Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Why Vista's DRM Is Bad For You and other jewels by Bruce Schneier

<< < (8/8)

f0dder:
Carol: they might be legitimate purposes, but still involve circumventing DRM.

Carol Haynes:
Quite - which is why DRM is a bad thing. It forces users to circumvent it to make fauir use of the products they purchased. (The legality of doing such things is moot because for 99.99% of people it is unenforceable.)

If MS refused to implement DRM for music publishers and movie studios there would be little point in the entertainment industries implementing all the forms of DRM on their discs.

Surely the lesson that everyone all agrees on is that DRM only actually affects legitimate customers - if nothing else it steals clock cycles constantly (even when you are not using DRM protected data) on Windows Vista, it locks you out of purchased downloadable products when the supplying company stops supporting past purchases and it makes purchased media at best irritating to use and at worst incompatible with systems (and in the past even standalone DVD players caused problems with discs).

The regional encoding system on DVDs (another lame form of DRM) is stupid in the extreme and only breaks world trade agreements and allows for price fixing/market rigging - not only that it is absolutely simple and legal to break - all you have to do is buy an extra DVD drive for your PC and set the region to which ever region you want. With consumer level DVD players/recorders the only thing regional encoding has produced is a market for third parties (found with a few clicks in Google) to produce mini handsets to unlock DVD players so that purchased consumer DVDs can now be fully unlocked for a few pounds - why create that market in the first place? Just give genuine consumers genuine products at reasonable prices.

Just think how much research and development money has gone into DRM by so many companies. Without it they would make more profit and probably be able to halve the price of every product sold. And has any one yet found a DRM system that actually stops, or even slows down, the mass duplication and sale of illegal copies? You only have to go to any car-boot sale or any street market in the UK to find someone selling knocked of DVDs!

f0dder:
Amen.

The DRM systems have tended to take some months to break, though. But before that kind of breakage, there's alternate means for the pirates... cam recordings in movie theaters (often with perfect audio, and often with professional recording gear), DVD screeners, whatever. And I'm sure the big-scale copying plants run by pirates have means to produce copies of protected media before the protection is cracked letting the average Joe make a backup/pirate/whatever copy.

40hz:
By the way, isn't this thread about why DRM is so bad and not the legality of AnyDVD?
-Josh (December 08, 2008, 10:58 PM)
--- End quote ---

You can't divorce the issue of legality from any discussion about DRM. DRM is a legal issue.

Being able to circumvent DRM by installing what amounts to a benign rootkit is in, IMHO, sorta missing the point.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page