This is an interview with members of DefectiveByDesign, the Free Software Foundation anti-DRM campaign that sent HazMat suited protesters to Apple stores.
DefectiveByDesign is targeting Big Media, unhelpful manufacturers and content distributors in an effort to save your fair use rights in the face of restrictive laws and DRM.
Has Digital Rights Management ever worked? My first experience with DRM was Lotus 1-2-3. Remember that product? Didn’t think so. For those of you who don’t remember, Lotus 1-2-3 was the market-leading spreadsheet twenty or so years ago. And, for the first couple of years the product was on the market, it was sold with a rudimentary form of copy protection.
I was doing PC support at the time, for a fortune 100 company who was meticulous about software licensing issues. Every copy of Lotus 1-2-3 we worked with had been bought and paid for. Yet at least once a week we found ourselves having to deal with a situation that required re-installing a DRM’d copy of Lotus 1-2-3. Because of the DRM, doing this took a lot more time and effort than it needed to.
What we finally did was go out and buy a commercial crack for the copy protection so we could get our job of supporting the Lotus users done.
Remember Macrovision, the voodoo DRM system that was supposed to keep you from copying VHS tapes? How many of you bought the $29.00 box that made it all go away?
Or how about that downloadable media format Microsoft released five or six years ago — you know, the one with the built-in DRM. Remember how that was cracked within 48 hours of release?
I’m an exclusive Linux user, but my windows-using friends tell me that the DRM on protected CDs can be defeated by holding down the shift key as the disk loads on the computer.
And of course, there’s CSS. That was really effective, too. Is there anyone over 14 years old in the civilized world that doesn’t have both the software and the know-how to rip a DVD?
Personally, if it’s DRM’d, I don’t buy it. If it has a dongle, I don’t use it. The iTunes Store? Forget it. I’ll fill my iPod with rips from my own CDs and tracks from eMusic.
Afraid of piracy? Drop the price. Offer a bare-bones/no-support version. If people could buy a film on a basic DVD — no special features, extras, etc. — for, say $5.00 — it wouldn’t be worth the time and energy to rip or download the film.
The DRM scheme for the upcoming high-definition video technologies appears to be very robust indeed. But it too will be cracked or circumvented, if it hasn’t been already.
Big media should just give it up and give people what they want. And what they want is no DRM.
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