Just What Consumers Need

by Tim Lee on May 10, 2006 · Comments

David Berlind points out a charming feature of the new BitTorrent movie-distrubtion network: its DRM scheme apparently isn’t compatible with the other DRM schemes already on the market. His reaction to that is about the same as mine:

To go with yet another proprietary DRM technology when the market is already full of exisiting non-interoperable ones that are screwing it up is quite an unnatural act and evidence that either Warner Bros., the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), or the movie industry as a whole have no clue how to right a ship that’s about sink as it floods with stupidity.

So. Let’s see. I need PlaysForSure-compliant technology to playback content X, FairPlay-compliant technology to playback content Y, and Bittorrent technology to playback content Z. Why don’t we bring back BetaMax and VHS while we’re at it?

He mentions Sun’s DReaM as an alternative, but as I’ve written before it’s not clear to me how that would be an improvement. DReaM would simply be a fourth (or fifth if you count Google’s DRM) incompatible DRM scheme. The fundamental problem here is that Hollywood is prioritizing (ineffective) piracy-fighting higher than giving their customers products they’ll actually want to buy.

Comments Posted in: DMCA, DRM & Piracy

  • dmarti
    Berlind has the DRMers' motivation wrong. They're not going for "Dr. Strangelove", they're going for "The Postman". Power in the DRM world wouldn't be a DRM-enforced version of power today.
  • The story of the "Tower of Babel" serves as an excellent allegory. The personal computer became ubiquitous because M$ through Windows offered a common unified platform. Now DRM technologies are being introduced which significantly frustrate interoperablity through the introduction of different "languages". The effect of introducing different languages in the "Tower of Babel" story was that the workers could no longer communicate with each other to finish constructing the tower. By insisting on proprietary techologies that destroy the consumers freedom of choice, companies are actually hurting themselves.
  • I rember Patrick Ross describing the existance of multiple different DRMs/codec combos as a feature, rather than a problem. How is this a good market situation? We have four or five vendors, all of whom use different codecs and DRM schemes. I'm not an economist, but this seems to be the height of inefficiency in the market and a bad sign.
  • DReaM is slightly better, in that it is an open standard and so in theory could have multiple competing implementations (unlike FairPlay) and implementations on multiple platforms (unlike PlaysForSure.) Otherwise, no, it isn't any better- certainly isn't meaningfully open source, and like you say, is Yet Another Non-Interoperable Platform, which only continues thwarting actual competition like we've grown to expect in CD players, DVDs, etc.
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