DRM has a purpose, and it can be successful even without perfectly achieving its goals. People tend to avoid effort, and if you can make pirating content more difficult than obtaining it legitimately, most people will obtain it legitimately.I haven't yet met a DRM scheme that doesn't achieve this purpose backwards(1). What it really rests on is that people don't know they could just get it easier on "allmyvideos.net".
There is no fundamental reason why information deserves to be free, it's just easier to copy than physical things.
Its not just easier. A copy has zero marginal cost. That makes it special and different than anything that came before. DRM seems to just be a monkey-patch to try to get that marginal cost to be non-zero. I'm not saying that it deserves to be free. I'm not even saying that I think it should be. I'm saying that it IS free. We don't want it to be, because our economic models don't support it (yet), but that's its natural state.
I stand by "DRM is silly". If that money were spent providing a better, easier product, they'd make more than they do now with DRM. It seems like they're perfectly willing to spend $3 to keep from losing $1 to piracy. It feels like a kind of willful ignorance.
No data, of course, just a strong opinion, held loosely.
(1) It doesn't take long outside the US to find out that there are plenty of things DRM makes impossible to aquire legitimately.
I haven't yet met a DRM scheme that doesn't achieve this purpose backwards(1). What it really rests on is that people don't know they could just get it easier on "allmyvideos.net".
There is no fundamental reason why information deserves to be free, it's just easier to copy than physical things.
Its not just easier. A copy has zero marginal cost. That makes it special and different than anything that came before. DRM seems to just be a monkey-patch to try to get that marginal cost to be non-zero. I'm not saying that it deserves to be free. I'm not even saying that I think it should be. I'm saying that it IS free. We don't want it to be, because our economic models don't support it (yet), but that's its natural state.
I stand by "DRM is silly". If that money were spent providing a better, easier product, they'd make more than they do now with DRM. It seems like they're perfectly willing to spend $3 to keep from losing $1 to piracy. It feels like a kind of willful ignorance.
No data, of course, just a strong opinion, held loosely.
(1) It doesn't take long outside the US to find out that there are plenty of things DRM makes impossible to aquire legitimately.