Microsoft's Final 'Up Yours' To Those Who Bought Into Its DRM Story

TechDirt ^ | 4/23/08

[holden]

This DRM stuff has become a mess

I suggest DRM was always a mess waiting to happen to most any who would "step in it." Those who recognized that sought to gain sufficient advantage by lubricating Congress to foist the DMCA and other copyright changes onto us poor, unsuspecting chumps. Previous law more reasonably and fairly manifested the methods whereby copyright infringement grievances could be adjudicated, compensated, punished and/or rectified, IMHO.

Microsoft was apprised of DRM's folly early on in this process, e.g., by Cory Doctorow and others, but Microsoft, in their desire to rise above their competition, disregarded such input, as have many others.

The legal responsibilities for DRM have--through the lubricant of campaign funds--have been foisted on the law enforcement community versus its domain prior to the DMCA, the civil courts. In other words, rightsholders groups, viz. RIAA, MPAA, etc. have paid our politicians filthy lucre to pass into law that which would subjugate and criminalize the previously non-criminal activities (freely enjoying their purchased multimedia on a variety of household players) of a huge proportion of Americans. Such rights groups gave protection money to politicians who would relieve rightsholders' legal bills and pass on the expense of collecting civil judgments from example-grannies onto the backs of all taxpayers.

That all reeks of raw corruption.

Without laws like DMCA, DRM could never succeed in the marketplace. The whole Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD debacle deserved never to have pointlessly soaked up all the money it did. Certain groups were simply interested in using the artificially-designated moment in time of the feasibility of bumping up the video resolution for movies (in no way owing technologically to those rights groups, by the way) to turn the Hollywood-and-consumer purchase transactions of the past into a monopolistic licensing tollbooth to skew the business advantage toward the Hollywood types.

In similar fashion, without government subsidies, ethanol could not succeed in the marketplace, and we probably wouldn't be facing, as we are presently, the prospect of a global food shortage. Politicians have been bribed to lay their hands--ignorantly and corruptly--to the wheels of capitalism. But, I digress.

HF

[CodeToad]

The one fact no one has ever bothered to address is that we humans are analog, so music and video are analog signals at some time and are subject to interception and recording. Who cares what digital system delivers the signals to the analog components; they can always be recorded and distributed. With the Internet, and going back as far as reel-to-reel recorders, copyright infringement is easy and will always happen. The best bet is to reduce such copying to a trickle by making works of art easy enough to obtain and affordable. The iPod and the Zune all address this issue but even they are sloppy in their implementation. In other words, the industries involved have no one to blame but themselves for not taking the care they shoulf but have been so inept to do.