Just Don’t Bite

Also known as DRM or by the proper name it is Digital Rights Managment. Or maybe it is just a Damn Retarded Method of annoying your customers and unless you work for a media company you’ll probably agree. They like to argue that DRM is a must for digital media since you can make perfect 1:1 copies and a copy of a copy doesn’t degrade the quality. Also with the advent of the Internet you can share them at a really nice speed. Now that we’ve got the “but what about just coping tapes” argument killed we can move on as to why DRM and this mess is suddenly a problem and a waste.

DRM is really little more than copy protection evolved from the early days of computers. Back when you’d get a floppy disk of a game and it’d have some stupid thing you had to do to prove you bought the game, or maybe had a odd disc structure, or a hole in the disk. Clearly these were as much of a joke back then as they are to day since we still have plenty of cracking groups around to break the protection of software. Although it did create a nice sub culture scene. Fact is, it was pointless then and still is.

Media kept along it’s merry little way and CDs came out. I’m not going to joke about how easy a CD is to copy, it’s trivial. So  when the movie industry decided that it was time for you to buy all your favorite old movies again but this time on a new format they sought to keep you from copying them. This is what CSS is Content Scrambling System released in ‘96 and cracked in ‘99. So it worked for three years, and was in the end a waste of money. During the same time CDs experimented with various forms of keeping people from coping or ripping them. I don’t think I need to tell you that none of them worked.

Needless to say it has came time once again for the movie industry to milk you of your money and produce a new format, and I think it’s safe to say that Blu-Ray won. It is protected by CSS’s predecessor AACS and it’s already been cracked. Big surprise huh? Why was it cracked? Well boredom from some people, and if the lore is right they guy who cracked it didn’t even have access to a disc or a player. Regardless, this is why you’ll find movie rips that are rather large floating around the internet along with the smaller Divx/Xvid versions.

So if protecting the media with some pointless restrictions is a waste of time, why bother doing it? After all time is money. The time they spent and continue to spend is wasted. They spend what could be a rather large chunk of money to stop a pretty small portion of the population from doing what they do. Seems counter productive to me, really it does. So what are they to do?

Take a risk, and take a chance. Well other than the one they’ve been doing that involves taking a risk at pissing off your customers by restricting what they can do.

Does it work? Well this guy named Trent Reznor that fronts some band called Nine Inch Nails wanted to find out. So he released an album under the cc-nc-sa license. He also let everyone download a chunk for free and offered a limited edition version for $300, that sold out. How much did he make? Some thing like $750,000 and there’s a bit more info on Ars. So no DRM, and still makes money. More directly HE makes the money, not the label.

Right now audio book publishers are even looking at getting rid of DRM. Why? Because it’s a pain in the butt. If they do it DRM free it will play on more devices. It is accessible by more people. It is less of a hassle. Probably cheaper too since they don’t have to pay the fees to use the DRM method.

Eh, in the end DRM is just a waste of time, a waste of money. Something thing that pisses off your paying customers and keeps your stone age business model alive. Please, adapt or die and let the rest of us move on and enjoy the creation of media that is around. Crap… that’s a whole different ball of wax and how we seem to be happy to pay for dog crap and call it entertainment.