DRM and ‘frustrated’ consumers
p2pnet.net News:- “Frustrated” consumers will simply “pirate the content,” declares Brad Hunt, executive vice president and chief technology officer for Hollywood’s MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America).
And what could frustrate consumers?
DRM – digital restrictions management systems, purpose-designed software created specifically to deny customers unfettered use of the CDs and DVDs they paid good money for.
“The issue we face today is that consumers are buying content that uses specific DRM and that, in turn, is gradually creating a world of separate DRM systems,” he told the Digital Home Developers Conference, says ZDNet.
“I think it is really important to realize that virtually all of the major [movie] studios earn most of their income from content enjoyed in the home,” he said. “In 2005, theater revenue made up only 15.7 percent of total studio profits, while home video entertainment was around 47.1 percent.”
And with that in mind, Hunt, “urged developers in attendance to ‘think about’ content and to make devices that support content protection, says the story, adding:
“For its own part, the MPAA’s current weapons of choice include Windows Media DRM (Digital Rights Management) for network devices (WMDRM-ND) and DTCP over Internet Protocol (DTCP-IP).”
Interesting that consumer control DRM systems are described as ‘weapons’ rather than measures.
Meanwhile, Hunt, “also touched upon the three content protection standards bodies the MPAA is currently working with to solve these interoperability problems,” says PC Magazine.
They include the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), the Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB) and the Coral Consortium and, “All three are developing home-network device interoperability guidelines and standards, as well as trying to come up with separate logo and certification programs that consumers will recognize. Still, all three are currently working independently of one another,” says the story.
Also See:
ZDNet – Frustrated consumers forced into piracy, October 17, 2006
PC Magazine – MPAA: Frustrated Consumers Will Pirate, October 17, 2006
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October 18th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
They still don’t get it. Even when they realise frustrated consumers don’t like DRM, what do they do? Try and find DRM that is less likely to annoy them.
I’ve said this before but DRM does NOT benefit consumers, it does NOT treat people who paid good money for their films and music with any respect, and it does NOT take into account of the fact people like to share stuff they enjoy, not necessarily just via P2P but just being able to take a film round to someone else’s house – DRM stops even that.
October 18th, 2006 at 6:07 pm
“Frustrated consumers will simply pirate the content,” declares Brad Hunt
This is the only line in the story that makes any sense. After that he totally contradicts himself. DRM is designed specifically to “frustrate” the efforts of consumers attempting to use content in the ways they want to. So, ANY DRM measures will “frustrate” a large percentage of consumers. Then we will pirate the content. Yup.
MPAA=dipshiats
October 19th, 2006 at 4:36 am
I agree. Technologies like WMDRM and others are proprietery and have not been revied by the community like other specifications in the networking world. It will always be easy to break such technologies. It cannot be deployed extensively, as the devices cannot implement this without buying device certificates(DTLA license is required to even implement it), which will further increase cost of devices.
Such technologies cannot work.