Interesting speech on DRM

[Asmor]

http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

Via Slashdot, this is a speech Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave to Microsoft on why DRM is a bad idea. It looks kinda long, but it's really a well put together and engaging read on why DRM is bad for everyone involved, including consumers, artists and businesses.

Quote from the article

Here's the social reason that DRM fails: keeping an honest user
honest is like keeping a tall user tall.

 

[Dakkareth]

Great speech.

*moves to spread the link*

 

[Torm]

Some of the things running through my head upon reading this:

You face a Beowulf Cluster of Grendel monsters. Roll initiative!

In Soviet Faerun, spells cast YOU!

And:

I don't use DRMed PDFs, you insensitive clod!

 

[dcollins]

Yep, I mentioned it in another thread, it's probably better here...

Summary:

Here's what I'm here to convince you of:
1. That DRM systems don't work
2. That DRM systems are bad for society
3. That DRM systems are bad for business
4. That DRM systems are bad for artists
5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

Comment on ebooks (in part 4):

The only really successful epublishing -- I mean, hundreds of thousands, millions of copies distributed and read -- is the bookwarez scene, where scanned-and-OCR'd books are distributed on the darknet. The only legit publishers with any success at epublishing are the ones whose books cross the Internet without technological fetter: publishers like Baen Books and my own, Tor, who are making some or all of their catalogs available in ASCII and HTML and PDF.

The hardware-dependent ebooks, the DRM use-and-copy-restricted ebooks, they're cratering. Sales measured in the tens, sometimes the hundreds. Science fiction is a niche business, but when you're selling copies by the ten, that's not even a business, it's a hobby.

 

[The Sigil]

Some of the things running through my head upon reading this:

You face a Beowulf Cluster of Grendel monsters. Roll initiative!

In Soviet Faerun, spells cast YOU!

And:

I don't use DRMed PDFs, you insensitive clod!

You forgot:

Hey, nice dupe of last week's DRM stink!

and of course...

Cowboy Neal keeps me warm at night.

--The Sigil

 

[Psionicist]

http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=91698

 

[Dragonblade]

Wow! Awesome speech!

I agree completely. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act always struck me as Orwellian and Un-American but I could never fully articulate why. This guy is brilliant.

 

[Elephant]

Some of the things running through my head upon reading this:

You face a Beowulf Cluster of Grendel monsters. Roll initiative!

In Soviet Faerun, spells cast YOU!

And:

I don't use DRMed PDFs, you insensitive clod!

"I for one welcome our new DRM-bearing overlords."

 

[MW Turnage]

It also bears pointing out that Cory isn't talking out of an orifice here. He's a published SF author with several works released not just commercially, but under the Creative Commons License. That means that, at the same time he has those books on bookstore shelves, they're free to download and redistribute (and make derivative works from) as long as you abide by the license.

In other words, he's made pretty good hardcopy sales at the same time the books were available for free download from anywhere. There's a lesson in there, somewhere.

 

[Bagpuss]

The Darknet paper addresses this possibility: it even predicts
what this person will do in the long run: she'll find out about
Kazaa and the next time she wants to get a movie for the kids,
she'll download it from the net and burn it for them.

How true I had never used Kazaa or a Peer 2 Peer network until I bought my first copyprotected music CD, and discovered I couldn't convert it to MP3's to play on my portable player. I then joined peer 2 peer and found MP3's of the same album in seconds. I've not paid for a music CD since.