Rubénerd!

Now, this is all for a product you as a consumer have taken the time and effort to pay and bring home to your house. In other words, you bought the [DVD] legally, but the studios still petulantly want you to hear them whining about piracy, and have no evident interest in giving you control to use it as you wish.

Bill Wyman commenting in Slate about DVDs. I think this argument can be made about most so-called legal distribution channels, whether it be optical media with unskippable FBI warnings (as I blogged in 2006), or downloaded media with DRM, or playing media with HDCP.

Cheapskates will always pirate content, but a growing number of consumers do so simply because the legitimate product is less convenient, or timely. It's their beloved free market at work; media companies aren't making products people want, and they only have their greed and short-sightedness to blame, not the internet.

Unfortunately with Digital Restriction Management systems that's simply not true.

It was another one of those "I knew it wouldn't work but I was hoping it would" kind of situations. Amazon has released a MP3 download service that has no Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) tacked on and unlike all the other so called "iTunes killers" it is a pleasure to use.

And surprise surprise you need an American postal address before you can finish the transaction! Yay!

Seriously can music companies really be angry over illegal downloads if they don't care about their customers overseas? The local Singaporean music association has their painfully embarrassing "Be HIP" campaign which does nothing to create new methods of distribution which clearly people want and would use, then blames us. Pure genius.

In the criminal justice systems of the countries I have lived in (and given my server logs, most probably yours too) it's not only accepted that you are innocent until proven guilty, it's the law.

DRM, or digital restrictions management is a series of technological measures implemented by paranoid corporations to protect them from the biggest evil force in the world: consumers. Give a consumer the freedom to use the content in the way it was originally intended to be used and they'll end up just ripping you off and not use your technology to use said content right? Horror of horrors!

This arrogant position of most media companies will be their undoing eventually, but in the meantime it just bugs me that they're taking advantage of consumers and taking away our rights that are written in law and unwritten in common decency.

Steve Jobs from Apple even admitted that he wouldn't be using DRM in iTunes if media companies were reasonable. I'm a tad skeptical, but at least he said that instead of nothing.

Now there seems to be some legitimate reasoning behind DRM. By theoretically preventing the copying of media they can protect themselves from piracy. The problem is DRM is rarely used for this purpose; instead of protecting themselves media companies seem instead to be using it so they can re-sell you the same content over and over again. Why let someone buy media to play on their TV, their portable media player, their phone and in their cars when you can sell it over again for each one?

But the part the really boils my blood is that by using DRM companies are sending out a clear message: they don't trust us with their content. They assume we're all out to destroy them, and that we have nothing but malicious intent. They're treating us like little kids; it's beyond contempt.

DRM: Guilty until proven innocent!

It's Rant Thursday! The Commercial Music Industry, not adapting to new business models, overpricing, why DRM is a joke, music subscription services stink, iTunes, and are they going to wake up before they kill themselves? Ha!

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