25 Arguments for the Elimination of Copy Protection

I kept wincing while writing this article. I suspect you'll do the same while reading it.

By  |  Monday, October 13, 2008 at 3:25 am

7. August 25th 2007.

That’s when a glitch with Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage activation servers–caused, the company later said, by a software update gone awry–resulted in thousands of legitimate, paid-for copies of Windows failing the WGA validation test and being inaccurately accused of being pirated. According to Microsoft, 12,000 users were affected. That’s a tiny sliver of the hundreds of millions of folks who use Windows, but it’s also 12,000 more paying customers than should ever have their time wasted and their honesty questioned by a flaky copy-protection system.

6. No MP3, no digital music revolution.

When the Fraunhofer Society invented MP3, they made the format capable of squeezing reasonably good-sounding music into small amounts of storage–and they didn’t burden it with copy protection. Consumers embraced it; the entertainment industry didn’t, as witness its attempt to kill Diamond’s Rio, the first popular MP3 player, and the fact that so much music still isn’t available in MP3 form. Can there be any doubt that digital music would be nowhere near as evolved today if MP3 had sported copy protection? Apple sells billions of songs today–all of which the music industry makes money from–but it was MP3s ripped from CD that made the iPod the iPod in the first place.

5. Steve Jobs is not a fan.

Published in February, 2007, the Apple CEO’s “Thoughts on Music” memo calls for an end to DRM for music downloads. When the CEO of by far the most successful purveyor of DRM-protected music cogently calls for its end, it’s time to take notice. [Photo from Wikipedia by Matthew Yohe]

4 It can be downright dangerous.

Especially when the companies behind it appear to have no respect whatsoever for the privacy and security of their customers. Yup, I’m thinking about the infamous Sony BMG rootkit scandal of 2005, which involved audio CDs that installed anti-copying software that made fundamental, hard-to-reverse changes to Windows computers that left them more vulnerable to hacker attacks, and didn’t tell users they were doing it. It wasn’t just people who planned to try and copy CDs who had to clean up after the mess: It was everyone who stuck an affected disc into their PC’s CD tray. And was fortunate enough to learn of the damage those discs could do.

3. It turns fair use into fantasy.

In 1976, Universal and Disney sued Sony to stop a new consumer electronics gadget known as the VCR. The case went on for eight years and went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court–which ruled in 1984 that copyright law’s fair use doctrine protected consumers’ right to buy VCRs and use them to record and time-shift commercial TV. That was before 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act came along and made it a violation of U.S. law to circumvent DRM in all but a few narrowly-defined instances. Those instances don’t include actions that are the 21st-century equivalents of what timeshifting was in its era, such as putting the contents of a DVD you’ve purchased onto an iPod. A lot of innovative products will never hit the market, because copyright law simply won’t be on their side.

2. It will leave our grandchildren a little poorer.

If you’ve got 78rpm records or old 8mm movies your family bought decades ago, it’s still reasonably easy to enjoy ’em. But chances are that it will be hard-to-impossible to play back most or all of today’s DRM-burdened music and movies in a couple of generations–new devices won’t support ancient copy protection, and the old devices that once did won’t be able to if DRM servers get shut down. Which they almost certainly will be–even Apple’s FairPlay is unlikely to live forever. Yes, some of this stuff will be available in other forms by then, but not all of it. And while the DMCA permits the cracking of encryption when playback devices that support it are obsolete, it’s hard to imagine that anyone will have the time, interest, and technical chops to set every DRM-protected piece of content free.

1. It makes paying customers suffer. A lot, in some cases.

I used to think that the name of the Free Software Foundation’s DefectiveByDesign.org anti-copy protection campaign was a tad hyperbolic. These days, I’m not so sure. So much copy protection has caused so many headaches for so many people who just want to use the products they’ve bought for legitimate purposes that it’s hard to come to any conclusion but this one: Copy protection by its very definition makes the products it’s applied to worse. Almost all of it is basically disrespectful to paying customers; almost none of it truly prevents pirates from doing what they will. Can we all agree there’s something profoundly wrong with technology that punishes honest people more than it does thieves?

Let’s wind things up with a T-Poll:

[CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE: This article’s title was inspired by Jerry Mander’s 1978 book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. I haven’t read it, and don’t support the end of TV…but I like the name.]

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26 Comments For This Post

  1. John Says:
    October 13th, 2008 at 5:54 am

    These are not 25 arguments. This is merely a list of 25 points illustrating some of the horror stories in the DRM / copy protection history… They’re all a consequence of the major problem behind how technical protection measures have been approached assuming the users were criminals. This assumption is wrong and consequently the technical solutions for DRM have led to the current battlefield.
    So the true question is not how to ditch DRM and copy protection but rather how to approach the problem with the right assumption and consequently the right business model.
    Such an assumption postulates to put the user back where he belongs in the center of the model and to trust him (the criminals are not who the media industry thinks they are). In doing so, you can re-think DRM in a totally opposite way enhancing user experience (which to the best of my knowledge is a key success factor in this industry).
    Work has been done in this area but the media industry just doesn’t want to see it and is still on a witch hunt trying to preserve an industry that has changed so much.
    Glad to talk about it if you want…

  2. Patrick Says:
    October 13th, 2008 at 8:44 am

    Yes, the consumer is hurt by copy protection schemes. And yes, determined pirates are at most slowed down by copy protection schemes. But there are two solutions:
    1. Companies stop implementing copy protection;
    2. Pirates stop pirating.

    You’ve completely ignored solution #2.

  3. Curtis Carmack Says:
    October 13th, 2008 at 1:33 pm

    Patrick,

    Your argument makes one of the key points: if DRM does not stop pirates (and it most certainly does not), then why use it? Overall, its primary effect is to alienate and anger legitimate consumers.
    I don’t think it’s possible to completely stop pirates, but pretty much all the $$$ spent on DRM should instead be spent on ferreting out and prosecuting the pirates.

    Curt Carmack

  4. Glenn Fleishman Says:
    October 18th, 2008 at 3:23 pm

    “In April of 2008, MSN gave up on trying to sell music wrapped in DRM and decided to shut down the servers tht made the copy protction function. It informed customers that they’d lose the ability to move songs they’d “paid” for to new decices. And only decided to refund their money after a consumer backlash.”

    I don’t believe they offered to refund money. (Also a typo: decices.) They agreed to continue running authorization servers indefinitely. I was unable to find any news story about MSN Music noting a refund.

  5. Tom Says:
    October 18th, 2008 at 4:54 pm

    Patrick, surely even if your solution #2 comes to pass, that won’t help at all unless solution #1 does as well? Or in other words, #2 isn’t a solution: it’s simply a way to encourage the companies to do #1.

  6. Ryan Says:
    October 19th, 2008 at 4:38 am

    Anything built by man can be destroyed by man. Simple enough.

    Pirates are thieves, if you can’t stop thieves stealing tangible objects, what makes files any different?

    DRM does nothing but hurt the consumer, and the company.

  7. LKM Says:
    October 19th, 2008 at 5:03 am

    @Patrick: DRM isn’t here to stop piracy, as evidenced by the fact that it never has. Pirated copies of Spore were available before Spore was even on sale. The actual reason DRM exists is to prevent second-hand sales. Hence, even if all pirates stopped pirating (and why honest customers would be held accountable for piracy, as you seem to do, I do not understand), DRM would remain firmly in place.

  8. thomas downing Says:
    October 20th, 2008 at 5:36 am

    I’ve come to the conclusion that DRM (in most cases) is NOT
    about preventing illegal copying of copyrighted content.
    That makes no sense, not even to the non-technical, not at
    this date.

    DRM (in most cases) is about increasing revenue from legitimate
    retail consumers. Make them pay more than once. Want it on
    two devices? Pay twice. Want it more than N times? Pay again.
    Want access to the extra whizbang that’s already in there?
    Pay extra. Want to share it via home networking with you
    family? Pay a network fee. And so on….

  9. SAB Says:
    October 20th, 2008 at 7:22 am

    Your logic is bad;
    Copy protection exists
    Piracy exists
    Removal of Piracy does not mean Copy Protection will cease to exist, nor does it provide incentive to remove copy protection, if anything it would provide justification for all that has gone on before piracy ended; i.e. “See? Copy protection killed piracy”.
    Removal of copy protection does not mean piracy will kill the industry. If there is no mass-market music industry then there is no-one to pirate from. Shooting the golden goose is not an option.
    Enforcing the laws by prosecuting those who make money by stealing and reselling the works of others is where the focus should be. When you can walk into a plaza and buy pirated DVDs with poorly made paper labels that are simply scans of the original artwork, you have a real problem, one which copy protection fails to address, one which the law fails to prosecute with any meaningful punishment.

  10. Martin Says:
    October 20th, 2008 at 9:49 am

    I have to agree with other commentors on this…the purpose of DRM and the DMCA is not to stop piracy. It is to take away whatever fair use rights consumers have, and eventually) to force them to pay again evey single time they play a legitimatley purchased DVD, CD, or movie/music file, or use legitimatley purchased software.

    Also, if some of the above mentioned products were not (consumers feel) overpriced, some of the incentive to buy pirated copies would be gone. I realize that there are some who would never buy, but they cannot be counted as a lost sale.

  11. Xanaqui Says:
    October 20th, 2008 at 3:02 pm

    @LKM-

    I’m under-convinced. A lot of DRM does little against second-hand sales, although if you are correct, that would be a violation of the first sale doctrine, at least in most jurisdictions in the U.S.A..

    Frankly, my negative experiences with DRM have been the following:
    1) The inability to change a work for my personal use (it would be nice to actually be able to use certain alternate/extra scenes from movies in my copy of said movie).
    2) The inability to use a product at all (I’m recalling one particular game where it continually asked for a wheel code, and apparently I occasionally entered in the information incorrectly).
    3) The inability to use a product due to the loss of some information or an artifact (in one case, I ended up buying the product again – in the other cases, I just threw it out).

  12. Calipip4 Says:
    October 20th, 2008 at 7:47 pm

    Most people have the whole idea of DRM’s like SecuRom and the X amount of activations all wrong.
    It’s not just a simple DRM, it installs separately to the game without your knowledge…if you un-install the game…it DOESN’T un-install the SecuRom, which makes it a rootkit (malware), so if you don’t know this, you will think it’s gone because it hides in “hidden folders” and in your “Registry”, not to mention disabling of some AV’s ,the damage it does to some PC hardware, and stops you from being able to use legal software that SecuRom has been programmed to black band. EA deserves to be sued over this issue alone.
    The other issue I have with this type of Draconian DRM is that when you can’t afford the internet anymore, you can no longer Play a Game you Paid for, and that is wrong…most games aren’t played over the Net so why do we have to be connected to it. ( It’s to Spy on PC users, that’s why it Phones Home with Encrypted Data.)
    There is a lot bigger picture than what we’re seeing here right now, this is only a baby step to the end plan. This has nothing to do with piracy, because we know that the pirates will never be stopped and it is proven once again with the amount of torrented copies of Spore downloaded so far in just one month. Why is EA adamant about continuing to use SecuRom when they know it’s not doing what they say it was intended for and is only affecting the paying customers? I will not buy anything that is put out by EA or Sony anymore, even though I would love to buy Sims2 IKEA, Sims2 Apartment Life, Spore, Red Alert 3 and many more, but I just don’t trust EA or Sony. All they have done for the last 18 months is lie through their teeth to save their neck and not a bit of concern for their paying customers.
    I’m a member at Reclaim Your Game: http://www.reclaimyourgame.com/ – and we’re dedicated to helping other gamers with their issues with SecuRom and get info out to educate the public.
    So please feel free to visit our site and see for yourself.

  13. Ronny Says:
    October 21st, 2008 at 2:29 am

    Most DRM is not there to prevent piracy. It is there to prevent *trivial* piracy, most notably the practice of copying something and giving it to a friend, as could be done fairly easily with audio tapes and CDs.

    While the knowledgeable can get around the DRM and make a copy anyway, for many people doing so is far more work than it’s worth.

    I loathe DRM primarily because it severely cripples my ability to make effective backups. If my DRMed computer crashes or my DRMed music player dies, the protected software/music on it may be lost forever.

  14. G Fernandes Says:
    October 21st, 2008 at 3:46 am

    Patrick:
    [QUOTE]But there are two solutions:
    1. Companies stop implementing copy protection;
    2. Pirates stop pirating.[/QUOTE]

    The existence of piracy is a market-signal saying that the goods on sale are priced above a price that the market perceives as reasonable. There have been many a thesis by many an economist that more than adequately explains piracy AND slams the likes of copy-protection (this can be expanded to include patents, which are copy-protection on technology) as actually detrimental to innovation and better products at acceptable price-points.

  15. Adam Jones Says:
    October 21st, 2008 at 9:12 am

    There will be pirating, as long as college students are unable to afford media, they will use their spare time and ingenuity to violate copy protection, under the belief that their actions are a victimless crime; as long as two people can fall in live in this crazy world of ours, they will make mix tapes for each other; as long as kids hit puberty and have the urge to watch taboo content off the web; and as long as countries with poor IP protection have enormous markets for copies. Hence, there will always be pirating.

  16. CRG Says:
    October 29th, 2008 at 9:42 pm

    As a general rule, honest people don’t like to be treated like thieves. So if you treat all of your customers like thieves, the honest ones will get sick of being treated that way and will stop being your customers.

    Thieves are used to being treated like thieves, so treating them that way won’t stop them at all.

  17. Nightwish Says:
    October 30th, 2008 at 5:59 am

    Not only does Spore’s DRM invalidate resells, you also lose access to your games in case your account at the EA forums gets banned.
    How nice.

  18. Sean Says:
    November 6th, 2008 at 10:38 pm

    Consider one of the simpler forms of “copy protection” that’s actually “market protection”: DVD regions.

    I want to buy a perfectly legitimate copy of a $30 Japanese DVD. Oh, it won’t play in my player? That’s OK, a pirate will sell me a $5 copy.

    Unlike a lot of other arguments, in this case it’s the vendor who doesn’t get their fair share. The pirate gets paid, and the customer gets what he wanted. Sure, he doesn’t have the legitimate license to privately view the DVD, but who reads that crap anyway…

  19. Nighteye Says:
    November 10th, 2008 at 5:42 am

    25 arguments, and it’s still not complete. So I’ll add one:

    26: DRM can cause irreparable damage to customers’ PCs.
    As evidenced by Starforce, a DRM scheme that causes some DVD drives to stop functioning correctly. I still have a game I got packaged along with my video card that as of yet I haven’t been able to play. When I installed it (and it installed Starforce without my knowledge or consent), my DVD drive immediately started making weird noises and stopped recognising DVDs. Uninstalling the game and Starforce made no difference – the drive kept malfunctioning. I’ve had to replace the DVD drive, and now I’m not going to risk my new DVD drive by exposing it to Starforce.

    Thus, because of the DRM, my legitimately owned game is rendered effectively unplayable. I paid money for the game, I paid money to replace the DVD drive broken by the game’s DRM, and I still can’t play the game.

  20. frogger626 Says:
    December 5th, 2008 at 10:05 pm

    I don’t like copy protection much myself- indeed, I am on a complete boycott of all sony products because of the rootkit disaster. Plus, they’ve been caught using pirated software themselves. I think DRM in music is pointless, but in games, it is necessary. Look at World of Goo- published with no copy protection, at all, zip, zero, nada. 90% piracy rate. Granted, those numbers are probably way bloated by their own admission, but still. There will be some people who won’t play- or at least, buy- games that have copy protection, but if they can make it so I can use my software that I paid for without undue stress, I can make due. I’m almost- alllllmost- to getting cracks for legit games I bought firsthand from the store. It’s pathetic, and it shouldn’t happen. Steam is good. It’s hard to break, and it’s easy to get used to, uninstall, whatever. Sony, look at Valve! Or better yet, stick all your stuff on Steam, instead. And SecuRom, on GTA4 on Steam? What the heck are they THINKING!

  21. Dave Says:
    December 13th, 2008 at 7:00 pm

    Wait, did you just call Spore a “masterpiece” and a “landmark game”? Where did you get that idea from? It’s an awfully shallow game – it’s B-grade at best. It was just hyped by a marketing machine to be something it’s not. Did you say that, just because that’s what the company’s marketing said about the game?

    Also, you wrote:

    “The copy protection which EA defended but dialed back after the consumer revolt.”

    EA did not “dial back” copy protection. They just increased the allowed number of activations slightly. The copy protection is still in full force, and is in no way “dialed back”.

    Again, this reeks of the same uncritical swallowing of EA’s propaganda as the praise heaped on Spore above.

  22. avoidz Says:
    December 14th, 2008 at 7:22 am

    I had Lenslok on a Sinclair Spectrum game I bought back in the 1980s. I must have played it two or three times since I could never read the code on my TV screen. It made me so mad at the time.

    I still have the offending piece of plastic to remind me of the awfulness of copy protection.

  23. FredW Says:
    January 3rd, 2009 at 1:09 am

    Media wants to be free or almost free. There are many things in the world that were scarce at one point in time. Where a small cartel controlled the market and the price. There was a demand for the product. There were those who were willing to steal to get the product, yes even governments. In every case, there was a market where someone realized that they could turn a profit if they offered the item at a fare price.

    Until it is offered at a fair price, piracy abounds. That is a fact of life. It does not matter if we are talking spices like nutmeg (the Dutch once owned all the islands where it grew) and other spices, to things unions control (like shirt buttons). History is full of cartels that have come to an as the price of the item adjusts to some value not out of proportion to the cost of its production.

    With the advent of the computer and the Internet, music, video and books all want to adjust to the cost of free or near free. You can call it piracy, you can make laws against it. In the long run, the markets adjust and people find business models to sell a product at a price where people are not willing to pirate it.

    For music, the price is somewhere less than a dollar a song. Apple is selling a lot at this price. There is still lots of piracy. The market demands at least one of three things. (Using Music as an example)

    The first, would be that even with a price of almost nothing. Such as mp3’s for 5 cents each. Those that produce them could make enough of a profit that it is worth there time to continue to create the product.

    The second, would be that with so much “content” out there, it would be worthwhile to pay some service that would be worthwhile to access the same content for almost free. Such some system where you pay a fee to be a member and they make recommendations about new music you might be interested in, and they pass some of the cash back to the content producer.

    The third, is that there is some other tangible product that can’t be replicated cheap, with good overhead that music would sell. Concert tickets to see a band, tee-shirts, autographed items. Someone listens to “free” music, discovers a band they like, and buy other things at a premium price, thus covering the cost of the item. Think of an MP3 the same way you think of junk mail. No one would pay for junk mail. Junk mailers send it out because it is cheep and promotes the sale of some product they make enough money off of to justify what it cost to do junk mailings.

    Right now, just because we have not figured out how to turn a good solid profit on reading material, video and audio that longs to sell for not much above what it costs to distribute. Does not mean that there is not a way to do it. It will be done at some point that is the way markets work. If you sell it for too much, there will be a market for someone who can provide it for you just above the cost of producing it.

  24. Austin Says:
    January 5th, 2009 at 2:32 pm

    Copy protection is like gun-free zones and anti-gun laws. It doesn’t stop criminals from using them. They’re not worried about breaking another law! It just stops (or increases the difficulty) of people who could use it likes it’s meant to be used. (In this case, possibly protecting people from getting hurt because a law-abiding citizen used it to stop the criminal.) It doesn’t prevent pirates from cracking it (even if breaking more laws to do so), it just prevents the customer to be able to enjoy it as it was meant to be.

  25. ButtPyrite Says:
    March 6th, 2009 at 6:06 am

    Best way to kill DRM, fight back!

    ThePirateBay.com – simply put, never pay for digital anything, ever!

    The rest of you who don’t like it, can Suck. My. Rooster.

  26. B Says:
    July 21st, 2009 at 11:27 am

    Here’s my beef with copy protection: it’s not the creators that reap the benefits, it’s the distributors. All the money the RIAA got from suing people went to the RIAA, not a single cent for the artists who create it. These companies exercise the ‘rights’ over ideas they did not create.

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