Originally posted by: CKent
Originally posted by: mugs
Originally posted by: CKent
Originally posted by: mugs
It's funny that people think DRM is automatically bad.
It almost without fail punishes legitimate consumers while at most minorly inconveniencing the pirates it's aimed at.
Did you read the rest of my post? Or my second post? I gave three good uses of DRM that don't punish anyone.
I read your post, but it doesn't change the fact that to play my PC games, I have to either subject my discs to wear & tear by having them in my drive to play, or take shady measures to play without the CD. To legitimately purchase music, I have to either choose between 128kbps encoded music (subpar bitrate, IMO) and face restrictions and hoops to jump through if I want to put them on my laptop / DAP, or purchase CDs which can install malware on my PC unless I take measures to prevent it from running (something I do, but which many PC users are unaware of). When thinking about DRM, I think most people think about these real-world examples they've experienced.
edit - for all intents and purposes, the terms DRM and copy protection can be interchanged
Well I'm glad you read it, but you completely missed the point. My point was that people think that DRM is inherently bad, but it also can be beneficial - i.e. it has opened the possibility to do things that would be unheard of without DRM, such as "renting" music and watching full-length movies and TV shows online, for free and legally.
Originally posted by: Drakkon
You gave 3 very good examples but theres a flaw in all of them and that is when you need to transfer what you downloaded and purchased to something else. Everything you brought prior to DRM was able to be transferred. You had sort of a roaming license so you could use it across multiple players. DRM in many cases restricts that and thus your stuck watching that movie/show on your computer which isnt that great or music on your ipod but not on your home system (unless you buy the fancy stuff to hook it all up - when you could just burn it to a cd). Thats what i see as being the biggest flaw in DRM technology - if you can't take a movie/music/show you purchased and move it around between your own gadgetry then in my opinion its worthless and flawed.
Yes, that is a big downside of DRM (it is tied to a certain set of players), but it doesn't apply to any of the three examples I gave. With Napster you don't buy music, you rent it. If you get another media player that doesn't support Napster's DRM, you just stop paying your Napster bill. You don't lose anything, because you didn't buy anything. That gives Napster a distinct advantage over services like iTunes IMO. The big problem for them is getting people to accept that they're not really buying their music.
You're right that with the movies and TV shows examples I gave you are restricted to watching on your computer. But without DRM to prevent people from taking those videos and burning them on DVDs or putting them on their portable players, those services wouldn't exist at all. NBC wouldn't put their shows up on their website if they were worried it would cut into their DVD sales. So DRM, even if it is not effective in stopping those who are determined to break it, is opening up the possibility of content delivery scenarios that otherwise wouldn't exist.
Edit: Considering the nature of flash, I would guess that this DRM will be primarily used for things like my last two examples - TV shows online, and movies online. It's not really a portable media format.
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