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.
However (Score:5, Insightful)
"There are some people out there, possessed by the firm delusion that "information wants to be free"--as if bits of data had legs and went walking about on their own..."
This is a strawman, and dumb. The contention that "information wants to be free" is a catchy way of saying "the properties of digital goods are such that their natural marginal cost is zero or practically indistinguishable from zero."
Bad news for most people who would like to marginalize/otherwise dismiss the free culture argument: the economic basis for the contention that "information wants to be free" is rock solid. Scientific. To escape it you have to resort to name-calling etc., as here.
Re:However (Score:5, Insightful)
Moreover, there is an information-theory perspective as well, involving the inherent nonconservative nature of information in its most basic forms. Digitization brings "information" closer to that basic form, by detaching it more thoroughly from physical media (books, tapes, etc.) and allows its basic attributes to come forward.
There's nothing you can do to put that genie back in the bottle.
Re:However (Score:4, Insightful)
I've also been thinking about all this recently from the standpoint of the expense of resources. The use of natural resources, the expense of pollution, the expense of the distribution chain, internet bandwidth, and even hard drive space. It's odd to think about in these terms, since it's usually painted as an issue of consumer rights vs. corporate profitability, or as the desires of the audience vs. the needs of the consumer.
However, the pictures changes if, for a moment, we re-imagine it as a problem for society to solve: how do we efficiently manage the distribution of recorded arts? For the sake of argument, lets disregard the other concerns, such as managing who is authorized to view what, or financial reimbursements to artists. Just think of the problem of distribution of information, as though it's assumed that the information is free.
Suddenly it becomes clear that physical distribution, in this day and age, is *stupid*. We have this huge network at our fingertips, and we're going to waste materials on manufacturing millions of CDs? Many of those CDs are going to ripped to MP3 and then sit on a shelf. For what purpose? We use land and materials to build physical record stores (and Best Buy), we use the materials for the actual media, we pay people to search/maintain the inventory, there's the trucks and the shipping, and all that crap. Think of all the man-time and materials wasted.
Also, users needing to rely on the hard drives in their home computer to store a specific copy of a top-40 hit or a Hollywood movie is nonsense. Right now, the top movie on iTMS is "The Prestige". Consider for a moment if I had bought that movie from iTunes 20 minutes before my hard drive died. Now, why should I need to keep a copy on my local hard drive? The movie has already been ripped, and the data exists elsewhere on the Internet. In order for me to download the movie again would only cost in used bandwidth, but those costs can be mitigated, ironically, by the sheer number of people downloading it. I'm sure that it's obvious to everyone here that the solution is P2P (bittorrent).
It's become clear to me that for a society concerned with using resources efficiently, sharing information via P2P networks is a solution that's almost too good to be true. I'm not just talking about hippy-talk "conservation" in the environmentalist sense. I'm talking about the human resources, the expense of intellectual thought, and the money spent. Overall, those resources, too, would be more efficiently managed through P2P distribution.
Now, some people would complain that jobs would be lost, but that's inherent in using human resources efficiently. Some of the human resources currently spent on these distribution issues are being spent unnecessarily. That we don't break windows makes less work for the window-makers, but breaking windows does not generate wealth. (Yes, I guess I'm suggesting that the MPAA/RIAA have become an example of the broken-window fallacy, and therefore create a net-loss for society)
Re:However (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:However (Score:5, Insightful)
it takes energy to set it in a meaningful pattern that enables all those free copies.
And that energy, when amortized over 6,578,462,507 [census.gov] people approaches zero, a fact that copyright fanatics like to ignore.
With copyright law as it currently stands the cost of pretty much any mass market information is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of production. In other words, highly inefficient production with massive losses in marketing, controlling distribution and policing.
I don't know what the complete answer is but I do know that the people who claim that copyright law as it is currently implemented is the only possible way information creators can benefit are fanatics, very likely entrenched interests and middlemen who know full well that they add no value. Parasites in other words.
Intellectual property law is a pure product of the mind and can be anything that we want it to be. Even something as simple as discussing what the correct copyright period should be, right down to zero, should be discussed and scientifically justified rather than the hand waving like "nobody will create without copyright" (that's nonsense) or "copyright is the only option" (that's also nonsense).
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
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Your arbitrary generalisation is unwarranted.
I'm sure there may be alternatives to copyright that have better results, but the favoured alternative of many -- piracy -- is not one of them.
Re:However (Score:5, Interesting)
In the natural order of things, someone would need to physically take your property and deprive you of it, yet you can share intellectual property with as many people as you wish and still retain it yourself. Education is fundamental to society, and keeping information (which is all intellectual property really is) secret is detrimental to society as a whole... Imagine if the caveman who discovered fire hadn't told anyone else how to do it?
Societies and the human race have prospered and advanced due to sharing information, but that continued advancement is slowed by the greedy few who want to keep information secret for their own benefit at the cost of society as a whole.
As for scientifically justifying a copyright period, i would imagine by studying the relative pros and cons of each length of time, although it's very subjective depending on what information is being copyrighted.
About profiting off the back of someone else's work... What do you call fair compensation? Many large companies generate huge profits from people's works, while giving those people a miniscule cut. Also, do you think someone should be able to continue making ridiculous profits indefinately? Surely there's a point where it's no longer fair compensation, and now they;re just ripping people off.
Whatever system is used, it should be more consumer-friendly than the current copyright laws... The current laws allow copyright holders to charge anything they want, continue doing so for ridiculously long periods of time, and both restrict supply and discriminate as to who is allowed to buy copies and what they pay. (and yes, i consider media which costs far more in europe and comes out several months after the us to be racial discrimination)
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Yes but society as a whole would benefit if anyone could take that rock the moment you put it down and you
Re:However (Score:4, Insightful)
You were missing the point that it makes no sense to speak of "taking someone else's property" in the context of "Intellectual Property," because it makes the false presumption that "Intellectual Property" is actually property. In other words, you're saying "P implies Q," but failing to realize that P is false.
My argument is one based on the physical reality of the universe; economics is irrelevant to it. In addition, you can't use "today's intellectual property laws" to justify themselves; that's a circular argument.
Yep, I completely agree.
I agree here too.
If we first postulate that a "copyright holder" exists, then yes, I can indeed see how he can be damaged, economically. Now, here's the problem: it doesn't make sense, physically speaking, for any such "copyright holder" to exist in the first place!
Your entire argument seems to be based on the presumptions that copyright exists and that it's possible to enforce. You then argue that, from those presumptions, that copyright infringement has negative consequences for the copyright holder, etc. In addition, you explain how copyright is desirable in terms of ethics (e.g. by giving authors fair credit for their work). That's all fine and dandy; I'm not disagreeing with any of it.
All I'm disagreeing with is your claim that "intellectual property" is the same thing as "real property." If we had Star Trek-style replicators, then I'd agree with you (and, of course, extend my claims to include "real property" as well). But we don't, so the fact that "intellectual property" is inherently copyable while "real property" isn't causes them to be different in a very significant way. The consequence of that fact -- which is a feature of physical reality, not economics -- is that your postulates (that copyright can exist and be enforced) are false and the whole argument is moot. In other words, yes, P -> Q, but ~P, so you have (so far) failed to prove Q!
My "final claim" wasn't a claim. Or at least, it wasn't a claim made for the purpose of justifying the rest of my argument. Still, you're right that I overstated it when I said "everyone" (which I meant in a colloquial sense).
Also, which "success[ful] online music services" are you referring to? The ones that don't use DRM (e.g. eMusic, AllOfMP3), the ones that aren't actually successful (e.g. PlaysForSu
Re:However (Score:5, Insightful)
So, next time you want to make a $6 million dollar movie, you can distribute it for free as long as you can get everyone on the planet to mail you 1/10 of a cent up front to help you produce it. Good luck with that.
Re:However (Score:4, Insightful)
Not wrong, just possibly flawed. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't really have any problem with people trying to make movies, or even to make money by making movies. That's a legitimate occupation in my book.
What I have a problem with, is when they try to alter the economic and technological landscape in order to make it easier for them to use a particular business model. That's where I draw the line. I could think of a lot of ways that I could change the world that would make it easier for me to make money, but that's just not how it works. The rest of us basically have to work within reality as it's presented to us, and we have to figure out ways of making money and otherwise surviving within that.
The content producers want to, and are petitioning (read: bribing) government for, is to entrench their business model at the expense of other possibilities, and at the expense of a whole lot of other things besides (not least of which is my freedom to do whatever the hell I want with the equipment I've purchased).
There's nothing inherently wrong with their business model, it just may not work. They're welcome to try, but if it doesn't work, I expect them to pick up and go back to the drawing board and figure out another way to finance movies, if making movies is what they want to do. For them to instead pour a ton of cash into, and generally mess up and corrupt, government, in order to keep a flawed business model around, is unacceptable.
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Whip up a poster and title and see who wanted some of that.
And the Toxic Avenger also was made that way.
Re:Statement: Insightful. Sarcasm: overrated (Score:4, Insightful)
The really fun thing about any copyright discussion here is watching one set of people arguing 'What is needed', namely, how we 'need' copyright law, against people who say that copyright law is a violation of their rights, past people who are arguing 'What is true', that copyright law used to rely on a level of inconvenience that is now gone and thus is almost totally unenforceable.
We may, indeed, need copyright law to continue to encourage content producers. That is totally orthagontal to whether or not enforcing copyright law is possible in a digital world.
If you fall out of an airplane without a parachute, you can argue that you 'need' to reduce your speed before you hit the ground, and you'd be correct. You could argue that free-falling is kinda fun, and you'd be right too. Or you could argue that you have no way to do the first thing, and you'd also be correct. Sometimes there is not actually a 'correct' solution.
We may, indeed, smash into the ground so hard we destroy quite a lot of produced content. Arguing that we 'shouldn't' do that is rather surreal, considering we already jumped from the plane.
If everyone works together, they might be able to invent, at least, a hang glider or at least aim for a lake. But we have way too many people arguing about what 'should' happen, without considering that there is absolutely no way to do what they think 'should' happen so perhaps they should aim for something a bit more likely.
Re:However (Score:5, Interesting)
Copyright is extremely inefficient. It deters other innovation (generally by smaller and more creative people and firms) by making borrowing material very hard. Copyright sends many times (about 10x) more money to middlemen (CEOs, advertising, lawyers, trade groups, profits, retailers, etc) than to production. Copyright also leads to monopolies and censorship - both commercial and government. Copyright also leads to more advertising by restricting alternative distribution (compare TV via P2P and over the air), and advertising is a terrible way to raise money for anything.
Just about any other system, including having a free-for-all, is going to work better than the current system.
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I'm reminded of the foundation series here. A person is unpredictable, but as you get larger and larger groups, they get more predictable.
Sure, people commit 'piracy' just like they do other crimes. Sure that's bad. But should I, as a business, not take any measures against theft because it's against the law and people shouldn't do that? No - to ensure my own profit margin I have to acknowledge human nature and take some steps to prevent theft.
But how do you prevent electronic piracy
Re:Sixth column of a series (Score:4, Interesting)
But DRM radically reduces the value of legally-acquired media, while raising the value of pirated ones. Furthermore, I think there is a strong philosophical argument against the bare concept of DRM, as the rules it imposes restrict our actions to such a large degree as to remove our liberty as moral agents, preventing us from acting as moral agents at all.
The first point is one of utility. Case in point: cleaning out my inbox today, I found a note from the iTunes store that the Good, the Bad and the Queen's album is only $8 for a limited time. I almost jumped at it, even clicked the "Buy this album..." button (I'm a big Albarn/Gorillaz fan), and then, filling in my password, I stopped to think. "This is only 128kbits," I thought to myself. "That sounds kinda chintzy on my headphones. I won't be able to send good tracks to my friends, or upload them to the poolhall jukebox at my school. I won't ever be able to play them on non-Apple DAPs without even more of a quality loss, or make them into ringtones for my friends' phones, or possibly be able to even listen to them at all once Apple gets over this DRM nonsense in 10 years. Shit, I don't even know if this album is any good, the free single was only so-so. I have food to buy. Huh."
The problem with DRM'ed media, and this leads into my second point, is that you don't actually buy anything. If I buy a CD, or download an album off the internet, it is my property: I have the right to use it and abuse it, as far as my own system of morality allows. (For me this includes making mix CDs for my friends, emailing them hott traxx, dropping cool songs on my friends' iPods, playing on my radio shows, and all the uses I described above.) By restricting my use of the things I buy to a predefined set of "correct" actions, DRM removes my freedom to act as a moral agent.
So I fired up Soulseek and—well, you know the rest of the story. I will happily agree that stealing the music is less moral than paying for it (though the profit split of $0.80 to Apple, $6.50 to the RIAA, and $0.70 to Damon Albarn seems a little off to me, as I would really like Damon Albarn to be as rich as he needs to be to keep making music—the people demand a new Gorillaz album!). But for the reasons above I think it's less immoral than what the RIAA and iTunes do to me when I buy into their DRM.
That's my call, as a human being and a moral agent, and I should be free to make it. DRM restricts my freedom to a rigid set of rules, predetermined by a cartel of people completely removed from my life and reasons for action. We get the old saw: everything not compulsory is forbidden; everything not forbidden is compulsory. It destroys the possibility of agency, and in turn the possibility of any kind of moral action.
I: just want to listen to music, where and how I want to. I'm happy to pay for it (and I do, more than I should), as long as my rights of property and agency are respected. They: want to destroy my personhood with an absolute and top-down system of "morality".
Who's the bad guy?
indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you think I care this movie is now being copied by my friends?
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(for the lame ones among you who didn't get the joke, yes I know he's using Linux.)
Re:indeed (Score:4, Interesting)
There are no DRM'd formats with an "AVI inside". "FairPlay" is a DRM system used by Apple. It is certainly not a thing you can use to "strip the DRM from it and access the AVI inside" anything. There used to be a tool named "FairPlay", which worked on music files and not video files, and has long since been abandoned.
So no, I do not think anybody cares that your imaginary friends are copying this imaginary file.
Cigarettes and MP3s (Score:2, Interesting)
He's got it right... (Score:5, Insightful)
I bought XIII and had to pirate it to play it in my laptop (without the CD)
I wanted to buy KT Tunstall's CD, but since I listen to my music on the computer, I had to pirate it (it's copy-protected)
My wife and I have a collection of some 200 CD's, all of which are ripped to my computer, but we haven't bought a new CD in almost a year.
There's a limit as to when we start pushing our customers too far, and they start to push back
THAT IS NOT PIRACY (Score:5, Insightful)
I know what you are trying to say but you are playing right into the hands of the MPAA and RIAA and the like with these statements.
Ripping a CD you bought to put the music on your mp3 player is NOT piracy. Yes the RIAA likes to call it that, wich is why they want to add a tax on mp3 players and want to force you to rebuy a track for each piece of equipment you buy it on.
That CD you play on your stereo, a itunes track for your PC, the ring tone version for your phone and so on.
HOWEVER that is NOT what you are legally required to do.
As far as downloading a crack to run software that you bought, in free countries were politicians are not in the pocket of industry, this is 100% legal. Imagine it would be illegal for you to take the tape out of a cassette player and put it on a spindle player instead. For that matter, imagine the police tried to arrest you for breaking into your own car.
The actions you claim to have done DO NOT fall under piracy (well unless you did them whole boarding a vessel with a cutlass between your teeth), they are fair use actions that your a perfectly entitled to do.
To even call this piracy is to give the RIAA and MPAA exactly what they want, that consumers think that limits can be put on what can be done with products you own.
Sounds Familiar (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Sounds Familiar (Score:4, Insightful)
(what percentage of people interact with 'the war on terror' anywhere else?)
It all depends on what value you assign to the lives of the various other people on the planet; if you use the apparent acceptable rate of car accident deaths(~1/10000 a year in the US), we are spending way too much on anti terror measures(the death rate due to terrorism is way lower than that for US citizens, even if you include 9/11 and soldiers dying in Iraq and so forth). Basically, the free market would ignore it and move on, much to the chagrin of the dead, but to the profit of the living.
Re:Sounds Familiar (Score:4, Insightful)
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It sure sounds alot like the reversed cause and effect of the "War on Drugs" or "War on Terrorism". Will the government ever learn to back off and let the free market guide itself?
The War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism are two completely different things. The drug cartels are motivated by money. The terrorists are motivated primarily by religion and hatred. If we get every single drug user in America clean, the demand will disappear and there will be no more monetary incentive for the cartels to br
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That's why it's OK for Americans to be addicted to cigarettes and alcohol but not cocaine or crystal meth.
Having everyone addicted to cocaine is a threat to national sovereignty.
Having them addicted to meth is a threat to profits.
The free market would have everyone buying cheap meth or homemade shine, or addicted to foreign produced coke.
As it stands now, they're buying whiskey, c
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Only if you count the war on cannabis as "the war on drugs." If you exclude that miscatagorized weed, you get almost exactly the purposes they say the War on Drugs is for.
If it weren't for use if illegal drugs, Richard Pryor would still be able to perform and Kurt Cobain would likely still be alive.
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Err... Not entirely correct.
The sole mistake Americans make is by automatically assuming that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". All other mistakes including sending the military and the CIA are a mere consequence of this one.
Bin Laden was made out of nothing through the enemy of my enemy principle. He is not the only one jinn to be unbottled in this manner. Plenty of others.
Protecting our interests... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the major mstake we make, as a country, is assuming we have the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. This is usually done to protect our "interests", which in turn is code for protecting the interests of our various companies and corporations. Read "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq [amazon.com]" and you'll see the same patterns repeated again and again and again.
Reductionism rules! (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't explain why the US government has so aggressively gone after marijuana cultivation here in the US. It also doesn't explain why the extremely powerful tobacco lobby keeps losing in court battles, or how these profits are "centrally controlled."
Umm... you do know that crystal meth [wikipedia.org] is produced in the United States, right? You seem to also imply that the only reason cocaine is illegal almost everywhere [wikipedia.org] stems from the fact that coca leaves don't come from the United States. Perhaps that's right, if you assume that cocaine is a benign substance, and there's a globe-spanning conspiracy to keep this beneficial substance from citizens everywhere.
By that logic, the fact that so many Americans can't do without coffee should be serious cause for alarm. Time to crank up the Blackhawks, bring the SEALs down to Columbia, and lets take control of those coffee fields!
Is that because meth-addicted people will buy less alcohol and cigarettes?
That would be swell. I like that idea. More addiction for everyone!
Yes, because The Sinister Cabal that runs America has made it so. The tobacco lobby is totally unrelated to the fact that in many southern states, the biggest cash crop is tobacco. Voters there probably don't want to promote the interests of tobacco growers. They've been forced to do so by The Man. Likewise, the alchohol distributors have effectively maintained a monopoly by keeping foreign-supplied beer, wine, whiskey, and every other form of alchohol out of America. Oh, wait. They haven't.
Of course it is. Whenever the world is binary, the solution is obvious.
Absolutely right. It wasn't until the US pulled out of Northern Ireland that the terrorism there and in the UK stopped. The Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction were terrorizing Italy and Germany until the US military left Europe. The Basque ETA. The Pakistani groups operating in India. Abu Sayyaf. All of these groups obviously will disappear as soon as the CIA disappears and the US military ends all its foreign presence.
Again, you see through the nuance quite clearly. There are no opportunists in the world of terrorism. These are all idealogically committed individuals, ready to give their lives for higher principles. Certainly none of them are using terrorism as a vehicle to further profiteering or mere power grabs. I think we can all agree that any problems that occur anywhere in the world are the result of America's negative influence.
You're right. All of the Shia children whose parents were killed by Sunnis, and all the Sunni children whose parents
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Re:Sounds Familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the crime is created in response to the problem of illegality. Junkies steal to buy heroin because it's sold at vastly inflated prices by dealers, they daren't seek help for fear of dropping their mates in the s#!t, and anyway they're already criminals just for having a toot so what's a bit of thieving between friends? Tobacco is more addictive than heroin (to the extent you can compare an illegal drug with a legal one), yet smokers are generally law-abiding. Apart from the ones who are bleeding the National Health Service dry by buying tobacco abroad
If only the UK goverment realised this. (Score:3, Insightful)
Digital rights issues have been gaining increasing prominence as innovation accelerates, more and more digital media products and services come onto the market and the consumer wants to get access to digital content over different platforms. Many content providers have been embedding access and management tools to protect their rights and, for example, prevent illegal copying. We believe that they should be able to continue to protect their content in this way. However, DRM does not only act as a policeman through technical protection measures, it also enables content companies to offer the consumer unprecedented choice in terms of how they consume content, and the corresponding price they wish to pay.
It is clear though that the needs and rights of consumers must also be carefully safeguarded. It is reasonable for consumers to be informed what is actually being offered for sale, for example, and how and where the purchaser will be able to use the product, and any restrictions applied. While there is good reason to expect the market to reach a balance as these new markets develop, it is important that consumers' interests are maintained in the meantime.
Apart from the APIG (All Party Internet Group) report on DRM referred to in your petition, Digital Rights issues are an important component in other major HMG review strands on Intellectual Property, New Media and the Creative Economy. In particular, the independent Gowers Review of Intellectual Property commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, published its report on 6th December 2006 as part of the Chancellor's Pre-Budget Report. Recommendations include introducing a limited private copying exception by 2008 for format shifting for works published after the date that the law comes into effect. There should be no accompanying levies for consumers. Also making it easier for users to file notice of complaints procedures relating to Digital Rights Management tools by providing an accessible web interface on the Patent Office website by 2008 and that DTI should investigate the possibility of providing consumer guidance on DRM systems through a labelling convention without imposing unnecessary regulatory burdens.
Isn't that what they want? (Score:5, Funny)
Step 2: Get DMCA on your side so you can make a criminal out of anyone at will.
Step 3: Sell defective products. When people are compelled to pirate on a larger scale because the Disney DVD they rented for the kids keeps fading in and out visually and audiably, or skips and dies on a particular scene...
Step 4: Point at all the new, higher piracy figures and dance around singing about how the piracy problem is getting worse and how you need more DRM power.
Step 5: Wait for the sheep to get used to the new order.
Fortunately, it's unlikely this will work. Look at DVD advertisements. I recently popped in Joe's Apartment (it was free and I like bad films) and there was not trailers, commercials, or even a stop at the menu screen. Straight to reel one. A short while back I was watching a new release (I forget the title) and it was telling me all about how the new HD-DVD (or Blueray, I wasn't paying much attention) is going to be worth buying new hardware at shocking prices because the disc will play the film immediately.
Thus, the cycle is complete; the studios received just enough annoyed customer complaints about the previews, ads, and intro garbage that they started making them skipable, or at least fastforwardable, and now they're going to temporarily give us immediate play back. Aren't we loved?
Frankly, I don't think it's really the ads that ticked people off -- we've been tolerating them since '46. 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.
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Skips and dies on a scene? Do you have a source for that? I've never seen that as a problem except for very abused DVDs, and that's the problem of with the business renting it, not the company that made the original disc. The renting company should provide a non-scratched DVD in repla
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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
Re:Isn't that what they want? Not Quite! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not so fast here. The ads may not have ticked you off the first time you played the disc. But what about the second time? After all, nobody buys a DVD to only play once.
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.
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Get off your ass and write them a letter. A real, honest-to-Godzilla ink-on-paper letter (feel free to write it on the computer and print it out, but whatever). Corporations pay orders of mangnitude more attention to paper letters than they do to email, for example.
Your one letter isn't likely to change anything by itself, and short of orchestrating a boycott and associated letter-writing campaign, it's the most you can do individually. But if enough people stop buying DVDs becaus
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Step 6: Profit!
Laws == Crime (Score:5, Insightful)
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I guarantee you that they would not go unpunished. The punishment in an anarchistic society could even be rather extreme. I'd kill you, and your entire family. Who would stop me?
dvds (Score:5, Insightful)
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Must agree here. (Score:5, Interesting)
So I decided to "cash them in". So I login to the site described on the coupon. "Sorry, but this site requires Internet Explorer 6 or higher".
Then registration process, asking me for granny's dog's name and so on. Then confirmation email. Then it tells me to download their player. Then the files which are not MP3 but some of their own DRM'd format. And of course unplayable in anything but their crappy player. No way to use them in a portable mp3 player, no easy way of burning them to a CD (outside of ripping audio mixer channel) and of course no way of playing them on another computer, even with said player installed (need login). Ah, and no playback without network connection.
Thanks, no "Legal MP3", even for free, please.
Mostly rubbish (Score:2)
1) The products they want... are hard to find, and thus valuable.
Most "rare" materials aren't available in DRM form. What causes the copyright infringement isn't the DRM but the fact that you can't get it at all. If they're available with DRM, then the supply is large: just go pay for it and download it.
2) The products they want are high-pric
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.
Baen Books has always gotten this: (Score:3, Insightful)
Jim Baen died last summer, but Baen Books still gives away a huge number of books in completely unencrypted, un-DRM'd formats. I think I have bought well over $100 of their buyable e-books, because I can read them on anything I want, any time I want.
DRM Causes Piracy? I agree.... (Score:2)
Someone else would lik
But the record companies _want_ more piracy... (Score:2)
I suspect that the record companies want more poiracy. Then they can get a blank CD/DVD/hard drive tax similar to the one in place on blank audio cassettes.
That's where the steady income lies, for them.
same as old adage (Score:2)
2: The products they want are high-priced.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I can attest to this 100% - in a different, but similar area many are familiar with. My example is my experience with WindowsXP. When I lived in New Zealand, I could not afford the NZD$536 [dse.co.nz] (USD$377) for XP home to keep my CS:S habit alive, so I used a 'less than legitimate' copy of XP. Anyway, when I moved to the US I thought I'd go legit only because after a visit to Frys i saw i could pick up XP off the shelf at (USD$199 [outpost.com]) - almost half the price. Even better I managed to get an OEM XP home for just over a hundred bucks.
Now there's no way I'm paying NZ$536 (USD$377) for an OS. No way. No way in hell. However, I was happy enough to part with a hundy for the OEM version. I didnt know of Linux at the time (now have 3 PC's on Ubuntu), but wanted XP to play CS:S and various other Windows games I'd paid for over the years (because they were well priced!!!)
So yeah, hopefully big business will wake up and smell the coffee one of these days.
Call me a stickler for language... (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I think the key issue with piracy is not DRM, but the fact that piracy and copyright infringement are becoming an acceptable to increasingly commit. The result of this is a situation where the laws of society are arguably out of sink with its values. Situations like this are hard to maintain because we depend as much on societal stigma as we do on criminal punishment to deter most crimes. When stigma is lacking or low, we often try to make up for this by adding criminal punishment to increase deterrence.
The problem with this, of course, is that it creates a paradoxical situation where we punish people more for crimes we care less about (another example, non-violent drug offenses). Thus you end up with a situation where people are morally outraged, even fearful, at the threat of having the book thrown at them for a crime they do not consider "bad" at all.
The biggest problem though for copyright infringement is that society normally deals with "lesser" crimes like these by imposing fines on the violator like with speeding for instance. People speed, and when they get caught they pay the fine, go to traffic school, and continue speeding. To most, the fine and traffic school are just the transactional cost of speeding to them.
However, infringement is inherently tough to solve with fines, because it is an economic crime, not a behavioral one. A reasonable fine, the cost of purchasing the infringed material, would have at best a neutral effect on infringement society-wide. People would just infringe, take their chances, and worst case pay up if they get caught. However setting fines too high, as the current system arguably has them, has an even worse effect though, since your average infringer will tend to infringe more than otherwise, the logic being that "if getting caught for a little infringement is going to bankrupt me, I might as well get my money's worth by infringing a lot." Unreasonably high fines also create a situation where the infringed party inherently knows that the infringer is likely judgment proof (cannot pay the fines), further pissing them off. At this point, society tries criminal penalties as well as fines, which leads us to the current system we have.
Obviously solving this problem is a toughy. We could kill copyright infringement as a crime, much as we repealed Prohibition, but that could create other problems, such as disincentivizing creativty, or encouraging tighter DRM, as creators deal with the ramifications. I offer no solutions, but this is the problem as I see it.
No (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole [some factor] "causes" [some behavior] is simply an assault on free will and an invitation to elite social engineers to take away more freedom from people.
People behave the way they want to.
(Example: Did videogames "cause" the Columbine massacre, or did some kids decide to massacre some people?)
Real Pirates (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I5dVBezF9k [youtube.com]
Re:Commodification (Score:4, Insightful)
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What the GP has noted from a more social perspective is actually valid on the physiological level. IIRC all ova in a female are completely developed before she reaches sexual maturity and after that dormant. During each ovulation one (usually) undergoes the final stage in its development and is secreted. No new ova are created.
At the same time male spermatocites which divide to produce spermatosoids are produced constantly (albeit at a decreasing rate) until the males die. New sperm is created all
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And in case you're wondering, only some of my girlfriends complain about it.
Remember: 80% per year. (Score:2)
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And then along comes Britney Spears [phun.org] to commoditize again. Although in her case I say decommoditization is the way forward.
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Only on Slashdot would this kind of tripe be regarded as 'Insightful'.
To the original poster - please explain to us how you 'decommoditize' sexual organs (are yours commodities too, assuming you have some?), and who the industry-Yids are, and what you mean by Yid? ?
To those who modded it insightful, I have to wonder what possible nugget of truth you feel
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Re:If DRM causes piracy... (Score:4, Interesting)
And of course, you're completely mistaken. I remember back when PC's were brand new, in the late 70's - every single one of us had a pirated copy of Microsoft's "Flight Simulator" program. Guess what - enough people actually paid for it (it was a good program!), and Microsoft continued to push out new versions. The Flight Simulator division at MS is still alive and well today - despite all the piracy.
Your gut feeling flies into the face of the actual facts. But this is what we've been saying all along - "piracy actualy PROMOTES sales"...
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There are many, many people (like me) who are not buying anything because the DRM means it will not play on all my devices. I have poked around the Itunes site plenty and played the samples, but never bought anything, just said "I would buy that right now if they got rid of the DRM".
It does not apply to me, but I believe there will be substantial sales to people who intend to violate copyright. Somebody may be far
Re:If DRM causes piracy... (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, the reason that most of the people I know didn't buy a copy of XP, and won't buy Vista, is the heavy handed DRM attached to it, which requires you to get permission from Microsoft to run your computer after 5 hardware changes. I can make 5 hardware changes in 5 minutes when I'm testing hardware. There is no way that I am going to spend half the night on the phone calling Microsoft. If I'm having a problem with hardware, I don't need the additional aggravation. I have a legit copy on my laptop--which never changes hardware--but I'll never install one on my desktop machine.
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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.
The Individual Sense of Fairplay is the Best DRM (Score:2)
The article introduces the reader to the reason to why the lack of DRM would not lead to mass piracy. It is because people in developed countries are (or at least used to) have a highly developed sense of ethics.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
So whether it makes sense or not is moot. Baen proved that free books increase sales enormously.
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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
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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
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if you use their choice of OS, their choice of browser, their choice of media player, their choice of hardware, etc.
I'm not to familiar with music, but ebooks sure don't follow this. I've often seen paper books for $60 and their electronic equivalents for $50. Only $10? I don't think so. Publishers claim that the majority of the cost of a book is printing, binding and shipping. All of those costs are gone with ebooks. Now you have server costs (much smaller than distribution costs for real books). So, it may cost slightly less, but is certainly not cheaper considering what you are giving up. Of course, you still have to be using their choice of software (OS, reader, etc), as few outfits provide unencumbered ebooks in PDF format or something.
Users expect to be able to use and move their stuff around. That is sadly not always possible. iTunes may be the exception, but I don't know not having used it personally.
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Publishers claim that the majority of the cost of a book is printing, binding and shipping. All of those costs are gone with ebooks.
Well, no. That may be true for certain types of books, but it is certainly not true for any that I'm familiar with. One type of book where I have hard data is upper-division physics textbooks (black and white). For those books, paper, printing, and binding (PPB) are about $10 a copy, whereas the price of the book is normally in the $50-100 range. One way to tell that PPB is
Only if you like Apple. (Score:2)
The fact of the matter is that a) Not all material is available via Apple, and b) even if it was, the entire notion of buying into Apple's system to screw the **AA is still robbing Peter to pay Paul.
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Weren't you listening??? DRM protected content is much less useful than the physical equivalent. To some people it's worth nothing at all since they can't play it on their own preferred music player. So they look for content they actually use.
And while the music industry has yet to lose a sale from me because of illegal downloading, they're not producing much I want to hear these days either. Hip-Hop, and Rap Music (an oxymoron
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Neither do I. See, I already know that if you want to buy a Creative MP3 player that you are screwed. Now you do too, no time wasted.
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itunes uses AAC and from I've read sounds decent, but it's still DRM laden.
What people want is to buy CDs and know that they're actually CDs and not some data CD with PCM tracks "hidden" on it. In short, people want what they're prepared to pay for.
Tom
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Exactly. The truth of the matter is, that if all music is DRMd, and there is no other way to get it, there will be NO piracy, and people will buy it just as they did in the days before music sharing was possible. This is likely an impossible scenario, but it is such a seductive dream
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DRM literally means it is easier to steal than to buy. You steal, you get a copy that you know will play and can be put on any machine. If you buy, you are stuck with the DRM and have to remove it, a significant amount of work that was already done by the guy that uploaded the free "stealable" copy. The stolen copy is actually much more valuable as it includes this work.
Bzzt. You are wrong.
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Stealing a Wii is much harder than to copyright violate an artist by acquiring an mp3. One involves depriving someone of property, while they're not paying attention, the other involves a click of a mouse.
I could see if stealing a Wii could be done over Kazaa or Napster [or whatever kids run nowadays]. But it isn't.
Plus nobody is saying that copyright violations are justified. The author was saying that the reason copyright violations rise in the fac
Re:In the beginning, there was... (Score:5, Informative)
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4) The illegally obtained file is less restricted and more useful than its for-pay equivalent. In short, you're choosing between paying nothing for a better product and paying something for a more frustrating, restrictive product.
That's what they mean when they say, "DRM promotes piracy." If someone sells me an unencumbered file at a reasonable price, I'll accept it happily and move on. But if someone sells me a file t