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."
and it's not just the music industry... (Score:5, Insightful)
How many more years of this before other industries like software (SecuROM anyone?) come away with the obvious conclusion as well? DRM doesn't do anything but restrict legitimate purchasers of the product, people who illegally obtain things don't have to deal with such inane restrictions
Correlation != Causation... (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, this is based on the correlation that "hey, most of the stuff through a trackerless BitTorrent setup is pirated movies/tv, porn, and software, almost no pirated music" and "you can get DRM-free music easily, but not movies/tv, porn, and software" as implying "its because of DRM that people pirate stuff".
Unfortunately, there are two problems here:
a) Music is not just DRM-free, its also SMALL. BitTorrent's strength is moving big files, while pirated songs are very small in comparison, you can just email em to your friends.
b) A lot of porn online is DRM free, so why so much porn in BitTorrent?
Correlation does not mean causation.
A note about the study (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, the bit about DRM doesn't surprise me one bit. Nobody likes DRM except rights holders. It causes many more problems than it solves (which are very few already), not the least of which is perpetual content control even after the copyright expires. Far from banning circumvention of it, we need to heavily discourage (or outright ban) the use of DRM as we know it.
Paying (Score:5, Insightful)
What do GNU/Linux users choose? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:and it's not just the music industry... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lesseee... (Score:4, Insightful)
I pay for music - because typically I look for specific artists or songs. It's easier for me to find it on Amazon rather than wade through piles of junk.
I would also like for the music industry to clean up its licensing. Let me buy music that I can play anywhere, in public, to any group of people smaller than, say, 100.
No strings, no fear, no stupid RIAA tricks. Come on RIAA, make it easy for us to be legal. You make it as hard as possible, with impossible convoluted licensing (you need a separate license for public performance and for copying a CD) so that it's nearly impossible to remain within the licensing restrictions and play the music I like.
Heck, I could make a strong argument that the music industry licensing is so convoluted that it is impossible to play music and be legal.
So clean up your act.
Re:and it's not just the music industry... (Score:4, Insightful)
We'll see what conclusion Ubisoft comes to.
The sad thing about this is that if you have a good quality product that meets the consumers needs and is at an affordable price, then people will buy them. People these days have many different media devices (desktop, laptop, portable media player, car stereo/player, netbook, ...). Most of these will have their music on their computer, synced to their portable media player and car, possibly backed up to an external drive.
With software, restrictive DRM will only push people away. For example, I have moved over to Linux, but still play games through Wine. I try out (and regularly buy) several casual games and some of the bigger ones as well (like StarCraft). DRM on this software will make it harder to run on this platform, and will drive me away from those companies. For example, I don't buy any Oberon Media games anymore, but look to Awem Studios and Big Fish Games for the casual games that I play/buy.
Re:What do GNU/Linux users choose? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Correlation != Causation... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Paying (Score:3, Insightful)
You bought the device, yes, but it may be more or less easily modifiable - researching the device beforehand is probably a good idea, and if the "iPod and its ilk" don;t suit you, then DON'T BUY ONE - instead buy something that CAN BE modified the way you want.
My car was partially built by robots on an assembly line, so as a result it's tricky to modify the chassis much from the stock configuration, compared to a different car I have worked on - a Cobra with a separate rolling chassis and body which is much more suited to home tinkering. Building my factory car with a single monocoque design has advantages, but it also has some disadvantages. If I was going to build a new kit car at home I wouldn't start with a chassis like that - why is it different for electronics?
My oven has a computer, albeit a simple one - should I complain that I can't install Linux on it and thus it's tyranny because my oven is closed source/hard to modify, or my DVR, or my sat nav?
Yes, you should have the right to do what you like with things you buy, but you should also consider what you are buying in the first place to determine if the thing you are buying will do what you want it to do. I would argue that if you want to buy an iPhone and install apps that aren't sourced on the app store then you shouldn't have bought an iPhone... you should have bought a Nexus One. (or you could just jailbreak it - Apple doesn't really care if you do, it just doesn't want to support that model)
Also consider that for all the moaning about how Apple locks things up, they have been a major force for online DRM free content: they were on record before the iTMS opened that they wanted it DRM free, plus the "Rip, Mix, Burn" adverts, and even with DRM tracks on the early store implementation including the ability in iTunes to burn them to CD, stripping all DRM off. They just have to do it for movies and TV shows now. I know they're not the only online music store, but they have made major strides in this area.
Sure, the iPhone and the iPad uses a closed developer "appliance device" model, but OS X does not. Their other hardware can be used as you describe - install OS X, install Windows, install Linux, have a blast.
Re:Interesting for BBC HD Freeview and Canvas Less (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Interesting for BBC HD Freeview and Canvas Less (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. It basically comes down to these choices:
Re:Already For Operating Systems (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Correlation != Causation... (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of porn online is DRM free, so why so much porn in BitTorrent?
People are embarrassed to be associated with porn -- they don't want it showing up on their credit card bill, or to be seen purchasing it -- whereas a subscription to Netflix or one of the music stores causes them no embarrassment at all.
Ipod (Score:3, Insightful)
I do not necessarily mind paying for music. I do mind being told what type of device I can play my music on. That, my friends, is tyranny. This leads me to another gripe: The iPod and its ilk. We bought the device, therefore we own it and should have the right to modify it to work the way we want it. This is very much like purchasing a car, truck, or motocycle and customizing it. We purchase the vehicle so we own it and can modify it (legally) to ways we see fit. In this day and age, it looks like we purchase the license or right to use something which stifles innovation and puts us even further technologically behind other countries.
Ok, so write your own firmware on the device and do what you want.. No one is stopping you.
Re:Paying (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't buy it seems the obvious answer, but it only works if you're representing the majority of users and your gripe with a tool is what most users' problem would be. Your example of your car and oven are exactly the reason why "don't buy it" won't work for appliances like the iPod or other locked down devices.
You don't care that you can't modify your oven or car because you don't want to. And the same applies to most users of iPods out there: They don't know about the locked nature of their device and don't care. There are a lot of car enthusiasts out there that lament the same problem geeks complain about in the iPod: The increasing inability to modify, to tune, to adjust to their liking.
"Don't buy it and it will change because they lose sales" also only works as long as there is an alternative. And that it does not work out in the content field has already been shown with DVDs and BluRays. Would you buy an unlocked BluRay player? I know you would. But there is none, despite a huge market for such players. Why doesn't anyone produce one? Because they wouldn't get the BluRay seal of approval. Ok, then why not build a player with a different, free, unlocked format? Because no content would be available for it. Vicious cycle, anyone?
And the same applies with iPod and "free" (not the beer kind) alternatives: Content will only be available for the iPod, so people will buy the iPod and whatever company provides a free alternative will go under.
Free market only works under a few unfulfillable premises. First of all the total market transparency, which simply does not exist. Nobody knows all alternatives and the difference between them. Then the free competition, meaning that every device would play on a level field. Which simply does not exist because any "free" device would be devoid of any commercial content. And the combination thereof means that "don't buy it, but this instead" will not work out. You, as the customer, do not get to fill your role in the free market system as the "decider" which system shall thrive and which shall perish. That decision is taken out of your hands, thus the free market system fails in this particular scenario.
Let's Not Forget Study Bias (Score:2, Insightful)
Obviously RIAA and MPAA will commission a study of their own that will find that the reason people pirate is that they are evil and want to steal the property of their poor, starving artists. But of course the bias of the study is in favor of the rights holders because they foot the bill for the study.
OTOH, this study suggests that people just want to own what they purchase and use whatever means available to make the ownership permanent. But of course the bias of the study is
Re:Correlation != Causation... (Score:2, Insightful)
I have yet to see a single 'work' that does not use someone else's 'work'
Indeed. As a musician myself, I literally cringe when someone uses the word "create" in reference to writing music. It's so utterly arrogant and delusional. No one creates music. We build by accretion upon the works of past artists and within the influence of the culture and technology we grow up in and with.
Human beings have been playing music on instruments for about 40,000 years and much longer without. Funny how all these nonsense "rights" only sprung up in the last couple centuries and the lies that music wouldn't be written without them as well...
Re:and it's not just the music industry... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, the sad thing is that this theory has been pretty much disproven in recent years by the iPhone phenomenon, in particular the way apps which cost $1 end up with 90% piracy rates (ie, rates comparable to desktop apps).
Pirates are, by definition, people who take something without paying for it. Whether an app costs $1 or $99 probably won't make much difference as long as piracy is equally convenient.
Oddly enough, I used to work on Wine (have several hundred patches in there). So I've "examined" more than my fair share of copy protection schemes. There are two things you should know.
The first is that you're in a tiny minority and always will be. In my years of using Linux, its market share has never increased and shows no sign of doing so anytime soon.
The second thing is that fortunately, that probably won't matter in a few years. It seems likely that PC gaming DRM will move to internet binding rather than media binding in future, which is likely to not only make it far more robust but also make it a lot more compatible with emulators like Wine, because the game won't have any interest in poking around in kernel mode trying to distinguish fake DVD drives from real. So I wouldn't try and overgeneralize from the sort of DRM we have today to all DRM.
Open + easy to access = I spend (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A Perfect Example: (Score:4, Insightful)
To my shock and amazement, the Region 1 DVD release of the film JCVD from Peace Arch Entertainment has two non-DRM "digital copies", one in MP4 and one in WMV format. Both play fine in Ubuntu and on any device which supports MP4 and/or WMV. It's nice to see a company do this correctly. I've been meaning to write them a thank you note - think I'll do that now.
I hate the term "digital copy" though. Did DVDs and Blu-rays become something other than digital copies at some point?
Re:and it's not just the music industry... (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, the $1 app piracy phenomen has still two problems:
-) most of the iPhone apps that I've seen are not worth even the time it takes to install them, and surely not $1
-) itunes is not exactly the best tool to discover which apps might be worth their price or not.
Now we've got a market with incomplete (or potentially totally missing information), now look up in some standard economy literature, why markets without complete information (e.g. private 2nd hand car dealing) favor bad products.
(Basically, without a way to prove how valueable your good is to your customer, the cheapest vendor wins out, because the customer without the quality information about the products has only the price as criteria. It's usually so much cheaper to produce crap than quality, ...)
Re:and it's not just the music industry... (Score:3, Insightful)
They counted the number of files, not the size of the downloads. If size was a factor, it would follow that there be far more music data shared than video - but there wasn't. Music is almost non-existent when compared to video, at least when looking at data. Even if it's a full album, that's still only 150mb compared to a minimum of 300mb for an hour-long tv program.
The lack of data on how many were downloaded is problematic, but would you like to propose a methodology for determining the number of downloads? The best you can do is record the number of seeders over the life of the torrent, but you can't make any statistical claims from the data without downloading each file yourself and seeding it for a while. In fact, you would need to download it several times to get a feel for how much data, on average, the seeders gave, and how long seeds and leeches remained in the pool.
Even then, I would expect there to be no relation between the amount of time someone might seed a legal download vs. an illegal one, and even different illegal media would likely exhibit wildly different seeders.
I would expect, for example, to find that Battlestar Galactica would have a very different seeder demographic than Friends, and I don't think you could guess downloads on the other by looking at the one.
Re:Paying (Score:5, Insightful)
That, my friends, is tyranny.
And that, my friends, is hyperbole. This [wikipedia.org] is tyranny. Choosing an iPod and iTunes over one of the many unencumbered music players on the market and then bitching about the well-known restrictions it imposes is just ordinary, garden-variety cluelessness.
Re:and it's not just the music industry... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:and it's not just the music industry... (Score:5, Insightful)
DRM is just part of this race to P2P.
I always payed for my EBooks. They were cheap and easy. I get them in a few seconds, instead of having to wait days for delivery.
Ok, I live outside USA, so ordering paper books is always a exercise in patience.
Now, the last time I tried to buy an e-book, I've got a message I could not buy it because I was outside the USA. It was a restriction imposed by the publisher. Now:
1) I can't get those in my country
2) Even if I could, it would be a translated version (which sucks)
So my only option was to get a pirated version of the book. Took me 5 minutes, tops and, since I could not download that single ebook, I ended up downloading (and reading) other books by the same author.
I WANT to PAY for my content. But things get to a point where they simply won't take my money. And then they complain about piracy. It is just ridiculous. I contacted the bookstore and even the publisher to try and sort this out, but simply could not BUY the ebook.
Ode to Content Control (Score:5, Insightful)
I like content
I used to buy content
But then you asked for money for every blank
So fuck you
I would like to see HD movies
But you said Macrovision is a must
And I can't upscale to my TV
So fuck you
I bought into HD-DVD
And picked up a few nice movies
But the content cartel said no
So fuck you
I have divx on every player
And terrabytes of storage
But I can't buy movies that way
So fuck you
My mp3 player does wireless
And its legal to share songs*
But the player won't do it
So fuck you
*In Canada
Re:and it's not just the music industry... (Score:3, Insightful)
People pirate the $1 app because there's 25 similar apps all costing $1+, and only one does what you actually want.
Rather than DRM being the failure, it's Apple's search system and app descriptions. :P
Different cause, same result.
Re:and it's not just the music industry... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think it's a good practice to assume that people who say one thing mean another. When I hear someone talk about "theft" in the context of copyright infringement, I don't think they mean "copyright infringement". I don't think it's obvious at all that the distinction between the two concepts is understood to be an accepted truth, and need no more discussion.
The point of copyright is to blur the line between information and physical property, economically, to provide a market in which the fruits of intellectual labor can be traded
See, from my perspective you're the one who's hoping to just hand-wave away a difficult situation. Yes, this is the point of copyright. It also has no bearing on a discussion of whether or not infringement == theft since it doesn't address the value of a given "property".
In my opinion, by blurring the line between infringement and theft you're really trying to blur the line between value and control. You would have to say that the value of a particular piece of intellectual property is inherent in your ability to control it's dissemination and use, and the problem that I and many many other people have with that concept is that it is an attempt to turn a commercial transaction into a form of governance.
Now, you may not agree with that point of view, but I would beg you to try and understand why I hold it and why it would be a large concern.