Why DRM can’t work
p2p news / p2pnet: Currently, we’re halfway through the first decade of the 21st Century.
People have become almost attached to their VCRs, digital camcorders, DVD-based recorders, cassette/CD-RW/MiniDisc recorders, and similar media manipulation and playback equipment. It logically follows that content distributed on media for use in these devices will be in high demand. If a law were passed that effectively cuts down the uses of any kind of content to the point where customers both get less content (due to **AA homogenization of the market) AND what content is available is restricted through whatever means, the customer won’t think twice about it.
When any company that provides products in demand starts to limit customers` options for methods in which they can use the product, they’ll be unable to retain those customers as easily, especially in the modern consumer-driven society we are living in.
Customers don’t know enough about copyright law, patent law, fair use, and many other aspects of the whole digital media revolution that they should, and that will, in the end, work against any huge media conglomerate trying to restrict content. It may seem counter-intuitive, but to illustrate the truth behind customers that are ignorant of copyright and patent law, I’ll do something that’s very practical and yet very innovative: I’ll lay down the state of current technology (with an emphasis on equipment that contains modern content protection technologies) directly on top of my experiences growing up in North Carolina. It`s not a catch-all story, but my hope is that some people will read this slice-of-life story and see the lack of usefulness behind content protection as it stands today.
When I was 13, DVD players were a few years away and computers with even the lowest end Pentium were still in the thousands. I owned a VCR, a couple of different cassette players, and a portable CD player. I owned very few music CDs, and I couldn’t make my own, but I could copy my dad’s 400-disc collection to my insane stockpile of blank tapes, and I could copy rented movies to a blank tape for later (re-)viewing or record a show off the TV while I was off at school. In fact, I made custom cassettes and recorded my favorite content on VHS for viewing after it was off ALL THE TIME.
Now, let’s cut my teenage media-loving gusto off via DRM and lawsuits, and see how things would change.
Magically, I’m thrust from my magnetic tape on a spool into a world of shiny coated plastic and computers that double as space heaters because the multi-gigahertz AMD CPUs aren’t down to Intel’s micron level yet. Instead of tapes and CDs, I have a CD burner, an mp3 player (hell no I can’t afford an iPod, and mp3 players get better battery mileage, etc). And I have DRM beating my brow everywhere. What would this be like?
I get my new mp3 player and decide the first thing I want to do is put my favorite songs from my favorite CD on it. So I find out from the internet how to “rip” a CD. Then I proceed to try to rip it so I can take the music and put it on my mp3 player.
Errors abound. Oh, I look at the CD cover for a while to see if anything insightful is there, and lo and behold, “this CD uses copy protection.”
I own the damn CD and I can’t even put some of it on my mp3 player that I paid for?! If it was a CD being put on a tape for a Walkman, I wouldn’t have that problem, but no one sells Walkmans anymore…
Okay, so half my CDs aren’t “ripping.” I find out where I can get copies of music that’s “pre-ripped” and find out about Grokster. I download the songs I own that I can’t rip due to the CD blocking it, and put them on my mp3 player. Problem solved.
I rented a DVD from the store and I want to watch it. My dad’s already watching another movie in the living room, so I have to settle for my 17″ CRT monitor on my computer. I pop the DVD in and…
…Errors abound. What the HELL?!
…”copy protected.”
I have to wait for their movie to finish, then I hook the DVD player to the VHS deck that my dad bought while they were still being sold, and proceed to watch the movie and make a copy so I can watch it again because it has to be returned before noon tomorrow, and I think I might like to watch it twice.
Analog device saved the day this time…
I listen to my mp3 player on the ride home the next few days. When I get home one particular afternoon, I want to watch that movie again, because I was talking to my friends about it today and I had some spare time to be entertained. So I pop it in the VCR and hit “play.”
…Terrible color and brightness artifacts abound. The movie sounds fine, but the image is terribly mangled. Is the VCR broken? No, because they were using it last night to watch a classic movie, and it never had a problem!
What the HELL is wrong NOW?!
The good old internet tells me that it’s something called “macrovision” which is a “copy protection” technology. Shoot me in the foot.
I’m forced to watch the TV. Oh, a show is coming on about some swimsuit models. Hormones in overdrive, I fire up my DVR to record the show so I can see the feminine curviness again and again like the politically incorrect woman-loving teenage boy that I am.
“Recording of this program is not permitted.” I think I read about this one. Didn’t they call it a “broadcast flag?” So my parents could record any TV show they wanted on that old VHS quickly and easily, but I have this $300 box here that has more computing power than a few old mainframes and I can’t even record a shallow TV show about how they take pictures of scantily clad women?!
I thought technology was supposed to make this stuff work BETTER, not WORSE!
*sigh* I spend the next few days royally pissed off about the movie, the DVR, the CD…all my expensive, shiny technology is spitting in my face at every turn, and it’s all in the name of “copy protection” or something like that.
I turn my computer on, and it crashes. What? Crash, crash, crash…this blue screen won’t go away. I do some research on a library computer and find out that the “copy protection” involved on the CD I was trying to rip actually installs badly written software on the computer that can break it. The family spends $120 having someone repair the problem, and I barely manage to explain what happened.
The ‘rents are pissed about the situation in general, though…
A few days later, my parents get a note because they’re being sued for downloading some popular songs off the Internet. My life promptly goes to hell as everything is disconnected and taken from me because my parents are being sued for something I did.
What did I do wrong? I explained the situation but the number of zeroes on the paperwork was causing my pleas to fall on deaf ears.
No mp3 player, no movies, no computer, and my parents are paying out thousands from the college savings they had for me because I got them sued and they had to settle; they’re not exactly the richest family in the city, and $500,000 is too much for them to risk being forced to pay out, I’m told.
I lose out on some of the tuition I need for my college, and I’m restricted from having fun with my electronics for quite some time…
All in the name of protecting media from thieves.
This is what the media associations and their respective member labels do when they put DRM on everything, file lawsuits, try to enact broadcast flags, and so on.
Content protection mechanisms damage customers and force them into questionable activities to exercise fair use rights, but more importantly, users who don`t know what any of it is will certainly be more likely to trip over the law (and step on rights holders` toes) while they attempt to use the content in the ways they want to.
No business can survive without satisfying its customers.
It`s time to start satisfying.
Jody Bruchon
[Bruchon is the owner of a computer service company in North Carolina. He says his personal mission is to "assault political correctness, destroy ill logic, blow away multiculturalism, and stomp out flames of ignorance". When he`s not doing that, Bruchon enjoys visiting his favorite sushi bars and working on his latest computer-related projects.]
February 6th, 2006 at 11:35 pm
*Riaa whacks Jody with a stick and says ‘it’s consumers not customers!!!’
February 7th, 2006 at 1:21 am
The reflections in the market of sales are showing that bar a minority few, the online sales aren’t working.
It is the dearest hope that the cartels will be able to turn the internet in the virtual market of the 21st century. Through squeezing of the sales points, the cartels have set this one upon themselves. Chain markets have demanded the cartels sell to them at far lower prices than any other market can get due to volume turnover. Since mom and pop stores can’t compete, they are and have been closing in record numbers. Chain markets are setting new price ranges as the expected price that customers will pay and no more. It has been very easy to blame “those pirates” as the problem without having to show anything in the line of proof in bottom line figures.
Instead the cartels now figure the endless shelf space of the virtual store is their answer to raise prices back to previous levels. They are scared, with just reason that since they have done the work to change it to digital files that anyone can just use them in whatever. So in the interest of “improved customer value” DRM has been added. Make no mistake, for all the trumpeting over DRM it does nothing to enhance the customer experience. It does the very opposite as is demonstrated in this article. It’s sole purpose is to styme customer actions and prevent what ownership through buying is supposed to mean. Instead, it is now a rental proposition at the price of ownership. Worse, it isn’t enough that lower quality is now supposed to be the same value as what was offered previously on the market but that it is now being considered that when the time is right, the market price of those offerings are too low. At some unannounced time in the future when the market numbers are there, it is already an all but foregone conclusion that those prices will rise.
Products that don’t meet customer expectations don’t last on the market. These less than worthless products are being shown for just what they are in the market forces and more and more are finding out what it means to buy these limited goods.
Only thing I can say is that the best is yet to come. With the sueing of their own best customers, there is no way that this sort of business will survive as it is being run. Accounting seems to be able to rule the selection process of what is to be the next hit and time after time they are wrong. Blandness rules the airwaves as the process of payolla continues without the middleman in it. Now instead of having a third party that takes a portion out of the middle of the cash flow, it is now alive by buying playlists of preposed ranks and orders to continue the influance of what will be played on the airwaves. The playlists have a fake value in the thousands and through this method the influance is still being made to control the airwaves and what song becomes the top of the most played across the nation. It has in fact become the sole limiting factor in the listener being able to hear new music.
New music is critical to the market in that without that new music there is no exposure to new listening experiences. One must hear new stuff to be able to judge if it is worth buying. Since the dropping of singles into album only sales, it has been the practice of the cartels to include filler to make enough to have an album. Another practice that has turned customers away.
DRM has the only purpose of locking the customer down. Since it is now more of a hassle to use the purchased product than it is worth, the customer is abandoning what they see as an obsolete business model supporting an worthless product.
February 7th, 2006 at 4:07 am
Consumer or customer…either way, they’re turning away from the storefront one by one.
~Jody
February 7th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
The article is right on target.
However, if we asked the question “What if DRM worked, would it be a good thing?”.
The answer is no. As structured now, copyright law actually results in the opposite of what was allegedly intended, to promote the creation of artistic works by authors. The arguments to prove this point are too long to explain here, but they are here:
The Copyright Funnel:
http://chocoweb.blogspot.com/
However, if DRM worked, it would only reduce the output, as authors would more likekly turn to other endeavors as the distribution process becomes more entangled in economical, technical and legal issues, which is precisely the reason that quality output of musical authors has decreased drastically in the last few decades.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com
February 7th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
Your question is like asking “What if the world is flat”. The simple fact is that DRM can never work. Unfortunately most people lack the technical knowledge to understand this, and thus we live in a world similar to when the majority of people believed the world was flat.
But say we lived in a flat world where DRM worked. It would not just restrict the output as there will always be the so-called”analog hole”: anything that can be output for human enjoyment can be recorded by technology designed to record the same sights, sounds, etc that our senses detect.
The simple fact is that any device that is used by an artist to record their work (IE: what the creator uses to create the digital work in the first place) can be used by an infringer to make unauthorized “re-recordings”. There is no possible way any technology can tell the difference between creativity and infringement as, from a purely technical point of view, there is no difference.
When these major media and content industry companies are pushing DRM what they are really doing is trying to ensure that only “authorized creativity” is possible. You can see this in the “Professional Device Hole” that they are lobbying for in the legislation http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/1875 They fully recognize that there is no technical difference between creativity and infringement, and are trying to craft laws so that only the “professionals” that are employed by these major studios are allowed to create.
It has taken a decade of outright lies for us to get to the “Professional Device Hole” honesty, and it is now critical that we inform people about what the real purpose of DRM is.
February 7th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
I really should have read the article you referenced before replying
Sorry..
February 7th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
Your question is like asking “What if the world is flat”.
I agree. The question was made to facilitate the introduction of an argument, that restrictions to copying will eventually reduce first the distribution of the created works and then, as a byproduct, creativity itself.
After all, no one (that I know) has actually made a controlled experiment to see if giving monopolies over art or ideas (patents) really produces an overall benefits to society. My hunch is that the results of such an experiment, if made, would not be good for the those whose income (a bias in itself) depends on being a copyright or patent owner.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com
May 1st, 2008 at 4:57 pm
You’re right. “The INTERNETS” will force out the truth. http://ncfindoffender.com/details.aspx?SRN=012927S2
May 5th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Whoa there “who cares,” I’d be careful if I were you, because the fact of the matter is that the person who is the most dangerous is the one who has the least to lose, and it seems pretty irresponsible to try to damage someone like that, especially if “nc general statutes” and “the law” are posting correct information about the law here; you should probably think about what you do before you fuck up royally.
May 5th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
“This section does not apply to any peaceable, nonviolent, or nonthreatening activity intended to express political views or to provide lawful information to others. ”
The intent was to provide lawful information to others. Must be lawful information since it is the LAW that the information must be disseminated on the Internet and by other means, too. Seems to me that it is particularly important to alert others if the person concerned used State computers to distribute child porn, and advertises for work on other people’s computers.
As for threatening or harassing behavior, seems clear to me that this is clearly meant to intimidate and threaten: â Iâd be careful if I were you, because the fact of the matter is that the person who is the most dangerous is the one who has the least to lose.” Bet I can guess who posted that.
May 6th, 2008 at 6:29 am
What is the article here about? It’s about DRM and why DRM is not a viable way to run a business. The information you’re trying to disseminate (A) has nothing to do with the article and (B) is presented among other context that implies it is being used to harass rather than to inform. Your intent is clear by the surrounding context in which you’re choosing to post, and if you’re the same poster as “Tom Stanson” and “Slander” above, even more so.
The article isn’t advertising anything, and the author isn’t employed by the State (see the part about “running a company?” Doesn’t mention the State anywhere in there, eh?) Your intent is clear. Your excuse is insufficient, and a judge wouldn’t buy it for a second.
As for your final statement, that’s just the truth and a friendly warning about the action you chose to take. Do your research. Criminals aren’t likely to do anything wrong if they’ve got a stable home, a stable job, and stable family and social support. A lay-off or home burning down is one thing, but someone like you who prefers to maliciously attempt to cause such destabilization puts yourself in a very non-lucrative position should the guy totally go off the deep end. Or file a lawsuit or something.