What are the lessons to learn from DRM?
Customers have paid for the texts/pictures/music/movies they purchased, and they expect to be able to use them as they’d like. You can argue that they’re not really buying the content, they’re just buying licenses for that content, but that argument, while technically legal, is facile and doesn’t take into account how real human beings think. When a normal person buys a song, he considers it his … after all, he just paid for it!
Intelligent people can disagree about the economic impact of file sharing – it seems pretty clear to me that it actually encourages sales and awareness of movies, music, and other content – but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about moving pictures and movies between devices, about transferring files between the many computers I own, and about changing formats as I please.
When you finally realize that you can’t perform a Fair Use action you previously were capable of you feel like a sucker, you feel ripped off – a sucker that has been conned by the same people to whom you willingly gave your money.
… unless the consumer is willing to break the law. Thanks to the wonderful DMCA, it’s illegal for anyone to break the DRM protecting a file, no matter how trivial it might be to do so, in order to exercise the Fair Use Rights that are legally granted to American citizens. Rick Boucher, a Representative in Congress who actually “gets it,” had this to say about the DMCA and Fair Use in 2002:
“… section 1201 of the DMCA … created the new crime of circumvention. Section 1201 (a)(1), for example, prohibits unauthorized access to a work by circumventing an effective technological protection measure used by a copyright owner to control access to a copyrighted work. Because the law does not limit its application to circumvention for the purpose of infringing a copyright, all types of traditionally accepted activities may be at risk. Any action of circumvention without the consent of the copyright owner is made criminal.”
So even though a Fair Use exemption is granted for “nonprofit educational purposes,” most NP can’t really exercise that legal right since it would require the commission of a felony to do so. Other uses of Fair Use include, and I’m quoting from the United States Copyright Office, “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.” DRM means that Fair Use for the file protected via DRM is at the whim of the file’s creator, which flies in the face of the whole idea of Fair Use. We shouldn’t have to beg for our Fair Use rights, since that’s the whole point of Fair Use!
DRM means that any investment in most DRM crippled material will one day be completely worthless.
TiVo is a different matter, since it’s essentially a closed box (although there are ways to get around that). In this, we need to trust that TiVo will not use a forced upgrade to further decrease functionality that was there when the machine was originally purchased. Seeing that the company has already done this once, by adding support for a type of broadcast flag that limits timeshifting, I don’t have high hopes that TiVo will do the right thing. Hello, MythTV.
I feel especially sorry for the people that have spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars at the iTunes Music Store. What happens when Apple downgrades iTunes again, further limiting what users can do with the songs they’ve purchased? What happens in five years, when Apple moves on to another format? What happens to your music collection when the iPod is no longer the de facto standard, and you want to switch to a new portable player? How are you going to get your encrypted AAC files to play on that new device, with something approaching the same level of quality?
DRM means that you have no control over the files on your computer. You can only do what the company supplying you with the DRM’d files want you to do.
It may take some time, but all DRM can be defeated. Or rather, as Chris Anderson, the thinker and writer behind The Long Tail contends, “Any protection technology that is really difficult to crack is probably too cumbersome to be accepted by consumers.” And anything that is not that cumbersome can be defeated (although so-called “Trusted Computing” is going to make that process a lot harder … but I think it will eventually be overcome by those determined to get around it). Cory Doctorow put it best when he explained that the only way that DRM can work is if all of the following conditions are met:
* Every copy of the song circulated, from the recording studio to the record store, had strong DRM on it
* No analog to digital converters were available to anyone, anywhere in world, who might have an interest in breaking the DRM (since you can just avoid the DRM by … taking the analog output off the player and re-digitizing the song in an open format)
* Peer-to-peer networks ceased to exist
* Search engines ceased to index file-sharing sites
* No “small worlds” file-sharing tools were in circulation
Although Cory is talking about music here, the same principles apply to any kind of file that can be protected with DRM. Even if Trusted Computing and Microsoft’s vision of DRM’d Word documents and emails comes to fruition, if it’s hot enough to protect, it’s hot enough for someone looking at it – and someone does need to eventually look at it, or how can it be used? – to copy it by hand.
Of course, some might argue that it’s enough that the average Joe can’t break the DRM. If that’s true, then why use DRM? What’s the goal? If the goal is to prevent all unauthorized copies from being made and circulated, then it isn’t enough to put up roadblocks; you must seek to lock down your “content” (as a writer, I hate that word) completely. If the goal is just to frustrate users, then why use DRM at all, since you must realize that un-DRM’d copies of your materials are going to circulate? And even if Joe can’t break the DRM, he’ll eventually figure out how to use a P2P network, or ask his nerd friend for help, and then you’ve got another unauthorized copy and an upset and now more knowledgeable former customer. What publisher wants that?
DRM has wormed its way into the imaginations of Hollywood, the RIAA, and publishers, and they in turn have convinced the computer industry (who, it must be admitted, needed little convincing) that DRM must be applied and supported throughout their products. To the **AAs, I’m sure that DRM made lots of sense. In reality, though, it doesn’t. DRM has angered the customer base (and most others), eviscerated my Fair Use rights, ultimately rendered the money I spent moot, and it can still be copied anyway! Where does that leave the publisher? It sounds to me like we were both – consumer and publisher – sold a bill of goods.
Welcome to the future, even if it isn’t so bright……
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