Why DRM is such a fucking stupid idea

http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2885549.html

by AndrewDucker • 13 years ago

100 86 13 years ago

andrewducker.livejournal.com

ChrisNorstrom2• 13 years ago

I had bought some songs on Sony's old "Connect" (iTunes clone) music store which uses DRM. It shut down and basically said the only way to keep enjoying all the music I bought was to burn all the tracks onto CD and then rip the CD back into MP3 format. (This degrades quality btw)

Rhapsody, another DRM music service had a weird glitch where the few songs I purchased became "disconnected" from my account and no longer played. They were just music files sitting there doing nothing.

MSN Music did the same. Google Video went down as well.

I bought "2012" on Amazon's video on demand store via Unboxed (which is terrible btw). My family night was ruined. The DRM was so invasive to prevent stream stealing that the movie got glitched midway, would pause and never unpause, would not skip forward, and disappeared from my account after upgrading the amazon player. After 2 repurchases and 2 refunds, I just pirated it. The pirated version played great, but the family already got bored and went off to do their own things.

Pirates pirate to avoid money -> customers pay because it's easier -> companies use DRM to punish pirates -> customers end up getting hurt in the cross-fire -> DRM makes pirating the better option for both pirates and customers(former).

DRM isn't a stupid idea, it's a stupid execution of a reasonable idea. Steam's DRM is reasonable. The damage to the name however, is already done. Now I avoid DRM like the plague.

TheZenPsycho2• 13 years ago

"DRM isn't a stupid idea, it's a stupid execution of a reasonable idea." I'm sorry but this conclusion doesn't follow from everything you wrote before this. What?

Joe-Z• 13 years ago

I think he's referring to the "companies use DRM to punish pirates" point. Which is by itself a reasonable idea. But as it turns out most companies somehow screw it up and end up punishing the customer instead of the pirate.

wuest2• 13 years ago

> Steam's DRM is reasonable.

This has yet to be seen. For a while, Steam was seen as a way to keep other DRM at bay. Bioshock changed that (I'm not aware of 3rd party DRM on steam titles prior; open to correction here). Now Steam is a distribution platform which also incorporates DRM which may, or may not, result in customers getting screwed, while games distributed through Steam may choose to incorporate additional DRM. The sad truth is that we simply don't know if Steam's DRM will ultimately screw over their customers. That will be seen at some point in the future, when maintaining servers is no longer financially viable.

networked• 13 years ago

>I'm not aware of 3rd party DRM on steam titles prior; open to correction here

I normally check The Big List of 3rd Party DRM on Steam [1] before I buy a game there.

I also have to note that Steam itself doesn't mandate DRM and can be used to distribute DRM-free games [2]; the DRM component is called Steamworks.

[1] http://steamdrm.flibitijibibo.com/index.php?page=DRM_Lists/T...

[2] See http://www.gog.com/forum/general/list_of_drmfree_games_on_st...

talmand2• 13 years ago

Compared with what's out there, Steam's DRM is quite reasonable. The main reason is that you can install your games as many times as you want on as many computers as you want, it just attempts to limit how many computers can access the game at the same time. It would be even more reasonable if it allowed two computers to be signed into the same account at the same time and allow two different games to be played at the same time. For now you have to set one computer to offline mode to make this work, but even then that's a decent compromise.

But the main difference with Steam is that it offers features that are beneficial to the gamer that excuses the DRM in the first place. Plus there's the fact that for the most part the DRM is hidden from the gamer, it just works.

Although, it does allow for another third-party DRM to be involved which just sucks. Especially when the extra DRM actually cancels out features of Steam such as limited number of installs. The worst is when a game is on Steam and has Windows for Live involved. GTAIV was just awful; sign into Steam, sign into Windows for Live, sign into Rockstar's Social Club to get full functionality. Now that's just stupid.

Where Steam can possibly screw their customers is if you piss off Valve for some reason then they can ban your account, which means you lose access to all of your games. But this policy exists on other similar platforms such as Origin. Personally I think this would eventually not hold up in court as I can see them removing your access to a particular game for some reason, but not the whole collection you paid for. Especially since Steam is a delivery platform; it would be as if you did a credit card chargeback on the game store that cheated you in some way and then they somehow took back every game you ever bought from them. But so far, this type of case hasn't entered into the court system as far as I know.

kaoD3• 13 years ago

> This degrades quality btw

How?

nodata2• 13 years ago

Lossy DRM version -> burned to disk -> Re-encode using lossy algorithm.

Same as re-saving a jpeg file as a jpeg.

wereHamster• 13 years ago

> DRM isn't a stupid idea

Let's add DRM to our product. It will stop the pirates and our customers will love it. - Said no one ever.

derefr• 13 years ago

Here's a more realistic thing some game publisher (or movie publisher, or music publisher) might have actually said at some point, though:

> Our market is composed 90% of selfish, penniless teenagers who will pirate everything they possibly can if there is any option of it, but who are also extremely impatient, and must be the first to own everything so they can talk about consuming it with their friends who are also consuming it.

> If we add DRM, we will create a ~2 week window where the only way to get our product is legitimately. With the social pressure from their friends to consume our product mounting, the selfish, penniless teenagers will be forced to either get part-time jobs, or coerce their parents into buying the [product] for them, because the primary option is temporarily unavailable.

> So, let's add DRM to our product. It will stop the pirates [for just long enough for us to turn a profit, which we can then use to do things that] our customers will love [us for].

Of course, this block of selfish-but-penniless-fad-following-teenagers just define the power-law "fat head" of most media companies' profitability, not the entirety of the curve. After that block has settled out (the fad has passed; everyone who was going to either purchase or pirate to join in on the fad has already made their choice), every additional day where DRM is kept on the product is just money-grubbing corporate self-interest. :)

Torn• 13 years ago

I take it you've not been following EA's business decisions?

ishansharma2• 13 years ago

> Steam's DRM is reasonable

And what about the case when Steam itself is used by companies as platform for their DRM. I can't play Ubisoft titles without Ubiplay, can't play some titles without Games For Windows Live.

I have spent 10 minutes waiting to sign in to these services because I have a flaky connection!

ChrisNorstrom2• 13 years ago

That's not the fault of steam that's the fault of Ubiplay and Games for Windows Live for Windows Live Games Live for Windows Live.

makomk• 13 years ago

Steam's DRM may have been reasonable at some poin but it certainly isn't now. I had all kinds of issues playing my legally-purchased copy of Portal 2 thanks to the DRM, as did a number of other people.

stonemetal• 13 years ago

Steam's DRM is reasonable.

Valve is much like Google. It works reasonably well most of the time, but if for whatever reason you end up on the wrong end of the stick you are basically hosed.

fnordfnordfnord2• 13 years ago

>Pirates pirate to avoid money

Often, pirates pirate a thing, not to avoid paying for it, but rather to view it on their continent of residence, to avoid region coding. There are several other good/quasi-legitimate reasons for piracy/ripping as well. I like having backup copies of things, or a media server. I don't really like having a wall of DVD's. I also hate the forced FBI warning, Interpol warning, and Stupid anti-piracy commercial. I also hate all of the other commercials too.

>companies use DRM to punish pirates

This is no punishment to pirates, the only party who is punished by DRM is the paying customer.

>DRM isn't a stupid idea, it's a stupid execution of a reasonable idea.

DRM is a misguided idea, favored by people who don't really grok the recent changes to and limitations of technology.

>Steam's DRM is reasonable. The damage to the name however, is already done. Now I avoid DRM like the plague.

Not really, it flakes out fairly often, initiating a 10-20 min process of restarting Steam and the game, which is pretty annoying for me because I try to allow myself a specific and limited amount of time for playing games. It sucks to waste that time waiting for [thing which adds no value] to align itself.

betterunix• 13 years ago

"Pirates pirate to avoid money"

...or because the officially endorsed copied will not play on their OS of choice (due to reliance on some proprietary technology), or because there is no legal copy available in their region, etc. Even without DRM-induced reasons, there are non-monetary reasons people might download unauthorized copies.

adeaver• 13 years ago

>Pirates pirate to avoid money

While that is true is some cases, it's not true in all. Some pirate because they can't get it otherwise (ex. region exclusions, see Game of Thrones), some because they want to try out a game but there is no trial, and some because they don't want to deal will all the stupid ads and Don't pirate crap on DVD's now (SEE: http://bit.ly/eriKlB) as well as broken DRM management (Sony Music CD's anyone)

Companies try to hurt pirates with DRM but all they hurt are the paying customers, who do not have it easier. The recent fiasco with SimCity is a perfect example of that. Paying customers got screwed because of EA's DRM scheme.

And the long term effect of Steams DRM has yet to be proven. If Steam goes under and we lose all the games we paid for does that still qualify as reasonable or completely borked?

I get that companies want to protect their assets, but applying 19th processes to a 21st century reality is never, ever going to work.

XorNot• 13 years ago

The dumbest thing which happens in the age of digital distribution is region-delayed releases.

This is a thing which makes absolutely no sense: the product can be delivered nearly instantaneously, I have money I am willing to pay for it, and the product is released - on identical hardware - in another part of the world.

Why can I not give you money, for said product, right now?

npsimons3• 13 years ago

DRM isn't a stupid idea

Very, very simply, here is the premise behind DRM.

1. I know a secret 2. I want to tell you the secret 3. I don't want you to tell anyone else the secret 4. I don't trust you

Perhaps now you can see why some people consider DRM a stupid idea.

codex2• 13 years ago

You can embed a private key in the TPM module of a DRM hardware player with signed boot and it will work reasonably well. This is the PS3's approach and, had they actually salted their keys, it would have remained effective.

Business-wise, DRM doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to keep honest people honest. The fact that the lock on the door to my apartment can be broken in, or picked, doesn't make the lock itself a bad idea.

shmerl4• 13 years ago

DRM is not just a stupid idea. It's unethical idea. No execution of DRM is proper. All of them are improper with various degrees of evilness and stupidity.

hadem• 13 years ago

I wouldn't say the only reason pirates pirate is to avoid paying the money. I think some of it is to avoid the DRM. It makes me think of the pirate vs buying movie image. http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/piratedvd.jpg

In the end, it seems like the paying customers are often hurt the most when it comes to DRM.

shmerl4• 13 years ago

> This degrades quality btw

You can always use a lossless codec if you need to (such as FLAC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC).

qompiler2• 13 years ago

Correction - Why the cloud is such a fucking stupid idea

dutchbrit• 13 years ago

Correction. There is nothing wrong with the 'cloud'.

SaaS etc... however is, which I assume you mean? (sorry for trying to be a smartypants!!!)

qompiler2• 13 years ago

SaaS or any other cloud based service model. Storing your data somewhere else where it gets held hostage in a proprietary format is a lot of pain waiting to happen.

Dropbox and Gmail are examples of how it should be done, I have a copy, I can make more copies, they make sure its accessible from everywhere I want. If Dropbox or Gmail suddenly stops I will still have my files.

dendory• 13 years ago

I've written at length about this before. All DRM providers will go away at some point, or decide keeping the server running isn't profitable anymore. This is why I convert any digital good I buy, and if I can't, then I don't buy.

wuest2• 13 years ago

Indeed. Either that or consider it a rental--because that's all it really is.

zanny• 13 years ago

If any service providing a game goes down that uses this kind of DRM, I will pirate it if I bought it afterwards. How would it even stand up in court that you are "stealing profits" from a business that no longer sells the thing, especially after you already bought a license with no hard-coded expiration to it?

bengillies• 13 years ago

> If you're walking into a situation with your eyes open, then go for it. I pay money to Spotify on a monthly basis because I view it the same way I view cable TV - I'm paying for access, I'm not purchasing something. But if you want to keep something long term, and have it work the way you want it to, then don't buy it unless it's DRM free.

This seems like reasonable advice but I'm not sure it really follows from the heading. DRM in Spotify is reasonable because if they shut down you lose nothing and can move easily to another service (rdio or whatever).

Paying for something that you have no control over is reasonable only if you don't care whether you get to keep it long term (I'd personally put books on Kindle in this category as I'm only ever going to read them once). If you care about access to something long term, then either subscribe to a service that provides it (i.e. you explicitly own nothing (like Netflix and Spotify)), or get it DRM free.

In a roundabout way such concepts also apply to things like Google Reader, which is fairly trivial to migrate to another service vs Email, which (unless you own the domain) isn't.

tybris• 13 years ago

One bad idea leads to another. Selling information by the bit is a bad idea.

tonyblundell• 13 years ago

This is why I never 'buy' things online that I want to keep.

Music is a paid subscription through Spotify. If they went down I'd subscribe somewhere-else.

Videos are either through a paid Netflix subscription or rented for £3-ish through XBOX live. I never really watch the same movie twice.

Books I do buy from Kobo, but I wouldn't read the same book twice (unless it's a reference book which I prefer to use paper for), so I don't really care if it's not available after I've read it once.

I've never really got why people spend £15 to 'own' a movie on something like iTunes when the way we consume that stuff is changing so quickly at the moment.

setrofim_• 13 years ago

Obligatory xkcd:

http://xkcd.com/488/

rlpb2• 13 years ago

I really wish that the word "buy" (and "sell") were illegal to use for DRM or otherwise encumbered digital goods. If a company wants to license something to you under DRM, then it should either explicitly use the words "buy a license" or not use the word "buy" at all.

And conversely, if a supplier uses the words "buy" or "sell" implying that you're acquiring digital goods (rather than licensing it), then that should be sufficient to nullify any license and make it a straightforward sale in the eyes of the law, and laws regarding "circumvention" should no longer apply.

dkuntz2• 13 years ago

Do you not still buy and sell licenses? Sure, it's not the product itself, but a license to use the product, but you're still buying it (it in this case is the license).

Sure, maybe using "license this product" instead of "buy this product" is technically more accurate, but at least 90% of customers don't really care. And seeing license is just going to confuse them.

AnthonyMouse2• 13 years ago

>Do you not still buy and sell licenses?

You do not buy and sell licenses. License is the verb. You license the work. License as a noun refers to the agreement document, not the product.

> seeing license is just going to confuse them.

If by "confuse" you mean "cause to be suspicious" then that's kind of the point, right?

rlpb2• 13 years ago

> Do you not still buy and sell licenses?

Exactly. Which is why I said that it sellers should be required to use the wording "Buy a license", or something like that, to make sure that customers do not believe that they are buying the digital goods themselves.

> And seeing license is just going to confuse them.

And I'd be confused if I walked into a store and was asked to sign a long agreement at the checkout. It's the seller who wants to do something confusing instead of doing a simple sale. Why should he be allowed to hide this fact while giving the buyer a much worse and unexpected deal?

mindslight2• 13 years ago

Gosh this is such a terrible feel-good non-solution. The companies will simply jump through whatever legal hoops they have to in the fine print, and merrily continue invading end-users' devices with their infantile controls.

contingencies• 13 years ago

The sad fact is that global, multi-million dollar production value media (film, computer games, etc.) is a seller's market. As long as they consider it more profitable to implement DRM, it's not going away. It works enough to be of some limited use to the content producers, and that's all they care about.

npsimons3• 13 years ago

The sad fact is that global, multi-million dollar production value media (film, computer games, etc.) is a seller's market.

Only an artificially created one. Take away the hype from big Hollywood movies; could you then tell the difference between them and indie productions, or even between most of the big studio ones? And I'm not just talking about remakes here (which is another issue, because of copyright terms being inflated ludicrously).

I still like Nina Paley's take on the concept: "Attention is scarce. Information is not. Do the math."

stevenameyer5• 13 years ago

There is no way to stop people's ability to pirate things if people want to bad enough. I think the only real way to eliminate pirating is to find a way to make people not want to. Maybe it is naive of me to think this, but i honestly think that if you made a good product that very convenient to get and allowed people to use it in the way they want then a lot of pirating would go away. People are willing to pay for convenience, and when you introduce DRM which makes getting/using it less convenient then you are actually pushing a segment of people towards pirating.

PS: I know it's an old article but if anyone has not read "What color are your bits?"[0] it is a great article on protecting copyrighted digital material and why it is so hard/impossible.

[0]http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

abecedarius3• 13 years ago

Yes, to keep people from copying a movie or a book requires more-than-totalitarian control over people. But that's from a special property of noninteractive works, that one viewing is all there is to them. To copy-protect a program, in principle you could deliver it only to tamper-proof machines that self-destruct before giving up the code. You can't infer the program from its behavior, in general, unless P=NP (though of course you can do well enough for many programs; but black-box reverse engineering is more like creative work than scanning/recording). And releasing an app only for a particular platform is not a human-rights violation, at least not on the scale needed to suppress cameras and Turing machines.

That would take engineering beyond the current state of the art, but I know of no proof it can't be done, and at least one person I respect seems to think it can: http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_11.html#section...

So "DRM is impossible" strikes me as short-sighted. DRM is bad for humans, impossible for the media that Big Media currently cares the most about, and currently unable to keep anything from escaping into the free world.

stevenameyer5• 13 years ago

You do bring up some interesting points. Restricting a program to physically secured hardware along with software protection would definitely make it extremely difficult to get the program or information outside of the way that the maker wants you to. Although I am not entirely convinced that it would be impossible. The issue is that it still must be a deterministic system. And this means that with enough money, expertise, time, precision someone could produce a situation in which they would be able extract the code and edit it. Now in most cases the amount of resources and effort that would be required to do so would probably not be worth it which would mean that it wouldn't be worth it to pirate, but i would be hesitant to say that it would be impossible to. Any deterministic system can be compromised the key is to make compromising it so difficult/expensive/time consuming that compromising it is not worth it.

Now from a practical stand point I don't know how well this would work in a consumer market, but can certainly see it being used in areas where protection of information is extremely important. It just seems a little to costly to implement on a wide scale to me, and I think consumers would see it as too invasive and resist it, so if there were alternatives in the marketplace I think a lot of people would opt for the alternative.

AnthonyMouse2• 13 years ago

>in principle you could deliver it only to tamper-proof machines that self-destruct before giving up the code.

"Tamper-proof" is impossible. That's why they call it "tamper-resistant" -- someone with enough resources is going to be able to tamper with it. In theory you may be able to make tampering expensive, but now you're just back to playing the cat and mouse game, and people start showing up with timing attacks etc. that aren't as expensive as you might have hoped.

GotNothing• 13 years ago

Agreed. Look at just early this week when ComiXology went down and users lost access to their comics for an extended period of time.

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2013/03/the-lesson-of-t...

matterhorn• 13 years ago

Why Profanity in a Headline Demonstrates Immaturity and Lack of Substantive Content

fixedd• 13 years ago

"Fucking" is a vulgarity, not a profanity.

rgbrenner• 13 years ago

Not to mention it adds nothing descriptive to the link, and serves no purpose whatsoever.

Can we get an editor to change it to: "Why DRM is such a stupid idea"?

zee007• 13 years ago

This is what DRM says :-

"You could have easily downloaded our product/music/movie for free. But you went out of your way to pay us for it. Thank you. In return, we'll punish you by putting restrictions on you that you wouldn't have had if you didn't bother to pay for our content."

A logic that sadly only makes sense to out-of-touch executives: "Hey, since we can't get people stealing our stuff, lets punish people paying for it instead".

npsimons3• 13 years ago

The reality is a little more nuanced. Basically, there are software people (people like you and me) who convince the execs that they can increase sales by reducing copyright infringement; all it takes is a little DRM they claim. Whether this is due to malice or incompetence is unknown, but one thing is for sure: we should start shunning these people. I don't care how good the money was, DRM creators deserve to be publicly named and shamed, or in the case of incompetence (believing that DRM will work), educated.

Of course, this is a supply side solution to a demand driven issue; but so is DRM :) I'm not sure how to reduce the demand for DRM, because the sad truth is that with enough demand, there will always be some idiot/huckster willing to implement it.

altcognito2• 13 years ago

The reality is even more nuanced. Execs see people pirating their stuff and believe that those are truly lost sales. (and maybe some % of them are) They believe that if they can make it unpalatable/difficult enough to pirate music/movies etc... they will return to the halcyon when everything was good and they were making money hand over fist.

In truth, more people are turning away from traditional media than ever before as choices have expanded more and more. They deplore this as well, but in some cases the genie is out of the bottle (we are never going back to the days of 3-4 networks where power and profit margins were greatest), so the best they can hope to accomplish is to own all the networks and control the stores. They are winning.