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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Once content is "out there", they have no such control, because people have the ability to disseminate the content without the creator's consent.
The only way for people not to have this ability would be to abolish the internet, ban general-purpose computers and replace them with locked-down equivalents; something like the iPad and Facebook, and make it illegal for anyone to produce freer equivalents.
Is that what you want? I suspect not. But that's the choice in front of us. It's not about whether people can get unauthorised access to content without paying for it, it's whether computers and electronic networks are to be a tool for freedom or a fascist jackboot stamping on all of us.
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.