Posted on 10/21/2008 7:31:07 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Can I begin with a few disclaimers? I believe that people who create things deserve to be rewarded for their efforts. Which means that I think that stealing entertainment and software is wrong. Actually, come to think of it, if there was a form of copy protection that was never a hassle for paying customers but which effectively prevented piracy, I might enthusiastically support it. (Go ahead, mock me if you must–I’ll wait.)
With that out the way, I also believe this: Copy protection (also known in recent years as Digital Rights Management) just stinks. At its best, it creates minor but real inconveniences for the people who pay for stuff; at its worst, it badly screws up their experiences with the products they buy. Let’s just say it–the world would be better off without it.
Most of the best arguments against copy protection aren’t so much arguments as case studies. Over and over, it’s caused both anticipated and unanticipated problems. Including ones for the companies who use it.
So let’s review the case against copy protection by looking at what it’s done for us over the past 25 years or so. Warning: Persons whose blood boils easily should read no further…
I managed somehow to avoid Lenslok back in its heyday in the mid-1980s, but just reading about it makes me gnash my teeth, It was an oddball prism-based gadget invented in the mid 1980s to copy-protect games on the Atari 400/800, Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and other pioneering home computers. You held the Lenslok up to your PC’s display to read a secret code that let you unlock a game. But “[in] order for the Lenslok to work correctly the displayed image has to be the correct size,” says Wikipedia. “This meant that before each use the software needed to be calibrated to take account of the size of the display. Users found this setup particularly annoying, at least in part due to the poor instructions that were initially shipped. Additionally, the device could not be calibrated at all for very large and very small televisions, and some games shipped with mismatched Lensloks that prevented the code from being correctly descrambled.” Sound a little bit like what Microsoft might have come up with if it had attempted to invent Windows Activation and Windows Genuine Advantage twenty years before it did. [Image from SUMO.]
Two of the most dominant software packages of the 1980s, they came from software publishers who apologetically championed the use of copy protection for years, even after the increasing use of hard drives made their schemes a major headache for customers who had paid hundreds of dollars for the software. Eventually, they were forced to ditch it, and in the long both were crushed by competitive applications that had never been locked up in the first place. Question for debate: Does copy protection tend to hurt the applications it “protects” in the long run–not only by annoying customers but also by leading companies to rest on their laurels rather than beat their brains out to earn every sale they make?
Microsoft’s brief Windows Genuine Advantage FAQ, for instance, begins its answer to the question “What is the Windows Genuine Advantage program?” by declaring “Microsoft Genuine Advantage programs, including Windows Genuine Advantage, help you determine whether or not your copy of Windows is genuine.” True–but far from the whole truth. If that was WGA’s principal purpose, Microsoft would give you one heads up that your software appeared to be illegitimate–at your request–and would leave it at that. Instead, it requires you to validate your copy of Windows (sometimes repeatedly) and, if it thinks it’s pirated, takes steps to dissuade you from using it. (At least Windows Vista SP1 removes the “kill switch” that rendered copies of Windows that failed the WGA test unusable.) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’d respect WGA more if Microsoft simply said something along the lines of “We spent vast amounts of money to build Windows, and WGA exists to prevent people from stealing it.”
If you splurge on iTunes songs that are protected with Apple’s FairPlay DRM–which works almost exclusively with Apple products–it’s a major disincentive to buy digital music gear from other companies. If you plunk down money for tunes protected with Microsoft DRM, you can’t put them on an iPod unless you’re willing to burn them all to CD, then rerip them. Yes, Apple could license FairPlay to other companies and/or build an iPod that supported Microsoft’s flavor of copy protection. But when music isn’t locked up in the first place and uses standard formats like MP3 and AAC, you don’t have to worry about anyone supporting anyone else’s DRM–the music just plays.
That was the tagline for the music certification program Microsoft introduced in 2004, incorporating its Windows Media copy protection. The one that consumers hd ttrouble with from the get-go. and the one that Microsoft began to abandon just two years later, when it shipped the first Zune players, which didn’t support Plays For Sure DRM. Today, many of Microsoft’s original Plays For Sure partners have dumped it, leaving consumers who invested in compatible devices twisting in the wind. And Microsoft says that Plays For Sure is now called Certified for Windows Vista. Except that its Zunes carry that certification and aren’t compatible with what used to be Plays For Sure DRM. Confused yet? I sure am.
In 2003, TurboTax added stress to tax time rather than reducing it, in the form of copy protection that Intuit said would be used on all future versions of the application. Its customers reported problems. Intuit initially responded by saying those folks were just misinformed and befuddled. Then it backpedaled, admitting that the copy protection was “the wrong thing to do” and ending it permanently. Oh, and the sales gains that the company thought would come once it was harder to pirate TurboTax? Intuit said that they were disappointing.
That’s not just the ultimate answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything–it’s also the number of digits that you’ll need to enter into Microsoft’s Activation Wizard if you’re unfortunate enough to have to activate one of the company’s products via telephone. Consider each digit a tiny hoop that you must jump through to prove you’re not a software thief.
Millions of perfectly good computer monitors can’t play high-resolution Blu-Ray movies–not because of a shortage of pixels, but because they were manufactured before the advent of HDCP, the copy-protection standard, licensed by Intel, that’s designed to protect high-def content. HDCP defends high-def video in part by making it look worse on non-HDCP devices: On older displays, it knocks down the resolution and turns high def into standard def. In other words, Hollywood doesn’t just want you to buy copy-protected entertainment: It expects you to spend hundreds of dollars on new equipment that supports its copy-protection scheme.
In August of 2007, Google gave up on trying to sell videos wrapped in DRM and decided to shut down the servers tht made the copy protction function. It informed customers that they’d lose the ability to move videos they’d “paid” for to new devices. And only decided to refund their money after a consumer backlash.
In April of 2008, MSN gave up on trying to sell music wrapped in DRM and decided to shut down the servers tht made the copy protction function. It informed customers that they’d lose the ability to move songs they’d “paid” for to new decices. And only decided to refund their money after a consumer backlash.
In July of 2008, Yahoo gave up on trying to sell music wrapped in DRM and decided to shut down the servers that made the copy protction function. It informed customers that they’d lose the ability to move songs they’d “paid” for to new devices. And only decided to…oh, you get the idea.
In September of 2008, Walmart.com gave up on trying to sell software wrapped in DRM and decided to shut down the servers tht made the copy protction function. It informed customers that they’d lose the ability to move songs they’d “paid” for to new devices. At last report, a customer backlash had resulted in the company deciding to maintain the servers for a longer but specified period.
By which I mean that for every ingenious new DRM scheme, there’s someone–or several someones–like Norway’s scary-smart DVD Jon, the guy who cracked the encryption on DVD discs. For them, breaking supposedly unbreakable copy protection is an irresistible challenge. They’re usually up to it, and they love to share the fruits of their knowledge. Result: Copy protection often doesn’t do much to faze the people who it’s designed to frustrate, since tools for defeating it are easy to find, easy to use, and free.
Software and entertainment publishers argue, correctly, that piracy is a gigantic problem that costs them lots of money in lost sales. But copy-protection isn’t a no-cost countermeasure–actually, it costs billions of dollars to devise, implement, and maintain. The money has to come from somewhere. And since pirates don’t compensate anybody for anything, it’s paying customers who end up footing the bill.
In the era of the Walkman, Sony was synonymous with portable music. In the digital age, it isn’t, and probably never will be. There are multiple reasons why, but one of them is clearly ATRAC, the copy-protected music format that the company saddled its digital audio players with at first. Early Sony players couldn’t even play an MP3 until it had been converted into ATRAC; the company only abandoned the format completely in August of 2007, when it shuttered its Connect music store and told purchasers of ATRAC tracks that they had until March of 2008 to figure out how to convert their tunes into another format. If Sony had leaped aboard the MP3 bandwagon hard and fast–like, oh, a certain company with a piece of fruit for a logo–it’s not entirely inconceivable that the Walkman would be the same status symbol today that it was a quarter-century ago.
Such as Will Wright’s Spore, a landmark game from one of the greatest designers ever. As I write this, it has 3105 user reviews on Amazon.com. Not all of them come from folks who have actually played Spore, 2627 give it a pitiful one star out of five–and those evaluations are full of words like draconian, baggage, and infected. All of which refer to the overweening copy protection that EA saddled the game with. The copy protection which prevented buyers from doing things which Spore’s documentation specifically said were permitted. The copy protection which EA defended but dialed back after the consumer revolt. Wouldn’t it be kind of sad if the main thing people remembered about Spore a decade or two from now was its crippling DRM?
RealNetworks’ RealDVD is a Windows application that will copy DVDs onto a PC’s hard drive. It doesn’t just preserve the DVDs’ data encryption–it adds its own additional layer of copy protection to prevent people from sharing the copies they make or even putting them on a home network. In a real (ahem) sense, the RealDVD copies are more hobbled by copy protection than the original discs from whence they sprung. But it wasn’t enough: Hollywood is suing Real, which was forced by court order to pull RealDVD off the market. If the entertainment industry can’t live with RealDVD, it can’t live with any DVD copying product. (Which doesn’t change the fact that there are plenty of DVD copiers that Hollywood has been unable to do anything about.)
That’s when a glitch with Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage activation servers–caused, the company later said, by a software update gone awry–resulted in thousands of legitimate, paid-for copies of Windows failing the WGA validation test and being inaccurately accused of being pirated. According to Microsoft, 12,000 users were affected. That’s a tiny sliver of the hundreds of millions of folks who use Windows, but it’s also 12,000 more paying customers than should ever have their time wasted and their honesty questioned by a flaky copy-protection system.
When the Fraunhofer Society invented MP3, they made the format capable of squeezing reasonably good-sounding music into small amounts of storage–and they didn’t burden it with copy protection. Consumers embraced it; the entertainment industry didn’t, as witness its attempt to kill Diamond’s Rio, the first popular MP3 player, and the fact that so much music still isn’t available in MP3 form. Can there be any doubt that digital music would be nowhere near as evolved today if MP3 had sported copy protection? Apple sells billions of songs today–all of which the music industry makes money from–but it was MP3s ripped from CD that made the iPod the iPod in the first place.
Published in February, 2007, the Apple CEO’s “Thoughts on Music” memo calls for an end to DRM for music downloads. When the CEO of by far the most successful purveyor of DRM-protected music cogently calls for its end, it’s time to take notice. [Photo from Wikipedia by Matthew Yohe]
\Especially when the companies behind it appear to have no respect whatsoever for the privacy and security of their customers. Yup, I’m thinking about the infamous Sony BMG rootkit scandal of 2005, which involved audio CDs that installed anti-copying software that made fundamental, hard-to-reverse changes to Windows computers that left them more vulnerable to hacker attacks, and didn’t tell users they were doing it. It wasn’t just people who planned to try and copy CDs who had to clean up after the mess: It was everyone who stuck an affected disc into their PC’s CD tray. And was fortunate enough to learn of the damage those discs could do.
In 1976, Universal and Disney sued Sony to stop a new consumer electronics gadget known as the VCR. The case went on for eight years and went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court–which ruled in 1984 that copyright law’s fair use doctrine protected consumers’ right to buy VCRs and use them to record and time-shift commercial TV. That was before 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act came along and made it a violation of U.S. law to circumvent DRM in all but a few narrowly-defined instances. Those instances don’t include actions that are the 21st-century equivalents of what timeshifting was in its era, such as putting the contents of a DVD you’ve purchased onto an iPod. A lot of innovative products will never hit the market, because copyright law simply won’t be on their side.
If you’ve got 78rpm records or old 8mm movies your family bought decades ago, it’s still reasonably easy to enjoy ‘em. But chances are that it will be hard-to-impossible to play back most or all of today’s DRM-burdened music and movies in a couple of generations–new devices won’t support ancient copy protection, and the old devices that once did won’t be able to if DRM servers get shut down. Which they almost certainly will be–even Apple’s FairPlay is unlikely to live forever. Yes, some of this stuff will be available in other forms by then, but not all of it. And while the DMCA permits the cracking of encryption when playback devices that support it are obsolete, it’s hard to imagine that anyone will have the time, interest, and technical chops to set every DRM-protected piece of content free.
I used to think that the name of the Free Software Foundation’s DefectiveByDesign.org anti-copy protection campaign was a tad hyperbolic. These days, I’m not so sure. So much copy protection has caused so many headaches for so many people who just want to use the products they’ve bought for legitimate purposes that it’s hard to come to any conclusion but this one: Copy protection by its very definition makes the products it’s applied to worse. Almost all of it is basically disrespectful to paying customers; almost none of it truly prevents pirates from doing what they will. Can we all agree there’s something profoundly wrong with technology that punishes honest people more than it does thieves?
Excellent article. I couldn’t agree more.
That’s definitely one of his better panels in that strip.
It’s so easy to pirate nowadays, I still can’t believe people actually pay for music.
So theft is OK if the alternative is "a hassle". OK, I find this whole working thing to get money is kind of a hassle, when all the money I need is just down at the bank. Good to know that stealing it is now justifiable.
And the next time that I get stuck in a long line at the grocery store, I'm just going to roll the cart around the check out and on out to my car. How glorious that by being making buying their product a hassle, the owner has given me a justifiable reason to just take it.
I just don't like much of today's stuff.
That’s not what he was saying. Read it again.
I remember when I purchased “Mortal Kombat” for the PC when it first came out. The copy-protection for the game was that you had to type in a random word from the instruction manual (they gave you a page number, line number, etc.). And the word was different every time. So, if you ever lost the instruction manual, the game was useless.
He listed 25 things that are bad about copyright. Let me list one thing that is bad about no copyrights.
1. People will stop working hard to innovate and produce competitive quality in the market place. All you'll get is amateur hour rehash. If you prefer Youtube productions over studio produced music and feature films, then you'll be in heaven.
So yes, getting rid of copyrights will definitely solve all of those hassles. Just like socialism solves all of those other consumer hassles.
I forgot which game I played that used it, though. I thought that really sucked. Also, I thought it was kinda useless--just go to the library and copy the manual.
Ah well. I don't have the time (or the inclination) to play those games anymore.
Yes--for legitimate purchasers of said property. He also said that if it would do it's job and prevent actual piracy, he'd support it. He's not advocating piracy just because it's easy, he's saying how bad today's state of copyright protection is not doing it's job, and it's making things harder than they really need to be.
He’s right. Megadittos.
But he isn’t actually speaking against copyrights. He is speaking against copy protections. To be even more specific he is speaking against copy protections that are ineffective, insulting, and flaky.
That is simply not the same thing as condemning copyrights. I believe you need to read closer AGAIN.
Consumers will vote with their feet. The generation coming up is now flatly refusing to buy IP with DRM. Note that they are not refusing to buy music, movies, games, etc. They simply will not be burdened with flaky DRM.
The bottom line is that it is now SO easy to acquire the pirated goods that proper purchase is almost certainly the result of a deliberate choice not to pirate. If I have made the choice to pay you I don’t want my honesty and integrity called into question through shady DRM practices that artificially limit what I should be able to do with the goods I paid for.
No he didn't. He listed 25 things that are bad about copy protection i.e. DRM.
And there is world of difference between stealing (taking something from someone which that someone no longer can use) and violating an arcane contract or a set of laws which ultimately handicap only those who wish to abide by them.
And I'm not defending piracy but common sense.
In fact, it is greater convenience which has caused this whole problem. When it was difficult to pirate music and movies, piracy was a minor issue. But now that the product is so convenient to access, people are demanding that their be no restrictions at all. Boo hoo.
There is no justification for stealing.
There are no doubt better ways to do things. Perhaps the ability to pay for a song for life and then be able to download it once a year in any format you wish.
If there is a better way the market will find it. But there will be no market if there is no copyright.
As Tribune7 has already mentioned--this isn't about copyright. He's not against copyright. His second sentence in the article says he believes people ought to be rewarded for their efforts.
You've set up a straw man and have effectively knocked it down. Now let's discuss the actual article.
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