![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Stop giving us crap, and find us something interesting to buy
According to DCITA;
DRM sits at the nexus of technical, legal and commercial considerations and offers a systematic way of approaching new developments in digital content. It can be a valuable tool for multimedia creators and developers. It has the potential to reduce much of the time currently spent in locating and negotiating with copyright owners and can reduce transaction costs upstream to rightsholders and downstream to users. Most DRM systems also include features to protect content from copyright infringement.
DRM technologies are touted as a solution to the messy problems associated with copyright - there being no central registers like there are for patents and designs and trade marks.
We, the consumers/users, are told that DRM will reduce costs and those will be passed on to us. Sorry, we're no longer so gullible. Cigarettes, Petroleum. Private Healthcare Just a few examples of industries where cost savings are not passed on. But any excuse to pass on a "cost" is readily taken up.
There are many problems with DRM technologies, not just technical. Thought he technical ones aren't a bad place to start. Sony rootkits ... hijacked by malware manufacturers within a very short time - probably sooner than the true nature of Sony's DRM were made public. Apple iPods and iTunes .. oh grow up Apple. How much sleep do you thing coders lost over finding ways around the iPod's software. iTunes is big, but neither monolithic nor monopolistic. Microsoft XBox ... cheap PCs ... for Linux.
A range of groups actively advocate against DRM: http://defectivebydesign.org/, http://freeculture.org/, http://stopdrmnow.org/, http://www.eff.org/IP/fairuse/, http://stopdrm.info/ (in French) are just a few.
I doubt DRM will go away anytime soon. Creating new technologies is much easier than talking to customers. Certainly finding new ways to impose upon us, or to capture (trap?) us, is more profitable in the short term than adapting or changing old business models to take advantage of technologies already in the marketplace.
Such a short-sighted approach is typical of mundanes, but really - is it so hard to stop and learn a little? Belligerence is not the way to win friends, whatever you read last week by Dale Carnegie ...
Once again, it's easier to try to lock us into old stuff you already own, and to try to flog it to us again and again, than to do something actually innovative - to capture us with content - to provide a really compelling reason to buy your shit.