Comment by docker_up
7 years ago
The lack of empathy in the responses is staggering to me. It's as if the idea that a content creator should be financially rewarded for his or her hard work is some sort of moral crime. Yes, DRM sucks, but what other way can content providers ensure that they get rewarded for the hard work and good content that they provide?
We can agree that content creators should get paid AND that DRM sucks. The key point is that DRM DOESN'T REDUCE PIRACY, IT JUST MAKES LIFE HARDER FOR LEGITIMATE READERS.
DRM isn't super hard to break, it is just annoying. But for piracy, only ONE person has to break it, and suddenly it is available, DRM free, for everyone. Legitimate readers continue to be forced to deal with DRM annoyance while pirates get a DRM free experience.
How does this help the situation of content creators not getting paid?
Maybe that's because these sob stories were already accounted for by the _original_ copyright length of 28 years? The vast majority of DRM is protecting some corporation's right to profit off of the work of content creators almost indefinitely.
Most DRM is there to protect it during the initial sales window when demand and awareness of the product are at their highest.
So why not release a DRM-free version after that window? I'd be happy to wait 6 months to buy a movie if that's what it took to get a DRM-free copy.
Citation needed. It seems very clear from the history of copyright law that the whole thing is just a money grab.
1 reply →
It shouldn't be when you consider that the topic is textbooks. I agree, work hard, give good content that's better than the competition on the market, and I'll gladly pay for that value. However, textbooks are not a free market. They are a captive market, where the professor decides what textbook is ordained for the course.
Students usually have the choice of the brand new print edition $$$ that they can resell for $, the ebook edition ($$) that expires after the term and you cannot resell, or fighting for one of the two copies of the book on 2 hour loan from the main campus library. Some professors do not let you use an older copy, and for some classes, they make you do your homework on proprietary publisher websites that charge for temporary access codes. So even if you pirated your book you would still have to pay McGraw Hill their cut to get full points in the class.
Curious how well textbook prices correlate to the maximum federal loan you can apply for.
It is rather bizarre to see some people feel entitled to content which isn't distributed as per their own personal wishes. A principled person would chose to take his/her business elsewhere and purchase a book on a platform whose ethics they agree with.
Not saying I'm some Mother Teresa type.. but I'm against online ads, and I don't run an ad-blocker. I simply don't visit sites which feature blaring in-your-face ads. I filter Google results to exclude domains which I will never visit because of their ad policy.
> It is rather bizarre to see some people feel entitled to content which isn't distributed as per their own personal wishes. A principled person would chose to take his/her business elsewhere and purchase a book on a platform whose ethics they agree with.
Couple counter-points:
1) It's reasonable that I'm expected to compensate the creator for the content. It's not reasonable for the publisher to dictate how I get to consume that content, especially not by forcing me to use particular format, software or hardware. DRM is enforcing the latter, not the former.
2) Having personal wishes wrt. content distribution is part of the market game. There is huge demand for bullshit-free content distribution, which is evidenced by the success of Steam and Netflix (especially relative to Torrents!), who cut out most of the crap and left the "you're now renting the content, not buying it".
3) Most content is non-substitutable. You can't just "take your business elsewhere", because there's nowhere else to take the business to! If Disney decides that the newest Star Wars is DRMed, there's shit all I can do - it's going to be DRMed everywhere, I can only choose from providers that enforce that DRM, and I can't exactly go and watch some cat videos on PeerTube instead - I wanted Star Wars, not smelly cats. This applies to books, movies, TV shows, video games, and to a large extent, to music.
1) If I'm selling lemonade and my terms and conditions are that you have to jump 10 times before paying me, and I only accept payment in rocks with 10% ferrous oxide, you are free to laugh and ignore me. Please also remember that we're talking about games, movies, music... not exactly life-critical products.
2) I agree. I avoid DRM and other BS as much as possible. I went out and purchased affinity photo when photoshop went to a subscription model. I'm going to cling on to my CS6 for as many years as I can. Yes, I'm going to lose out eventually when plugins stop working or when I buy a new camera whose RAW files cannot be opened by CS6, but thems the breaks.
3) Yes, that sucks! I don't know what else to say. You can either be principled and avoid DRM, or be a realist and accept DRM in as few places as possible. I'm objecting to the "I'm entitled to pirate it because they didn't sell it or stream it without DRM" mindset.
1 reply →
You can't dismiss it all as entitlement. Imagine that you have a gym membership and someone is offering a service to life your weights for you for a fee. Do you have a right not not lift weights without paying this fee? Of course you do.
Some of these things that people want to charge fees for are things that you can participate in for free naturally, so long as nobody is gate-keeping you. So it's very hard to justify spending money on them... particularly if you consider them bad for you, (like, say, binging on Netflix.)
It is the freedom of the creator to pick a license and method they wish to use to distribute their work. I'm talking about DRM for things which are mostly entertainment - things like movies, games, music, etc. We all have equal freedoms to not support such platforms. I don't follow what point you're trying to make with your gym example. If the gym has some policies which you dislike, you can simply chose to not go there. (I know people love to take things to extremes, so I'm obviously obviously not talking about racist policies or other illegal exclusionary practices)
8 replies →
> A principled person would chose to take his/her business elsewhere and purchase a book on a platform whose ethics they agree with.
A principled person would follow their own principles which may be different from yours.
Infringing on copyright law to play a game or a movie doesn't quite have the same 'civil disobedience' ring to it as fighting slavery.
1 reply →