would people all of a sudden decide to go buy stuff instead of pirating it? "

Well, CD's are pretty profitable, they're digital, and they've got no copy protection or DRM.

So, I guess the answer is yes.

Re:BS

"Movie DRM was a direct result of overseas counterfeiting."

Except the DRM on DVDs isn't a hindrance to illegitimate disk duplication. Yeah, it prevents grandma from copying the disk, but nobody else. And even if CSS had never been cracked, the disks could be duplicated using professional equipment that the counterfeiters typically have.

I think the DRM on DVD's was more closely related to RCE protection in place on most disks.

Re:Commodification

Nice, take a slight at an ethno-religious group, play on a guy who chooses to voice his disgust at the remark that he felt was directed at his ethno-religious beliefs, and slight him even more by espousing you beliefs on a religious ceremony, by asking his to ponder your personal beliefs on circumcision. Nice...I applaud you...to bad I didn't have any mod points left to bring you even more off topic. Some things are personal choice, deal with it. Now if you were circumcised by your parents choice and don't like it, sorry. If you had a botched procedure and it caused you to lose normal function, I understand your reasonings here. But if you feel so strongly voice your opinion intellectually, don't just point us over to a site advocating making a procedure that is either a religious matter or a traditional matter illegal by law. That offends me personally. If you want it to change inform people, don't ask for more laws to invade my rights to carry on a religious or social tradition. The arguments your organization sites against circumcision just are not enough to justify mandating new laws. Laws just get in the way of living. I'm sorry that this bothers a small number of you, but I assure you you are not in the majority here.

just my 10 bits

Now about DRM causing piracy... I can see that. Lets make a law banning DRM ;)

Re:Commodification

I don't respect anyone's beliefs, if "respect" means "not opposing a blatant violation of human rights".

About HIV, there's thing called "condom", haven't you heard of it?

Re:Ridiculous...

where the electronic form is much less useful than the paper version.

Run that by me again? That may be your personal preference and is probably based on your experience with early book readers, but reading an RTF-formatted book in a Word processor is no burden. Admittedly if I want a hard copy, I effectively have to spend an additional $5 on printer paper and ink, but the electronic version is perfectly readable online. But on the other hand, it's easier to cart around 30 or 40 eBooks on a trip in my laptop than it would be to haul that many paperbacks along.

And while the electronic form is more useful than a CD or DVD, that argument is irrelevant. CDs and DVDs are DRM-infected as much as (legal) online media downloads are.

Where Flint's argument falls down is that in his marked of science fiction there isn't enough demand to make commercial piracy profitable enough to justify the risks. This is probably true of most book publishing where sales are in the tens of thousands of copies. So Flint and Baen can afford to trust their customers because no one is out on the web trying to sell OCRed copies of published works for $4.99 a pop, .

For movies and disks that sell in the hundreds of thousands or millions of copies, the potential for a competitor to enter the market selling a reproduction of your product is much higher. The problem is, there's a catch-22 here. If you DRM your product, it isn't particularly effective, since the DRM eventually will be cracked. Also, you drive a few of your customers (Slashdot readers) away, possibly into your competitor's arms.

If you don't DRM your product, you regain the few technically-savvy users you lost with DRM, but you lower the barriers to the pirate-competitors to the point where they can flood the market to such an extent that they actually affect your sales to your mass customers. So I actually sympathize with RIAA and MPAA motives, even if the strategy they've come up with is abysmal.

Re:Commodification

Are you anti-semitic? Not only do show no respect for Jewish beliefs . . . .

Aha! That's what I always suspected: “anti-Semitism” is merely the failure to worship Jews, let alone oppose them.

Quoth Nietzsche: “Das Heil kommt von den Juden” (Salvation comes from the Jews).*

_____________
* Nietzsche, The Antichrist [rhein-zeitung.de], 24.

Re:Nonsense

Doesn't affect you at all, eh? *coughbullshitcough*

Re:Nonsense

Some real world effects of DRM, for the average user who isn't trying to do anything particularly unusual. I read ebooks on my PDA. So does my wife. We each bought books before we met. The PDA version of MS Reader can only be registered with one account at a time. So if I want to read a book my wife bought, I can only do so by either switching my PDA's registration (which, in turn means I can't read books that *I* bought), or by buying a second copy of the book. And, because we already have two accounts, we will have this problem with any books we buy in the future as well. The second you seem to have dismissed out of hand. I buy a DVD, I don't *want* to be restricted to playing it on a home DVD player or PC. I travel. I have a 90 minute commute on public transit. I like to have video available in my PDA (and I doubt this is any easier with a video ipod, so don't tell me that's "mysterious"). Because of DRM, moving video from DVD to a file format the player can read is a multi-stage (meaning I need to come back and keep doing things the whole way through) multi-hour process. Home-made DVDs, without the DRM can do the trip in one step, it takes only 40 minutes to complete, using a single free program, and I was able to teach my computer-illiterate boss how to do it with only 2 demonstrations. DRM doesn't impact most people simply because they already "know" they can't do certain things ("I can't play a DVD on this, it has no DVD drive"). If the DRM didn't exist, the "knowledge" wouldn't either, because it would be much clearer that these things are not just possible, but *easy* with most digital media. Also, you list "ripping" among the mysterious. You do know that's exactly what you're doing when you buy a CD and put it on your computer for your ipod, right? And even that isn't as complication-free as you make it sound. Don't believe me? Look up Sony's attempt to install spyware, without the owners *knowledge*, let alone consent, on computers that ripped their CDs.