Vista DRM, agalmics and conspiracy theories
So I’m talking to a friend of mine about building a NAS and, possibly, a media server. We were commiserating on the state of DRM and how it limits our choices: Since I’m an iTunes user I have to use Apple TV to enjoy my media on my AV system in my living room since no other product can work with Apple DRM… dammit. By the same token, I’m not about to use Vista and its crippling of the end-user experience in the name of protecting content.
He steered me towards an ArsTechnica story about how DRM isn’t about piracy and is, in fact, a way of creating false scarcities in an effort to ensure traditional revenue channels. Of course, the flies in the face of my growing admiration for agalmics in relation to digital media of all types. I mean, c’mon: I can perfectly reproduce any digital thing I want at little or no cost… so why are we applying traditional economic models here?
The two arguments I hear the most go thusly:
- If you are not paying someone for every digital copy of media you are stealing.
- The content creators would make no money without a structure for generating revenue.
These are both a bit stinky:
- Am I stealing when multiple people come over and watch the DVD that I purchased, or listen to the music that I own? What if I lend it to them? What if, heaven forbid, I make a copy for myself because CDs have a tendency to not survive for very long? What if I bought a movie on DVD and want to enjoy it on my iPod, or stream it from my in-house NAS to my TV? None of that is stealing.
- I differentiate here between content creators and content producers. Content creators are the actual artists who, y’know, write stuff; content producers are the ones who distribute and try to control all that content… in this case the RIAA. Who would we want to protect, the creators or the producers? The creators of course. Who does our current system protect? The producers!
But I digress… I’ve heard people question why Microsoft would bow to the RIAA on this since, really, it’s Microsoft that should be in control of this relationship (since it owns 95% of the machines in the market it can use its position to dictate to everyone else how they’re gonna play in that market). Instead, though, MS says, “Okay, we’ll make everything more fragile and jump through all these hoops and force all the hardware makers to jump through these fragile little hoops as well.” Why is that?
I think it’s the side benefit to MS that makes this interesting: Vista’s content-protection scheme squeezes out the open source hardware support necessary for people to run open-source OSes on their desktops.
Since open source hardware drivers, by definition, can’t keep proprietary content protection schemes a secret, as required by the licenses, and because the licenses themselves cost money… no more hardware support for open source OSes. Microsoft gets a bit of a win on this one.
But where are the consumers in all this? Nowhere.