 maartenaElmoPremium
join:2002-05-10
Orange, CA
kudos:1
 ·AT&T U-Verse
 ·DIRECTV
| DRM.... It's not ONLY the PRICE that makes people go to piracy, it's DRM.
If I buy a U2 album, I want to be able to make a copy of it for the car, as the hot California summers will make the CD unusable if I happen to forget it on the front seat..... whereas a copy can just be thrown out and i'll make another copy. I also want to be able to play it on my mobile MP3 player, and put it on the harddrive of my Media Center so I can play it in the living room as part of a long playlist.
That said, it is likely I will actually buy a digital version of said album in the first place, but the same goes: Copy to regular CD for the car, copy on both the iPod and my livingroom Media Center.
And the same goes for movies. I don't have kids, but I can see that - for the same California sun reason as above - you will want to have a COPY of the kids DVD's in the back seat player instead of the original, and you will also want to put that movie on your mobile video player to keep the kids entertained during a cross-country flight.
People don't want to be nickled, dimed, and limited to the number of copies and what KIND of copies one can make of legally bought music.
People want to play a fair price for DRM free music. If there are too many limit, people will turn to piracy, and freeware programmers are making it increasingly more easy, and increasingly more private to do so.
The music and movie industry are where the American car industry was in the nineties, and quite frankly they continued to be stubborn all the way to the 2008 crisis where they had to beg for money from our taxes. They are clinging to the past, holding on to old profit models that no longer work, and they are slowly are being eaten alive by the ever growing pirates.
They CAN change however, and CAN survive as an industry, they just need a completely different strategy, and offer a fair price, a price people will want to pay in these days of economic struggles, without crippling it with DRM.
The freeware software authors for programs like uTorrent and others, are VERY, VERY close to locking down P2P to be completely anonymous and encrypted without sacrificing on usability, and only a little bit in speed (if any).
How this works is that all users have a small pool (a few hundred megs) of completely encrypted data, encrypted to such an extend that even the 15.000 servers in the Pentagon basement will need 3 months just to decrypt it, and where the user has no idea what it is uploading, nor can he ever have an idea of what he is uploading. Packets for the movie you want are routed through many different users, NONE of which actually have the movie in possession, or ever had it in possession, but are just passing through some encrypted data. Furthermore, the packets are masked and it is not known where they originated. Even the IP adresses where it came from are not know, as the last host it came from is nothing more then a "hop" or a "router" in the chain of P2P hosts that data is traveling to.
And yes.... transmitting encrypted data and passing it on is completely legal. The only way the entertainment industry will be able to do something against that is to ban encryption outright, which will effectively kill the online-transactions market, in other words: shopping online securely.
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"I reject your reality and substitute my own!" |
