Text 9383, 110 rader
Skriven 2006-01-24 17:34:42 av Mike '/m' (1:379/45)
Ärende: DRM is a complete lie
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From: Mike '/m' <mike@barkto.com>


http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29161

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Opinion It has never protected a single thing


By Charlie Demerjian: Monday 23 January 2006, 01:15 DRM IS A LIE. When an
agenda driven DRM infection peddler gets on a soapbox and blathers about how it
is necessary to protect the BMW payments of a producer who leeches off the
talented, rest assured, they are lying to you. DRM has absolutely nothing to do
with protecting content, it is about protecting the wallets of major
corporations. The funny thing is they aren't protecting it from you, they are
protecting it from each other.

Let's look at the shattering success of every DRM solution to date. Every
single one has failed. The score card is hundreds if not thousands against,
zero for. Name me one song, movie or software title that is DRM infected that
has not found it's way to the net within a week of release, usually long before
release. There are none. To protect content, DRM is an abject and total
failure, and will continue to be.

It also hurts the user - there is no DRM infection that in any way benefits the
consumer. It costs more to develop, costs to license, makes hardware more
expensive and complex, and screws the user under legitimate uses. It has a
negative value to the consumer.

So, it makes content less attractive, less playable, and is legally dubious, so
why is the industry hell bent on infecting everything from your prophylactics
to your computers? Simple, they want a bigger slice of the pie, and DRM is the
way to get it. No, not bigger profit margins, the greedy bastards already do
that with each format change, DRM infections are about edging each other out.

Here is the problem, every DRM infection is unique, patented, copyrighted,
copywronged, and DMCAd ad nauseum, They protect their code in every way
possible, and make it so you have to get their approval to use it. This is all
done under the guise of protecting content, but that is a lie. If you are going
to steal content, do you think violating another copyright on the DRM mechanism
will make you lose more sleep? Not a chance.

If you are a rival company though, you can't really violate such things and get
away with it for long, Sony, MS and most people swiping GPLd code are proof of
that. So, you have to license it to play ball, or at least play music and
movies. That is the true nature of DRM infections, to keep other big greedy
companies out.

So, say you are a big immoral record company that see walking wallets, aka
customers, as not giving you enough of their hard earned money, some have the
gall to buy from other big greedy immoral companies. Bastards! What do you do?
Make sure they have a hard time playing things from the other guys.

Let's take a good example of this, the first few generations of Sony's DRM
infected failures of an almost MP3 player. Sony decided that its proprietary
ATRAC format was better than MP3, and technically it could be, but that is
irrelevant. They didn't support MP3s out of the box, but would do a one way
conversion if you wanted to put your MP3s on the Walkman. Taking them off was a
bit curious though.

Also, if you wanted to buy music, you could go to the wonderful (sarcasm
people, sarcasm) Sony connect store, and buy almost anything that Sony licensed
artists made. If you wanted a song by a Warner artist, well, tough. Stepping
into the land of make believe for a minute, imagine that Time-Warner made
digital music players, and lets pretend they have an encoding system and DRM
infection called HURT-SCAM. You can buy a TW player and download any HURT-SCAM
song, curiously this meant only titles from a Warner artist. If you have a Sony
player, it doesn't support HURT-SCAM, and TW players don't support ATRAC.

Now, if this hypothetical TW player wanted to play ATRAC, they could reverse
engineer it, and get bitten by the same DMCA laws they bought so many
Congresspeople to implement, and the same is true for Sony wanting to implement
HURT-SCAM. (Please note, I am not intoning that these companies buy government,
remember this is make believe. The US governmental system is immune to such
things, just ask them.). Basically, both sides have to license their bitter
rivals before they can interoperate.

Now, lets step back into the land of reality. You have ATRAC, FairPlay (har
har), Real, WMA, and a host of other DRM infections, and none can play any of
the others. If you have a player that can do one, chances are that it can't do
any of the others, almost like the license terms preclude it, but it would take
someone much more cynical than I to say that. You have enough walled gardens to
last a lifetime, and each one is filled with greedy execs trying to wrap their
mind around how much money this will bring them. The stakes are high, they each
want it all, and want all the others to go away, there is no middle ground.

The enforcement mechanism is quite simply the DRM infection Without DRM, the
other guys could invade their garden and do thing that might benefit the user,
I mean take away the profits they feel are rightfully theirs. In the mean time
every piece of media thus 'protected' is available for download. DRM has done,
is doing and will do nothing to stop piracy.

Basically, you and I are the innocent bystanders in this drive by shooting
called DRM. The big companies are at war, and we are the casualties. So, they
have to send their flying monkeys to sue single moms, 12 year olds and
octogenarians to make it appear that they are doing what they say. Bull, they
are lying. The sad part is that the public, and worse yet, the governments are
listening to them.

The misinformation campaign seems to have sunk in, people don't even question
that DRM is about protecting content any more, even though it has never done
so. It hurts the users, and hurts the companies making it, but they have their
eyes on the big prize. DRM infections are the only way to keep their rivals at
bay, lobbing a few bullets at the users is a low price to pay for that.
===

 /m

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