Posts Tagged DRM

I have written in the past against DRM and methods of property protection that punish the consumer rather than the thieves, but my annoyance with DRM is in no way an endorsement of piracy, which is a huge issue, especially for the little guys.

And one of those guys has a book coming out this week. You might’ve heard of him, here and there.  Wil Wheaton.  Yes… that kid from Star Trek with the bad sweaters and really annoying sense of superiority.

Wil Wheaton may be a bit famous (or infamous).  He is somewhat like a demi-god among geeks. He, also, isn’t a fan of DRM, though I would understand why he might want to look into trying it, since his book, Just a Geek, has been pirated and offered up for free.

Now….this isn’t some tremendously wealthy celebrity or best-selling author for whom a bit of book piracy is just a drop in the bucket, because they’re making millions anyway.  This is a man who still has to work for a living, and and who just happens to do that work with his pen or in front of a camera.  His books are even self-published and promoted out of his own pocket, so any piracy directly affects him in a way that it never would a large corporation.

The same goes for the majority of authors and actors and musicians out there.  Because the majority of creative professionals are not wealthy. Most of us will never see even a shred of the type of celebrity that Wil might enjoy. We have to work for a living, and we offer up that work to the public, for your enjoyment.  If you do enjoy it, we ask a little bit of compensation. Not because we’re greedy bastards, but because we need that money to put food on the table and clothes on our backs, to feed our children, to pay for our shelter.  We may offer some content for free, and ask you to share it with your friends, because there’s no better advertisement than free advertisement.  But when we ask you to pay, all we are asking is compensation for our work, the same as you would pay farmer for his vegetables, or a butcher for his meat.

When you seek to profit from a pirated item, or when you purchase or download a pirated piece of work, that’s just like running into that farm stand and grabbing a bushel of vegetables and running off.  If the farmer’s a big industrial farmer, well, he may have several tons of vegetables to sell, and be able to shrug off the loss of that bushel, but if it’s a small family farm, the loss of even one bushel is a huge loss.  That’s the way it is for all of the other little guys out there too. Just because what we produce is something less tangible – a song, a movie, a book, an hour’s entertainment – doesn’t mean that we don’t need that money just as much or work just as hard to produce what we have.

So think about it, next time you head to your favorite torrent sites. You may enjoy the thought of “sticking it to the man” by pirating things produced by huge corporations, but sometimes the person you’re stealing from is the person next door.

Oh, and…if you’re a Star Trek fan? Head over and buy Memories of the Future.  It looks to be a good one.

Related articles by Zemanta

• an open letter to the guy who put just a geek the audiobook on his website for people to steal (wilwheaton.typepad.com)
• Just a Geek (oreilly.com)
• How much is that MP3 Download Worth? How about $80,000?!? (geardiary.com)

Here are some articles for your reading pleasure:

• E-Book Provider goes out of Business, Book Owners can’t access Books
• Amazon deletes books already purchased on Kindle

There are plenty of others.  But you’ll realize that, in those articles, the people who were losing their digital property were people who had actually done the right thing and purchased the items, spent the money to pay for the rights to read and own those books.  These were not pirates that were getting punished by DRM, but the people who had bought these things legally.

The primary purpose of DRM is to prevent piracy and protect digital property from theft.  To do this, publishers of digital content place DRM on the things that people buy from them.

However, pirated music/books/films/games/etc. are easily attainable for the people who pirate them without any DRM restrictions on them whatsoever.  A prime example of this is the Will Wright game, Spore, which shipped with some of the most restrictive and invasive DRM available, SecuROM.  Spore was already available before the official release in a DRM free version on torrent servers, free to pirates.  It was the people who bought the game who got the DRM.

And this is why DRM does not work.  It does nothing to stop piracy and does a lot to infringe upon what most consumers expect to be purchasing when they buy something.  What happens if you buy a game or an MP3 of some music with limited installs – and the computer that you have it installed on breaks down or gets replaced in some way? Well, if it happens relatively soon, you can call the company and get those installs reset.  What about years down the road, though, or what if the company that made it goes bankrupt? Will that number still work?

I am very anti-piracy and anti-theft.  A writer myself, I believe that everyone should be compensated for their work just as I expect to be.  However, I do not believe that punishing the consumer who actually sets out to do the right thing and buy an item from you is the way to go about stopping piracy. I know that when I learn that something has DRM on it, I generally choose not to purchase it.  If a legal DRM free alternative is available, I’ll happily buy that, but if not,  I don’t turn around and download a pirated version . . . I simply make the decision that I can do without it.  I don’t want to spend my money on something only to have it snatched from my hands later.  I’d rather not risk that.

There are alternatives to DRM that do work, without punishing the consumer.  Music and print publishing companies should take a look at Corey Doctorow and Jonathan Coulton, who publish their work DRM free (and often completely freely available) with Creative Commons licensing.  Valve, with Steam, has the right idea.  Steam doesn’t just protect the publisher by helping to discourage piracy – it provides a service to the consumer as well, making it simple and easy to download games with the assurance that they won’t just disappear.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Amazon ironically deletes “1984″ from Kindle devices (downloadsquad.com)
• Death To SecuROM! (rockpapershotgun.com)
• EA ‘dumps DRM’ for next Sims game (news.bbc.co.uk)