

Day Against DRM - May 4th, 2011 - sasvari
http://libreplanet.org/wiki?title=Group:DefectiveByDesign/Day_Against_DRM_2011

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thebishop
DRM can be obnoxious when it's done poorly. But it can also be an enabling
technology. Content creators should have a right to decide how their content
is disseminated - whether it's sold, shared for free, given free for
noncommercial use, kept private, etc. The author should be able to make this
decision. If someone writes an e-book, they should be perfectly welcome to
give it away for free. And if they choose to charge money for it, that
decision should be respected too.

Of course there are always ways to get around the author's decision (read:
thepiratebay.org), and if digital restrictions are onerous, people will do
that. But used properly, it can be nearly transparent: without DRM, Netflix
would still just be in the DVD rental business.

This might be an unpopular opinion here, but I'm interested in how people
think about this topic.

~~~
wladimir
The fundamental problem with DRM is that it burdens legal buyers, but not
people that use a pirated version. So the more restrictive the DRM, the more
your actual customers suffer.

Suddenly, you can play something only on a restricted set of devices (users
hate this!), or you cannot use it at all because the DRM server went down, or
even worse, DRM products get in each others way and crash the PC.

Doesn't that make it sound attractive to simply get a copy off a torrent?

Also, you seem to equate "giving away for free" with "selling without DRM".
That's nonsense. A lot of ebook stores (for example, Oreilly) succesfully sell
ebooks without DRM.

~~~
thebishop
_The fundamental problem with DRM is that it burdens legal buyers, but not
people that use a pirated version. So the more restrictive the DRM, the more
your actual customers suffer._

 _Doesn't that make it sound attractive to simply get a copy off a torrent?_

I agree, and this comic is an excellent illustration:
<http://www.virtualshackles.com/207>. But this is primarily not a problem with
DRM in general, but with how DRM is implemented, right? Again, using Netflix
and Hulu as an example, I've never found their DRM burdensome. Whereas I have
found the iTunes device limit to be a major pain.

 _Also, you seem to equate "giving away for free" with "selling without DRM"._

I certainly don't intend to do that. You can definitely sell things without
DRM, and selling without DRM may make more economic sense than selling with
DRM.

I guess I maybe just see legitimate uses for DRM alongside of the obvious
problematic uses.

