DRM Causes Piracy 413
igorsk recommends an essay by Eric Flint, editor at Baen Publishing and an author himself, over at Baen's online SF magazine, Baen Universe. In it Flint argues that, far from curbing piracy of copyrighted materials, DRM actually causes it. Quoting: "Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an 'economic epidemic' under certain conditions. Any one of the following: 1) The products they want... are hard to find, and thus valuable. 2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them. 3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with. Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they're the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises. And... Guess what? It's precisely those three conditions that DRM creates in the first place. So far from being an impediment to so-called 'online piracy,' it's DRM itself that keeps fueling it and driving it forward."
Sixth column of a series (Score:5, Informative)
Column #1 [baens-universe.com]
Column #2 [baens-universe.com]
Column #3 [baens-universe.com]
Column #4 [baens-universe.com]
Column #5 [baens-universe.com]
All of which are available in their entirety, despite the "1/3 to 1/2" thing.
Good reading.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
So whether it makes sense or not is moot. Baen proved that free books increase sales enormously.
Re:Laws == Crime (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Isn't that what they want? (Score:3, Informative)
Fade-in/fade-out. Seems to be a decendant of the old Macrovision system. I've seen it happen a few times, notably when I popped The Fox and the Hound (not the most recent issue) in the store's DVD player. I've run other films, Disney and otherwise, that played properly. Amongst customers, I've received multiple independent complaints of the fading problem specifically on academy (4:3) aspect discs -- they try the widescreen and it plays normally, so this may be a move to extinct academy.
Glitched chapters. I bought my father Dances with Wolves -- the complete cut with the pretty box -- but he said it wouldn't play correctly, getting stuck or glitching in particular scenes. I ran it on my computer and there it too glitched and faulted. Both my father's player and the DVD drive I used were Sony, so let the conspiracy theories abound. Physical damage can cause read errors of course, but DwW was bad out of the box. I've handled similar complaints at work. Even if a disk isn't brand new and has hairline scratches, that isn't enough to cause catastrophic playback errors, when I've seen perfect playback from disks that look like they were used for air hockey.
As for worn discs, my store's policy is if a disc receives two complaints it's pulled, but for old fims that we rent off for free 80% of the time anyway, there is no replacement of the title. New films we'll give the customer a different disc of the same title, but if that fails as well, and often it does, there's not much we can do about it since the whole run doesn't work in particular players.
Re:Mostly rubbish (Score:4, Informative)
If I'm looking for an apple, and you offer me a cart full of oranges and say, "See, there's plenty of fruit," it's still not going to satisfy my desire for an apple.Songs are the exception, and that's mainly because Steve Jobs bullied the music companies into going with the 99 cent price point. You can bet they'd raise the prices if they could. And even Steve Jobs doesn't like DRM any longer; neither does Bill Gates.
But look at some of the books on eReader [ereader.com]. For instance, A March into Darkness by Robert Newcomb [ereader.com]. $17.95 for the DRM'd ebook at eReader, $17.79 for the unprotected hardcover at Amazon [amazon.com]. Granted, this probably isn't the best example because the list price for the hardcover is actually $26, and you can knock 10% off the eReader price by using their newsletter discount code, but it only took me two minutes of searching to find it. If I wanted to look longer, I could probably find a lot more egregious examples. And anyway, with Baen able to sell their ebooks profitably for $5 or less each without killing print book sales, even of their hardcovers, there's no earthly reason an ebook should cost $10, let alone $18, apart from the dual evils of pricey DRM (do you know how much eReader charges for their ebook services? People I know who've checked on it say it's quite a lot) and publishers not wanting ebooks to "cannibalize" print sales.
Re:So let me get this straight... (Score:2, Informative)
Downloading pirated items is not Stealing! It's breaching a copyright. It is not depriving any party of their property. On top of that, your analogy is slightly off. DRM is not a lock on a door, it's a lock on your OWN door to make sure you don't go out and do bad stuff.
Re:If DRM causes piracy... (Score:1, Informative)
I gather that in the UK (and elsewhere in Europe), some car CD players refuse to play certain CDs because those CDs have DRM. Nothing has really been done about this. People here seem to just "put up with it", by which I mean they stop buying CDs.
When I get a CD which doesn't play, I check on the internet, and quite often other people report similar problems.
I have an excellent CD by Funeral for a Friend which I really love. The last 3 tracks of the CD don't seem to play in my car, and I just shrug and put this down to DRM. That band (to my mind) is excellent, but what's the point in buying their CDs, since they won't play (I listen to CDs in my car).
These days I really don't buy many CDs because the overhead of working out whether they'll play in my CD player, and taking them back to the shop is a hassle.
DRM has stopped me buying CDs, and reduced my interest in music.
By the discussions on the net, it appears this is happening on a big scale.
Re:In the beginning, there was... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Isn't that what they want? (Score:5, Informative)
It's the fact that no one who pushes a button on a remote control wants to see a red X or Ø appear. They want action.
So true. So very true. Whenever I see that, I feel this icky, semi-irrational anger at the device that dares defy me, when I know that it is an artificial block to keep me watching a preview or whatever. My anger is partly directed at the device, partly at the manufacturer, and partly at the movie studio that made the movie.
It's frustrating because I can't actually do anything about it to effect a change. If I stop buying movies made by that particular studio, they'll have no idea why. They may figure that people dislike their movies, they may figure that piracy is hurting sales, or they may come up with with some other reason except the real one, because my reason is beyond what they think will cause consumers grief enough to stop buying.
Instead, they market the "removal" of the irritant as a "feature" of a new format and continue to keep me from convenient device shifting. This is BULLSHIT. I'm done with it, so take note, movie industry players, hardware and content alike. I will never buy one of the new format discs. I'll rent and rip, from Blockbuster or Netflix or whatever. My home media server is the end of the line for them. A post-DVD format disc will never be bought, let alone a dedicated player for the TV. They lose. I'll build a petabyte RAID array to dump ripped movies before I pay them another dime.
They give me an non-DRM alternative that I can download, and I'll return to being a paying customer.
Re:Nonsense (Score:3, Informative)
Baen proved that free books increase sales enormously.
The problem is that you can't necessarily apply the same lessons to other types of information besides books, or even to other types of books.
College textbooks. College textbooks are unlike science fiction books because they're extremely expensive, the target audience doesn't have any choice about whether to choose a particular book, and the same title typically sells steadily for many years. So for college textbook publishers, following the Baen model just won't work. If they wanted to make it work, they'd have to lower the price of a calculus textbook from $150 to more like $20. Baen's model depends on the idea that the electronic freebies help to keep the books popular; no such consideration applies to college textbooks, where the only concern is to keep the professor from adopting some other book.
Software. The Baen model depends on the fact that books are available in two forms, paper and electronic, and most people who are actually going to read a science fiction novel prefer paper. It doesn't really work that way with software, although you can certainly try to make two versions, or sell support, etc.
In both of these examples, information that has intentionally been set free by its authors really is a threat to the established industry -- and I think that's a good thing. (See my sig for numerous examples of free textbooks; not many of them are also available in print.)
Re:Nonsense (Score:3, Informative)
Re:If DRM causes piracy... (Score:3, Informative)
Uninstalling an OEM driver and running the Microsoft-shipped driver counts as one hardware change, then installing a new version of the OEM driver counts as a second hardware changed. I've had NIC drivers, sound card drivers, and video card drivers trigger re-activation, and forced to call the Craptivation support line.
F*** activation.
Wrong Use of "anti-semitic" (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Nonsense (Score:3, Informative)
Baen has a "free library" on their website with a small, frequently changing collection of stuff. However, their hardcover books also come with a CD licensed for free redistribution that can be copied onto hard drives, etc. No DRM whatsoever.
A fellow running a (unrelated) site called TheFifthImperium has put the contents of every single one of these CDs up on his website at http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com [thefifthimperium.com]. They can either be read online (as downloaded documents or HTML) or you can download the entire CDs. No idea of this site's ability to withstand Slashdotting, but it's well worth visiting. David Weber (of Honor Harrington fame, plus many other fine novels) and Eric Flint (author of this article and a vast number of superb sci-fi or fantasy books) feature heavily on these CDs, but there are books by quite a few BAEN authors included. If your local library has hardcover BAEN books, there's a good chance they'll have the CDs too (though the link above will get you to all the CDs, which is nice as no one CD has all the books they've distributed this way).
Even if reading on a computer doesn't appeal too much, it's worth checking them out just to learn a bit about the authors and their works.