A long and deep study of user behaviour in the UK by a Cambridge prof confirms that when an honest person tries to do something legal that is blocked by Digital Rights Management technology, it encourages the person to start downloading infringing copies for free from the net, since these copies are all DRM-free.
Akester's new paper, "Technological accommodation of conflicts between freedom of expression and DRM: the first empirical assessment," does pretty much what its title implies. Akester spent the last few years interviewing dozens of lecturers, end users, government officials, rightsholders, and DRM developers to find how DRM and anticircumvention laws affected actual use...Landmark study: DRM truly does make pirates out of us allEverybody that Akester spoke with had some problem of their own. Film lecturers, who are allowed to put together clip compilations under UK law, still can't (legally) bypass the CSS encryption on DVDs.
Lecturers who don't know how to bypass the DRM are faced with an unappealing choice: those "unable to extract a clip from a commercial DVD lodged in their library collection are forced to tailor the content of their lectures to the VHS materials at their disposal. They contend that this happens frequently, given that most commercial DVDs are DRM protected."
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Well, it only took a decade or so to convince The Man that global warming is real. Maybe another 10 years of these reports will bring the old man 'round.
@1: by that time the old man will be on the way out and won't really care any more. they got what they wanted out of it while it mattered to them.
holy moly this paper is long. I can see why though. it would have made a great source to cite for the research paper I wrote on this exact topic last summer for a class I took.
I started torrenting when the music CDs I bought stopped working on my CD player and installed hidden software on my PC because of DRM protection.
What good timing... yesterday I was in a local electronics store that sold PC game software and although the last time I spent any considerable amount of time playing video games was on an old Atari console, I decided it might be fun to flex the muscle of my new-ish PC and pick up a copy of a popular 3D shooter that had gone on sale. Using the Wifi enabled laptops they had on display (thanks guys!) I did a quick google search on the title and immediately changed my mind about the purchase. Apparently this title (as well as many others by the publisher) is "protected" by a DRM scheme named 'Securom' which installs some kind of verification software on your PC which I'm to understand is damn impossible to remove. Immediately I thought about the whole Sony rootkit fiasco that plagued some audio CDs a few years back and decided that my fleeting interest in gaming wasn't worth the headache--- so yeah, in my case, DRM was def the deal breaker. That said, this hasn't pushed me toward piracy, its simply pushed me away from gaming.
"confirms that when an honest person tries to do something legal"
Where did they find one? Let alone enough for a whole study? Diogenes Personnel Services?
I can't play a copy of MY OWN RECORD in my itunes library because my father bought it from the itunes store and I copied it over to my ipod. I know I could grab one of the 400 remaining copies in my basement, but I like the irony too much.
Duh.
I bought a DVD of Terminator 2 last night. Came with an HD version on the extra disc in WMV format. Tried dropping the disc/streaming the file into my MICROSOFT Xbox360 (which is pretty securely locked down and laden with DRM) and it wouldn't work. Wouldn't play on my Macbook. Switched to Windows and it wouldn't play there either. The disc tried forcing an install of WMP9 (which wouldn't work because I had 10 already). Tried installing a special player of the DVD. Had to download a new version of the player online. Finally opened the file and... the authentication server wasn't responding. Even if all this was working correctly, apparently it wouldn't work if I took my US laptop and US DVD out of the country.
So glad I decided to be a good consumer and buy a legit copy instead of downloading a h.264 version that would work in everything (and be convertible even if it didn't).
Now I get to illegally download a de-DRMed version of the file I legitimately bought last night just so I can actually watch it.
DRM sucks and Microsoft DRM sucks the hardest.
I've never understood why companies would deliberately make their product less useful or trustworthy than the pirated version.
I've bought numerous music CD's that would not play in my car or on my computer. I actually NEEDED to download a pirated version to be able to play an album that I had a perfectly good and legal copy of to be able listen to it. And after Sony decided that installing malicious software on their customer's personal computers was an acceptable practice, it has become, at the very least, as safe to download an album from a sketchy internet site as to legally purchase it.
DVD's have been less directly malicious, but I have at least one DVD that has an excess of 10 minutes of unskippable FBI warnings, "You wouldn't steal a..." spots, trailers for movies that were in theaters two years ago. Christ, I just wanted to watch a damned movie.
If the pirated version is SIGNIFICANTLY more user friendly than the legit version, with little to no loss in quality, should companies be surprised when people make a conscious choice to download the pirated version? Especially when most places don't let you return opened CD's or DVD's if they don't work, and no I don't want to exchange it for another non working copy, and store credit is only useful if you have something I want to buy.
Euge, Iamanangelchaser, euge!
http://xkcd.com/488/
People really struggle with bypassing CSS? Something like DVD Decrypter is free and readily available. I'm surprised that in their searching, they never came upon videohelp.com, as it tends to be my first stop when I have questions about how to do something with video. Perhaps their google-fu is weak...
Bypassing CSS isn't particularly difficult, no, but the point is that people shouldn't have to illegally (yes, it is illegal) bypass products that they legally own. DVD decrypting software also doesn't solve the problems associated with video games and other products that "call home" to servers that may well turn out to be offline or otherwise unreachable. In the end, the problems people are having are simple, that is, playing back the content they obtained purchased. Why should the consumer have to spend 20 minutes googling for answers on how to play a goddamn movie only to find that the only solution is to install something like AnyDVD (a nice little piece of software I might add) to bypass security features that the pirates obviously have no problem getting around themselves? The whole thing is an exercise in futility and makes it clear that the companies enacting these policies assume the end user is a criminal rather than a customer.
DRM is folly. But it doesn't turn anyone into anything. People respond to DRM however they choose. As several have posted they responded other than piracy.
Certainly DRM encourages people to believe that the legal methods don't work. In such circumstances the temptation to try illegal methods explodes. And many will yield.
POUSTMAN you make it sound like obeying according to or against the law is an intrinsic human trait rather than simply an accident of where arbitrary remotely-designed and non-naturally-obvious rules happen to intersect our ordinary day-to-day activities.
8)
VHS tapes have been known to have forms of DRM built into them, as well.
It isn't composed software and isn't particularly sophisticated but it does require special measures to be taken to duplicate the tapes.
Seconded. Basically what the previous anon said.
I still buy CD's and DVD's and video games, but only as "trophies" or little merit badges to show that I support the creator of this content, yet have never varied from using the unprotected MP3's I downloaded before I bought the CD.
I'll buy a game, then torrent a copy that doesn't fuck over my computer if I try to install it.
DRM certainly turns people into pirates. I have a number of friends, and I count myself in the number as well, who have turned to pirating copies of music/tv shows/movies/ etc. as we change the way we interact with digital media. We have moved from VHS to DVD to Blue-Ray/HD-DVD, we have moved from CDs to Digital Purchases. We have have changed operating systems forcing us to either go to great (and legally questionable) lengths to convert our legally acquired [itunes] purchases to more cross-platform friendly formats. We have gone from Hard Copies of our movies on the previously mentioned formats to Hard drive based storage media requiring again, great (and legally questionable) lengths to do so. We have also, perhaps the second time we've made a conversion, simply made the decision to download pirated copies of the media we coincidentally own.
Certainly, in a world where scarcity of media is no longer in question and duplication is a matter of finding the right (and freely available) tool and where media piracy has become a matter of taste, it has become easier to simply pirate certain things we want rather than jump through the hoops of making an exchange of money for a good, a copy of which costs almost nothing to make (a fact of which we are accutely aware), which will require us, sometimes immediately, to convert it to the format we are currently using.
I remember the first time I circumvented DRM: I copied a VHS tape so I would have no fear in taking it around and when I watched the copy, I noticed it became alternately dark or washed out. It took me just a little searching (remember using infoseek?) to find that a company called Macrovision had prevented me from making a legitimate copy of something I paid $14 for (My allowance was $10 every two weeks). Needless to say, I found a way around it and fast became (and have since remained) the geek people come to when, for example, they want to quit using itunes use the tricked out linux desktop (almost stock ubuntu with compiz-fusion) I have but don't want to lose all the music they rightly paid for.
I recently had a conversation with a friend who was considering buying a copy of Windows Vista for his new PC simply so that he could keep using itunes and the music he paid for. People are becoming less willing to shell out money over and again for the "priviledge" of continuing to use what they have already paid (sometimes heavily) for. There will always be freeloaders who go to great lengths to get something for nothing (I don't hesitate to suggest that we all know at least one, and this isn't restricted to digital media by any means), but there are many, many more people who have turned to piracy as an easier means to circumvent DRM.
Well, I never considered pirate copies, for CDs or DVDs I own or plan to buy.
If you are a power user of these media or have a professional need to remove DRM and other protection schemes, the solution is to use software that removes these protections.
I use AnyDVD HD to rip thousands of CDs and DVDs, so I can listen to or watch them from my media library and make copies of them for personal mobile usage.
Torrent copies only encourage piracy for users that do not own these media, it is sad that the legit users do not realize they have problems thousands of other users share, for which solutions already exist.
Plus, audio quality is usually not very good for mp3s, I can't find half the CDs or DVDs I own, most ripped DVDs are actually just the movie in one language or subtitle and no bonus feature in some non-DVD media format, and the process is cumbersome and slow. By slow, I mean a DVD download can take days if it's a specialized item with few "seeds" or when the seeds are across ocean and continent.
Since new protection schemes are circumvented as soon as introduced, it is stupid for media labels to persist using DRM. It's the same for the region codes on DVDs. Users should not buy anything but an unzoned DVD player, nor play DVDs on their desktop/laptop computers without an unzoning software, or they'll be locked to a single region after only 3 region changes.