« The Ohio Vote: "Kerry votes switched to Bush and ballots pre-punched for Bush" | Main | "Cory responds to Wired Editor on DRM " » Cory on Wired on BitTorrentCory Doctorow on Wired Magazine's article about Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent p2p file-sharing software. Cory takes issue "where Clive talks about Microsoft DRM being useful to 'keep content out of pirate hands'"... ...there is not a single piece of content in the history of the universe that has been "kept out of pirate hands" (i.e. kept off the Internet, or prevented from being stamped out in pirate CD factories abroad) by DRM. It's a weird kind of Big Lie strategy by the DRM people to talk about how DRM can prevent "piracy" when there has never, ever been an example of this happening.and later It's a statement that's so categorically untrue, it seems to come from a parallel universe with different laws of physics and economics. BitTorrent proves the futility of DRM as surely as DRM turns honest customers into studio-hating downloaders.Cory also discusses the use case for BitTorrent: I bought a Sopranos Season Three DVD set for a friend's Christmas this year. When the friend opened the gift on her Christmas holiday in France, the discs wouldn't play in her hotel's French DVD player; nor would they play in the on-site English PowerBook -- because the discs had DRM. At that point, the rational thing to do would have been to sell the discs on Amazon and just download Season Three using BitTorrent -- the studios have rigged the game so that you get a superior product (e.g., something you can actually watch) when you download bootlegs from BitTorrent, and they actively punish customers who buy their products instead of downloading them. [Link] jon posted this at 9:30 AM |
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