DRM and Piracy
p2pnet.net News:- “For almost ten years now I have argued that digital rights management has little to do with piracy, but that is instead a carefully plotted ruse to undercut fair use and then create new revenue streams where there were previously none,” posts Ken Fisher on Ars Technica.
He’s not alone in that belief. With him are hundreds of millions of people around the world who were, and are, suffering under the misapprehension that when they bought an entertainment cartel ‘product,’ they owned it and could use it freely. But according to the music, movie and software cartel dogma, you don’t ‘buy,’ you ‘license,’ even though you’ve never seen, let alone signed, a contract.
“In a nutshell,” says Fisher, “DRM’s sole purpose is to maximize revenues by minimizing your rights so that they can sell them back to you.”
But that’s not the way it is, say the studios and movies, deeply shocked. DRM is all about piracy! Pirates and people who undermine sales by sharing with each other, particularly movies and music, and who are therefore lumped together with the pirates. File sharers are just as bad as the real criminals, the counterfeiters and duplicators aka ‘pirates,’ because when they’re sharing, they’re not buying, resulting in lost sales and lower revenues.
And that, say the cartels, is criminal. So they’re suing their own customers, calling them “thieves”.
“As a quick aside, let’s put this piracy excuse to rest,” says Fisher. “You can easily find almost any DVD online, for free, because CSS has long been cracked and the movies uploaded. All of these new DRM schemes can’t change that one simple fact: at least for the DVD market, a pirate’s lifestyle is a matter of downloading some easily obtainable software. There is simply no evidence whatsoever that DRM slows piracy. In fact, all of the evidence suggests the opposite, and arguments that DRM If they’re already honest, they don’t need DRM.”
So given the “explosion in revenue thanks to DVD, why aren’t popular services like the iTunes Store being embraced?” – Fisher asks. “At a time when TV networks are seeing ratings boosts and fattened profits thanks to downloadable video, how come Disney is still the only movie studio to sell new releases on iTunes?”
Actually, iTunes isn’t really all that popular, not when you compare it to what’s happening on the p2p networks where the vast, and silent, majority of people who belong to the online community get their fixes. iTunes only seems to be The One because iTunes numbers are the only ones we ever consistently see in the mainstream media.
“If we believe Ronald Grover’s sources in his BusinessWeek article of last week, the problem is liberal DRM and not piracy, and this is a startling admission,” the Ars Techica article continues. “According to him, an unnamed studio executive said that a major reason why studios weren’t jumping on board with the iTunes Store and other similar services is that their DRM is too lax. ‘[Apple's] user rules just scare the heck out of us.’ It’s not piracy that’s the concern, it’s their ability to control how you use the content you purchase.”
And that’s precisely why p2pnet has been calling DRM DRCC (Digital Restrictions Consumer Control).
“As it turns out, five devices authorized for playback is too many, and the studios apparently believe that this is ‘just as bad’ as piracy,” says Fisher.
“Hollywood believes that iTunes Store customers will add their buddies’ devices to their authorization list, and like evil communists, they’ll share what they have purchased. This makes little sense, because the way iTunes works, you can only issue so many device authorizations at a time. You could share with a friend, but then your friend would have to be authorized to play all of your purchased content, taking up an authorization. Inconvenient, huh? But is it a big problem?”
Fisher concludes, “I can walk in to Best Buy right now, buy a DVD, and lend it to every person I know. Who hasn’t lent a DVD to a friend or colleague? This is perfectly legal behavior, but you can see that Hollywood hopes to stop this kind of thing via DRM. Thanks to the DMCA, once copyrighted contents have been encrypted, your rights fly right out the window.
“It sounds like a bad Hollywood tale: ‘In a world… where DRM is liberal… there’s only one fowl that’s not foul… Chicken Little. And the Sky. Is. Falling’.”
Also See:
Ars Technica – Privately, Hollywood admits DRM isn’t about piracy, January 15, 2007
the real criminals – The Pirates of Osan, January 2, 2007
BusinessWeek – Why Hollywood Snubbed Jobs at Macworld, January 12, 2007
DRM is too lax – Why Hollywood spurns Jobs, January 12, 2007
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January 16th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
“I can walk in to Best Buy right now, buy a DVD, and lend it to every person I know. Who hasn’t lent a DVD to a friend or colleague? This is perfectly legal behavior, but you can see that Hollywood hopes to stop this kind of thing via DRM.”
I can see Hollywood lobbying to make DVD lending illegal too.