Is breaking HD-DVD DRM a bad thing?
February 21st, 2007
Solveig Singleton over at IP central presents a view that breaking DRM might not be a good thing. The post pulled me up a little. I’m very happy that the DRM has been broken on the next generation of DVDs. Solveig asks why it’s a good thing and the answers to his questions are not obvious.
Is DRM bad for consumers? They’re free to walk away are they not he asks. I don’t think this is sufficient but I’m happy to be proved wrong.
First of all, it’s simple to walk away from commodity items or find substitutes. Creative works such as films are not easily substitutable – you can’t argue that if you’re unhappy with the DRM on the latest Tom Cruise film, you can just not watch it or watch the BBC instead. Each work is a little monopoly in it’s own right.
Could you simply buy the DVD instead of the High Defenition version? Sure but it’s got it’s own DRM and I challenge anyone to be able to find a VHS copy of this years oscar winners.
Secondly, the markets argument implies that DRM protected content will be cheaper since the studios will be able to charge different prices for people that want different versions of the film. But they’re clearly not even attempting to do this. There’s no version of any film available today which allows me to pay extra to copy it onto my iPod and the studios have shown no willingness to do this.
Yes it’s wrong to copy your friends DVD, but it’s not wrong to make a backup of that copy of Shrek 2 so your kids can’t destroy the original, or to move a copy to your iPod to watch during a train ride. These legal rights have been taken away by DRM and as such it should be good that it’s been broken. Don’t even get me started on region coding which is a transparent attempt at market manipulation.
People are willing to pay for entertainment as shown by the amount of money spent on DVD sales today. For some reason they’re even willing to pay more to watch it in high defenition. The studios are attempting to turn a simple purchase transaction into a one sided licience and this drives people crazy. You bought it, you own it, you can do a bunch of stuff with it as long as you don’t copy it and sell the copies. No sane person would argue with this. Why can the studios not see that?
Entry Filed under: Politics
3 Comments
Add your own1. Clayton | February 26th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Sadly commenting on my own post!
2. Steve R. | March 13th, 2007 at 1:08 am
Congratulations on getting your blog up. One of these days I will do the same, it gets to be a bit frustrating not being able to have your platform. Anyway, you shouldn’t feel so lonely.
On the DRM issue, all the aspects of how this is onerous to the consumer have not entered the public discussion yet. That unfortunately leaves the pro-DRM crowd having a “better” articulated argument. For example, the pro-DRM crowd states how the consumer is able to buy content ala-carte so that the consumer has more choices. This is pure bunk.
The consumer is actually being stripped of ALL rights. This may be a poor analogy, but think of a gallon of milk, where the gallon of milk is the bundle or rights owned by the consumer. The gallon of milk costs $4.
The content industry is now selling us that gallon of milk in increments of pints at $1.50. We can no longer by it by the gallon. So if want to utilize the “rights” of a gallon of milk, we have to spend $6.00. Each pint, in this analogy stands for transferring content from one format to another, to time-shift, to mix and match, etc.
Another issue not receiving adequate attention is what happens to material that has DRM in it when it enters the public domain? I seriously doubt the DRM would be disabled. I assume DRM will still be used to extort money from the consumer.
There is much more, but time pressess on. Good luck with your blog!
3. jer | April 1st, 2007 at 10:57 pm
First off: you don’t own the content on the DVD. You’ve purchased a license to view it, provided you’re willing to comply with the rules they’ve outlined. In the past, purchasing a movie or album has been synonymous with licensing its playback, but now that technology has finally caught up, the studios are finally able to make them separate.
That said, I do agree with you completely. The fact that I have to break the law any time I want to view a DVD on my linux computer is incredibly frustrating. The same with putting it on a portable media device or backing up a copy or whatever. If you’re reading the content of the disc in any way other than a licensed DVD player, you’ve broken the law. This is inane.
Same with region encoding. When it becomes easier to simply download something off the internet than go through the rigamarole of buying a player that can play content of a different region, it really emphasises the sillyness. It’s just enabling the black-market DVD sales, as they’ve strippe dout all the region encoding.
The really insidious thing, is that with HD-DVD and BluRay, they supposedly require specific videocards and drivers in order to play them back on a computer, which is most likely an attemtp to prevent people from ripping them. This means that you have to spend hundreds of dollars just to watch that $12 HD-DVD you bought at Target. This is just not right.
So, yes, I’m glad HD-DVD (and now BluRay as well) have been cracked, ensuring that I’ll be able to watch them on whatever platform I choose, regardless of whether they want me to use them on said platform.
From their stand-point, though, I can totally see why they’d be upset.
In addition, the security they’ve built into these Hi-Def formats requires a valid key to decrypt. Once someone has acquired this key and the body that oversees it becomes aware of it, they can revoke the key at runtime, meaning that they can cause certain players to no longer be able to decrypt it. Most likely this will be a software application, and it will just require a user to upgrade the software, but what happens when Panasonic’s key gets cracked and your component dvd player can no longer play it?
As far as the public domain question the previous commenter brought up: that shouldn’t be a problem. Content owners are doing all they can to ensure things NEVER make it to public domain. Look at Disney; they’ve successfully extended the copyrights of their content WAY beyond what copyright law intended it to be.
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