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DRM: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth IS
By Jay Savage | May 2, 2005
About a two weeks before I started this blog, I posted a rant to my (now) personal journal about the way everyone whines about DRM, but no one does anything about it. It seems [Evil Genius Chronicles](http://www.evilgeniuschronicles.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi) heard me. If you don’t mind the profanity, [Take Your DRM and Shove It](http://www.evilgeniuschronicles.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/2005/04/27#050427_03) is an entertaining little rant that gets it just right…assuming that you’re in the anti-DRM camp. Me? I’m somewhere in between:
Originally Posted 04:14 pm April 13th, 2005
> DRM
> It seems like at the moment you can’t really call yourself a geek if you aren’t thinking about DRM, the DMCA, and copyright issues in general 24 hours a day.
> Hwaet.
> I have to say, I just don’t get most of it. I think in large part it’s the geeks, and more importantly people who download music, who don’t understandcopyright, at least as much as the RIAA and the big–and little!–companies who produce and sell music. The hard truth is that digital media, by and large, grant us more rights as consumers than their printed and analog predcessors. That’s right, more. You may flame me now, but then come back and finish reading.
> The standard complaint about digital music (and, to a lesser extent, digital documents) is that users can’t do whatever they want with music they own, because various DRMs limit what machines music can be played on, how many times tracks can be burned to CD, etc. This prevents people from sharing music with “friends” (1 million of your nearest and dearest on bit torrent at any given moment. You do at least know the names of all your “friends”, right?) and listening to music wherever they want.
> The argument that preventing these activities somehow infringes on our rights a consumers generally works by reference to older media: “If this were a CD, I could take it with me, or lend it to a friend, or burn as many mix tapes as I wanted.” Of course with an mp3 player, you can take it with you, just like you can with a Walkman. You can burn mixes, although perhaps with restrictions (more on the details here later). You can, generally load your songs on other people’s mp3/aac players. Have a thousand friends, let them all plug into your usb port; no one’s going to stop you. And yet, somehow people still feel gypped. Why? The clear assumption–sometimes stated–is that the difference here is between physical media and “digital media”. This attitude, though betrays an apalling lack of understanding on the part of people who claim to be technologists, and should really know better.
> The fact is, when you purchase electronic music, you are getting a physical entity, and you can do whatever you want with it. No one can or will tell you what to do with the bytes spinning around on your hard drive. You can transfer them from one medium to another. you can copy them as many times as you want. You can even rearrange them, physically and logically, to suit your needs. This is a far more liberal form of ownership than you get with a physical medium. Try folding a CD to make it fit in your pocket sometime, storing bits of CD in different parts of your CD rack. Think about what your rights really are with “physical” media. Take a book. If you have a book, you pay for each copy. If you want to lend it to a friend, you can either buy another one, or go without your own copy for a while. You can also copy some, but not all, of the book, within fairly strict copyright and fair use rules, on a photocopy machine, resulting in an inferior copy. The same is true for music. A digital to analog (CD to tape) copy loses quality. An analog to analog (tape to tape) copy loses significant quality. And lets face it, if the police found you with 1,000,000 copies you’d taped of a CD and decided to send all over the world, you’d be in trouble.
> So far, it doesn’t really look like our rights are being infringed all that much. Which brings us to real DRM password protection and burning restrictions. On the surface, this looks bad, I agree. But this is where we get into the “more” of digital music. When we copy our book or CD, we’re creating a clearly inferior product. When we copy an mp3 or pdf, however, it’s an exact copy of the original. When you purchase a DRMed aac, you are being given explicit permission to make seven identical copies. The equivalent with a CD or tape would be to make your own personal copies from the masters. After that, you can still plug the audio out from your computer or mp3 player into your stero and make as many mix tapes as you want. And the RIAA isn’t going to know or care. You are also given the explicit right to make several copies of the file to different media–an operation that is legally murky with other formats. And finally, you can authorize several different computers to play the same file. This is like having an original CD–not a copy to tape, or a lossy CD-aiff/mp3-CD copy–on each of those computers: one for home, one for work, one for the car, and…I don’t even have enough computers to max out the iTunes DRM. That’s five CDs for the price of one. and there’s going to be some associated cost for that.
> That’s not to say that we don’t collectively need to take a long, hard look at digital right management. Clearly, millions of people wouldn’t be so upset if there weren’t something seriously wrong here. Personally, I don’t like the idea of registering my computer. I’d rather, say, pay twice as much for downloadable music–and if I’m getting 5 times the functionality, why not–or even deal with braindamaged hardware a la VCR. But in order for this conversation to happen it needs to be radically refigured. It can’t be about who’s rights are being trampled because, honestly, no one’s are. We can’t complain about what’s been taken away from us when nothing has, when there wasn’t even anything there before to take away. Instead, we need to start talking about what we, as consumers, want to see from a new product.
> And we need to start talking with more than our mouths. I’ll tell you what I’d love to start with. I’d love to see a tech blogger with some guts. Instead of thousands of people saying “Yay iPod! Yay iPod!!! Yay iPod!!!!! (btw, DRM suX0r5),” I’d like to see just one person–and preferably as many as possible–say “yeah, nice toy, but I won’t buy one until they give me DRM I can live with, and neither should my readers. Keep buying those CDs and stay away from iTMS, too. If you need an mp3 playrer, go read my review of the Nomad line, or pick up a used one on eBay, but don’t give your money to Apple (or HP, or M$).”
> Ok, rant /off. [link](http://www.livejournal.com/users/daggerquill/300851.html)
(Thanks to [ck](http://www.sampletheweb.com) for the link.)
