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"Cory responds to Wired Editor on DRM "

Cory boings back at Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine after Anderson repsonds to his earlier DRM rant in a post about Wired's BitTorrent article.

DRM, "Digital Rights Management," is a breaks your technology and limits your access to content that you paid for, requiring you to pay more. And more. DRM advocates with their hands in your pocket say they're protecting themselves from piracy, but "DRM is not protection. There has never been a DRM-covered file that was kept off the Internet. Ever. DRM has never once in the history of the field kept a file from appearing online, or from being booted by organized crime pirates. Despite its rhetoric on this, Hollywood is perfectly aware of how bogus the DRM-is-protection claim is...."

DRM isn't protection from piracy. DRM is protection from competition. If you believe that "much as we might want it to be otherwise, content owners still call most of the shots," then you believe that the guy who makes the record should get a veto over the design of the record player. That the film studios should be able to ban the VCR. That the recording industry should have been able to shove SDMI down all our throats and make MP3 disappear.

This is a profoundly ahistorical proposition. Never in the history of media from the dawn of the printing press right up to the invention of the DVD have we afforded this kind of privilege to incumbent rightsholders. Quite the contrary: at every turn, brave entrepreneurs have engaged in "piracy" of copyrighted works (through devices like the record player, radio, cable television and VCR) and kept at it until the law caught up with the technology.

It's different with the DVD. With the DVD, the electronics companies completely wimped out. They traded their customers to the studios for two packs of cigarettes, and the result has been a decade of stagnation in DVD players. There's no indication that movies are being released sooner or more cheaply on DVD than they were on VHS; and in fact, the release of movies on VHS was preceded by incredible, absurd hyperbole about the video-cassette's inevitable destruction of the film industry and the compelte impossibility of a movie ever being released by a studio for viewing on your VCR.

If you believe that "content owners still call most of the shots" then you believe that the studios will make movies and just not release them, they will amass a great pile of unreleased material in their Hollywood vaults and sit before the doors, arms folded, glaring at the world until it arranges itself into a more accomodating configuration. It is ridiculous. DRM hasn't convinced the studios to put new material online -- the offerings that the studios have put online are a pathetic shadow of the material one can download from the P2P networks. The studios have all the DRM in the universe at their disposal, but they're not using it to bring new material to market.

Nope, they're using it to sell you the same crap for more money....

jon posted this at 4:04 PM
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