DRM From the Viewpoint of the Electronic Industry

mike449 writes "The cover story of the Oct.16 issue of EDN magazine is about the recent trends in DRM. It is not just a technical article. The author tries to convey what people who are supposed to design and implement access restriction measures think about their feasibility and associated economic, legal and moral issues. 'Of course, you can always try charging a reasonable price and trusting people to be honest. Just think of all the money you'll save not having to implement DRM'."

Don't forget the first part

[PIPBoy3000]

Of course, you can always try charging a reasonable price and trusting people to be honest. Just think of all the money you'll save not having to implement DRM.

The first sentence is quite telling as well. There will always be a small minority that refuse to pay for things, though most people are more than happy to shell out a few bucks for something useful.

I picked up Knights of the Old Republic the other day. It's a great game, but I found that the copy protection wouldn't let me play at first. It took a "no cd" patch before I could play my perfectly legal game. Sigh.

Re:Just say no!

[Seehund]

Digital Restrictions Management has recently found new amazing uses.

It can be a means to prevent sales of the software product that's allegedly supposed to be protected, in favour of protecting an artificially created monopoly market for hardware which the software producer has nothing to do with. Get on the "overpriced hardware treadmill" instead.

Witness what's being done to AmigaOS [8bit.co.uk].

If only Microsoft and the [RI|MP]AA could try to be that kind of mah-brain-huuuurts stupid! ;)

Re:DRM only hurts the Good Guys.

[Ozric]

I had to do this to get Madden 2000 to run. Thats right, I had to crack it to use it. this was a game I had bought from the store. Now that's a problem.

Thanks DRM for making my life so much better.

Re:DRM only hurts the Good Guys.

[Monkelectric]

You're on the money. I'd like to repeat my Steinberg LM4 Story :) I bought a legit copy of Steinberg LM4 but it wouldn't install on Win2k even though Win2k is a SUPPORTED PLATFORM for Cubase (the host application for LM4). The copy protection on LM4 wouldn't allow installation on Win2k for some reason, and Steinbergs answer to this was "go fuck yourself." So I ended up downloading a warezed version of LM4. I'll never buy another Steinberg product :)

Re:DRM only hurts the Good Guys.

[GigsVT]

The same thing happened to me when I bought Carmageddon 2. There were many serious bugs that weren't in the playable demo. It turns out, they did all their testing before they put safedisk on the image, and safedisk broke lots of things. They eventually released an official crack for the game that basically removed all copy protection.

Re:Apple != RIAA

[danaris]

The copy you burned still has DRM, and ripping it to a DRM-less format is against the law.

Huh??? I don't know what you're smoking, but once you burn it to CD, it's a real, honest-to-goodness, Red Book CD, that is exactly like any audio CD you bought before DRM was more than a mad gleam in the RIAA's eye. No DRM there.

Which works great as long as that's true, and you still have access to that machine. Of course, it really sucks when you have to somehow get your old 8088 on your fibre-optic network so you can have access to your old files.

OK, first off, your example of an 8088 is a serious exaggeration, and highly implausible besides. Secondly, while, again, I don't know how the authorization works, you can deauthorize a machine and move the files to another...which you can then authorize. But you can certainly burn them, as mentioned before, at which point you can listen to them anywhere.

...neither am I dumb enough to ignore the fact that they can.

In your (apparent) eagerness to bash Apple, you missed my point: that no, they can't do that. They can't destroy your files. They can't even stop you from listening to them. In fact, they carefully designed their DRM format (if it was, in fact, them who designed it) to ensure that you would be able to listen to your music into the foreseeable future by allowing you to burn CDs till you turn blue in the face, which you can then play wherever you darn well please.

Then again, wasn't there a story not to long ago about how iTMS tunes would mysteriously stop working when you took them out of North America?

Not exactly; it was more like if you change your legal address to outside of North America, or something; I don't recall exactly. But do you know what kind of legal wrangling Apple would have to go through to get people outside the US permission to use iTMS songs? There are plenty of countries that don't view copyright the same way we do, and if Apple let people there have the same access that people here do, you can bet the RIAA would pull the plug on the iTMS in a New York second*.

You know, it would be refreshing if people would at least come up with new trolls.

Dan Aris

*Defined as the length of time between when the light turns green and when the taxi driver behind you starts leaning on his horn (with apologies to Terry Pratchett).