Comments on: Rethinking the Issue of DRM http://www.jonathanfritz.ca/software/rethinking-the-issue-of-drm the personal portfolio of Jonathan Fritz Tue, 22 Feb 2011 04:02:21 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Jon http://www.jonathanfritz.ca/software/rethinking-the-issue-of-drm/comment-page-1#comment-84 Jon Tue, 13 Jan 2009 14:14:53 +0000 http://jonathanfritz.ca/?p=62#comment-84 What you need to do is control mindshare. I know it sounds like a hippy term, but the point is to shift the public thinking away from legitimizing piracy. You want to look at the Radiohead album or at World of Goo, fine: In both of those examples, the product in question was a critically acclaimed one that was easily available for little (or no) cost at all - and yet people still went to the pirate bay to pick up the latest torrents for both products. This is the problem of mindshare, and can be expressed in terms of a dependency ratio if only to demonstrate how unsustainable the system is. There are too many people out there who automatically pirate whatever they want without first considering its availability through other channels. Another part of that essay I wrote dealt with how the record companies fucked up their mindshare after the napster debacle. Had they an application similar to the iTunes store at that point during the napster trials, they might have had a chance to swing the general public toward legitimate online music stores. Instead, there was a black hole online, and people learned to pirate. At this point, these entertainment providers have a serious problem - preventing piracy on the PC is almost impossible because everybody in the world just regards it as OK. They have lost the mindshare. This isn't an issue of economics or of ethics; it is an issue of advertising. What you need to do is control mindshare. I know it sounds like a hippy term, but the point is to shift the public thinking away from legitimizing piracy. You want to look at the Radiohead album or at World of Goo, fine: In both of those examples, the product in question was a critically acclaimed one that was easily available for little (or no) cost at all – and yet people still went to the pirate bay to pick up the latest torrents for both products.
This is the problem of mindshare, and can be expressed in terms of a dependency ratio if only to demonstrate how unsustainable the system is. There are too many people out there who automatically pirate whatever they want without first considering its availability through other channels.
Another part of that essay I wrote dealt with how the record companies fucked up their mindshare after the napster debacle. Had they an application similar to the iTunes store at that point during the napster trials, they might have had a chance to swing the general public toward legitimate online music stores. Instead, there was a black hole online, and people learned to pirate.
At this point, these entertainment providers have a serious problem – preventing piracy on the PC is almost impossible because everybody in the world just regards it as OK. They have lost the mindshare. This isn’t an issue of economics or of ethics; it is an issue of advertising.

]]> By: Tyler http://www.jonathanfritz.ca/software/rethinking-the-issue-of-drm/comment-page-1#comment-83 Tyler Tue, 13 Jan 2009 04:49:34 +0000 http://jonathanfritz.ca/?p=62#comment-83 So what do you do in an environment when piracy is still growing even though most companies are starting to remove DRM from their products (Amazon, iTunes, etc)? What do you do when you try and sell to a country that has a 90% piracy rate *WITH* DRM? While removing DRM provides a lot of good will in the short term, that might only be short lived. Take the last Radiohead album for example. It was cheap or even free from their official website and yet more people pirated it through torrent sites than downloaded it legitimately from their website. So what do you do in an environment when piracy is still growing even though most companies are starting to remove DRM from their products (Amazon, iTunes, etc)? What do you do when you try and sell to a country that has a 90% piracy rate *WITH* DRM?

While removing DRM provides a lot of good will in the short term, that might only be short lived. Take the last Radiohead album for example. It was cheap or even free from their official website and yet more people pirated it through torrent sites than downloaded it legitimately from their website.

]]> By: Jon http://www.jonathanfritz.ca/software/rethinking-the-issue-of-drm/comment-page-1#comment-79 Jon Sun, 11 Jan 2009 15:47:16 +0000 http://jonathanfritz.ca/?p=62#comment-79 This is the very point of the essay that I wrote - DRM is a waste of time and money, because sophisticated pirates will break it anyway, and the honest people that it frustrates will just become downloaders. However, that essay was written primarily with music in mind, while this post deals with DRM put on video games. The stakes are a little different in games, because of the multi-million dollar investments, fast moving marketplace, and stiff competition within individual genres. If a publisher doesn't make back their investment within weeks of launch, they may never, because the next game will come along and eclipse their works. In this case, DRM is justified as a desperate attempt to simply break even, in an effort to ensure funding for the next title. This is the very point of the essay that I wrote – DRM is a waste of time and money, because sophisticated pirates will break it anyway, and the honest people that it frustrates will just become downloaders. However, that essay was written primarily with music in mind, while this post deals with DRM put on video games.
The stakes are a little different in games, because of the multi-million dollar investments, fast moving marketplace, and stiff competition within individual genres. If a publisher doesn’t make back their investment within weeks of launch, they may never, because the next game will come along and eclipse their works. In this case, DRM is justified as a desperate attempt to simply break even, in an effort to ensure funding for the next title.

]]> By: Phili http://www.jonathanfritz.ca/software/rethinking-the-issue-of-drm/comment-page-1#comment-78 Phili Sun, 11 Jan 2009 08:53:47 +0000 http://jonathanfritz.ca/?p=62#comment-78 DRM is a very controversial topic I think. The purpose of DRM is to keep honest users honest; it cannot protect against sophisticated pirating. If DRM limits the ability of the average user to access the information that user has paid for, that user will not invest in such technology again. <a href="http://free.remove-drm.org" rel="nofollow">DRM remove software</a> is needed then. DRM is a very controversial topic I think. The purpose of DRM is to keep honest users honest; it cannot protect against sophisticated pirating. If DRM limits the ability of the average user to access the information that user has paid for, that user will not invest in such technology again.
DRM remove software is needed then.

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