Monday, October 02, 2006

Mark Your Calendar: Day Against DRM (Oct. 3rd) Yeah, Today.


Defective By Design is/has organized a "Day Against DRM". DRM of course is the plaque of modern (digital) media death, and is the product of big business. While DRM in theory is good, in that you want to protect your hark work and created materials, when it steps over the boundaries (as it always does) and will not let end users manage their own content is when it becomes problematic. By manage I mean move your content (ie. music, and movies) to another device or computer. Let's say you buy all this music and movies on your desktop computer but now you want to move said content over to you notebook for a trip, you can't because of the DRM. Or how about your computer crashes, and you buy a new one, even if you backed everything up you be hard pressed to be able to re-license your content for you new computer. Now some companies do make it easier that others, Apple for instance, let's you "authorize" up to 5 computer at a time to share your purchased content throughout.

Now on the flipside, DRM to some degree is necessary. Without it there would be mass pirating of (digital) media, like there is now with CD's and DVD's. One thing the copyright holders do have to realize is that most of the time the people that pirate their content these (pirates, argh!) would/will not buy said content anyway. I'm not suggesting that this has any impact on the DRM debate but with all these companies claiming how much billions of dollars they lose due to piracy, they in fact are not losing half that amount. For instance if someone rents/borrows/downloads a movie with the soul intent of copying it they were never planning on purchasing it. So by that person copying their (copyright holder) movie, and not receiving any money for is a moot point because it is money they were not going to see anyway. Again, not to say that this justifies the copying in anyway, it does suggest that the record companies and movie studios aren't losing as much as they claim they are "losing".




(Via: DefectiveByDesign)

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