DRM and Suicide Committed by Industries

[dewline]

I keep thinking this DRM stuff is going to be Very Bad Indeed for manufacturers, creators and customers alike.

antipope just reminded me of why that may yet be so. Give it a look-see.

More on other stuff later today...

Comments

[wyldemusick.livejournal.com]

Amongst the things to consider about Digital Restrictions Management (because it ain't about rights) is that no matter how hard they try, the DRM schemes are usually broken in no time at all, and tools made available for scraping the cruft off of tainted purchases. I think the only one to still be functional at all is Apple's Fairplay, and that only on books.

Attempts to restrict how one can use digital purchases have often had bad results (with consequences for the bottom line at content providers) - the various schemes to protect CDs, which resulted in many CDs not playing in a wide variety of players, Sony's rootkit debacle, various autoboot options that were designed to prevent the CD being used in a computer in any way other than that demanded by the publisher, various games protection schemes up to and including World Of Warcraft's highly invasive monitors, assorted DVD schemes including region coding and agreements amongst player producers to produce units that wouldn't play burned discs of any type, the super-sized region coding schemes that were RC1 and RC2 that were meant to bypass any bypass and lock drives and players down, tricky schemes used by Warner Bros (on The Dark Knight and many other discs) and Paramount (on Star Trek, particularly) that resulted in computers having seizures when the discs were put into DVD drives -- not even played, or any attempt made to rip them. Just pop it in, and bingo...the computer would lock up and act weird. Not so good for those of us who play mot of our media on a computer these days.

I* had the same issues as Mari with the Sony eReader, where each new library book downloaded would deauthorize everything else. It was very frustrating. As I noted in an earlier post about this, I'm presently somewhat content with returning to paper books since the eReader broke, as they don't have issues with device volatility or battery life. They're just a little less convenient.