Miscellaneous > Applications
DRM
Faust:
quote:They will move on to the act that costs only 5 bucks or so, and there will always be free content as well.
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Unfortunately competition doesn't work to reduce prices if all the companies involved get greedy. It's like with the petrol station companies in Australia - they all decided to jack the prices up so they got good profits, and because they _all_ decided to do it they were happy. Now they wont lower prices because even though this may give them a higher amount of customers, they don't want to rock the boat. And if a new mon and pop station comes out with reasonably priced petrol, the big companies in that area just start selling petrol at a loss until the mom and pop station goes under. Then they go back to normal prices. It is a good idea for music - really people should be paying for good music, it is an artists only livelihood. And its not like you can "improve" art so there is no parallel to free software. I'm just a bit worried that record companies will use this to hold CD prices at their horrible values and still end up shafting the artist - $30 AUS for a CD, costs them less than $3 to make and the artist gets what, 5 cents a CD? 10 cents if they're lucky? Advertising costs don't cut it either, they're are plenty of record labels doing perfectly well without the record moguls level of advertising cashflow. The radio has always been the best method of advertising music and that has always just required giving a radio station your CD. I'm happy for the DRM to be in place on artistic works if I can be assured the big companies won't use it to shaft the consumer - but I don't think we can trust the big companies.
Doctor V:
What you have described, all big companys in an industry colluding to keep prices high, is what the recording industry has been doing for ages, which is why we see almost 20 bucks for a CD that takes penniies to make. I don't think DRM is going to change this in any way. It will give them the ability to continue this with online sales, as opposed to not providing online sales at all. Competition will still exist on 2 fronts. They will have to compete with their own contents that are illegally circulating online with p2p. Meaning they will have to make content that is above and beyond just the music, and make it at a price fair enough so that it will sell dispite the free contents. I just don't see them stopping p2p anytime soon, its too widespread and decentralized. The next front from competition is from indys, and smaller record labels. Nothing the big labels can do will stop the small labels and indys from making content and either selling or giving it away online. Lately, smaller labels have been doing very very well, and will probably keep growning. DRM *Might* even help the smaller labels and indys by giving them a way to market their content without help from Tower Records and MTV.
flap:
No. Digital Restrictions Management is a bad thing, full-stop. No-one has the right to tell you not to copy.
quote:DRM protected material
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"Protected" is a progaganda term in this context. You can't protect a work of art; you can only stop people from enjoying it. That's the opposite of protection. If anything "protects" works, it's free licences like the GPL and the free art licence.
Doctor V:
quote:Originally posted by flap:
No. Digital Restrictions Management is a bad thing, full-stop. No-one has the right to tell you not to copy.
"Protected" is a progaganda term in this context. You can't protect a work of art; you can only stop people from enjoying it. That's the opposite of protection. If anything "protects" works, it's free licences like the GPL and the free art licence.
--- End quote ---
One thing to note, DRM will not prevent anyone from copying anything, it will just prevent people from viewing the copied material without a licence. And actually some companys want their work to be copied and even use P2P networks to spread their work out.
While letting a work be available to anyone free of charge certainly ensures that it will never completely die out, some works take millions of dollars to produce, movies for example. And if a company gives the work away for free, they might not make a profit off it. And that would stop them from being able to produce anything else. A work is really going to be destroyed if it is never poduced at all. And if somthing is really good, its not going to remain bottled up forever. As soon as it looses it newness the content owners will release it in several different formats eventually. That or someone will break the encryption and set it loose on P2P. Their is no perfect encryption and when encryption is broken, DRM is broken.
Since the term 'protected' can be ambigious in this context, I'll say 'licenced' content from now on.
V
flap:
quote:One thing to note, DRM will not prevent anyone from copying anything, it will just prevent people from viewing the copied material without a licence
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Oh great, so we can copy but not use it?
quote:While letting a work be available to anyone free of charge
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Once again, I'm not saying that artists should give away their work for free. This is about restrictions on users copying.
quote:That or someone will break the encryption and set it loose on P2P. Their is no perfect encryption and when encryption is broken, DRM is broken.
--- End quote ---
So you're saying DRM measures are ok because they can be cracked anyway?
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