Digital Rights Management (DRM) drives piracy

February 27, 2007

“BoingBoing”:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/96467942/why_drm_drives_pirac.html repeats the genuinely relevant portion of this “Eric Flint”:http://preview.baens-universe.com/articles/salvos6 post.

bq. Pirates rob bullion ships, they don’t rob grain ships. Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an “economic epidemic” under certain conditions. Any one of the following:

bq. The product they want—electronic texts—are hard to find, and thus valuable.
2) The products they want are high-priced, so there’s a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them.
3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with.

bq. Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they’re the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises. [ "TANSTAAFL":http://preview.baens-universe.com/articles/salvos6 ]

If you’ve been paying attention to the DRM fight, you’ve recently heard Steve Jobs claim he’d drop DRM in a heartbeat if the labels would approve it. And other music labels say they think they’d sell more, not less, if the music they provided was free of DRM. It’s becoming increasingly clear that DRM primarily benefits the DRM makers — who charge licensing fees for the right to use their encryption methods. (You didn’t think “Macrovision”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrovision was doing it out of the good of their hearts, did you?)

As a side-effect, it benefits large corporations that want to shut out the competition, as Cory heard back in January of last year:

bq. The bombshell was Amir’s explanation of the reason that his employer charges fees to license its DRM. According to Amir, the fee is not intended to recoup the expenses Microsoft incurred in developing their DRM, or to turn a profit. The intention is to reduce the number of licensors to a manageable level, to lock out “hobbyists” and other entities that Microsoft doesn’t want to have to trouble itself with. [ "MSFT: Our DRM licensing is there to eliminate hobbyists and little guys":http://boingboing.net/2006/01/30/msft_our_drm_licensi.html ]

Apple’s used this to great effect, using “FairPlay”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay to lock iTunes buyers into its own hardware.

Does DRM help the artists? That’s hard for me to imagine. But it does help manufacture the need for a software arms-race. And it also helps eliminate competition from the small-fry: hobbyists and upstart electronics manufacturers.

That picture becomes even more clear when you see laws proposed that would *require* people to license DRM technology, even if they don’t want to use it. In 2002 we saw the “Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_Television_Promotion_Act which would have required electronics manufacturers to comply with government-standards anti-copying measures. And Canada appears to be discussing “forcing online music stores to use DRM”:http://www.jeremydebeer.ca/content/view/95/2/. That’s just two examples of attempted compulsory-purchase legislation. The former would put an artificial financial barrier on anyone who wanted to start a small media-electronics company; the latter would force independent artists or labels to pony up or shut down.

Nothing says “pro-business” like compulsory purchases.

In theory, DRM is supposed to make copying so impractical people just buy the genuine product. But in the real world of application, it drives up the cost of the the legal product while DRM is quickly and authoritatively hacked. And what does a hacked DRM scheme lead to? More research into a new DRM system, which requires new licensing agreements and new licensing fees…

Also on Thudfactor:

* “Media runs to Congress Again”:http://www.thudfactor.com/wordpress/2006/03/03/media-runs-to-congress-again/ : “The Audio Broadcast Flag Licensing Act of 2006 (H.R. 4861) requires all digital radio makers to build their devices so that they only permit ‘customary uses’ of broadcasts.”
* “DRM that Shall Be”:http://www.thudfactor.com/wordpress/2006/02/10/portability-of-digital-content/ : Sorry, dude! You can’t make a DVD of your movie because you can’t afford the DRM you don’t want to put on there anyway!

Posted in Technology