DRM is dying

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

I dislike a world with only bad news, so I will post some good news here, and the title to this thread is good news.

Yahoo! Music General Manager, Ian Rogers has come out and said that Yahoo Music will no longer participate in any DRM scheme. The bands, Nine Inch Nails, and Radiohead, have also come out very strongly against DRM, and Radiohead is going to be selling their own non-DRMed songs. Nine Inch Nails is thought to be seriously considering the same course of action, and the leader of the band has publicly, on-stage at a one of their concerts, told their fans to steal their content. Amazon.com has also come out with a DRM-free music store.

EMI, which is starting to sell non-DRMed content, is said to be inline to distribute CDs for Radiohead because of just that fact.

I was once told by a proponent of DRM that my ideas of how to stop piracy were bad because they changed the entire dynamics of the music industry. Well, to that I say, that I know very good definition of insanity. That definition goes something like this, "Insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results". That means, if you want to stop piracy, you can't keep on using methods that have proven to have failed over and over again. Human nature isn't going to change any time soon, so trying to fight human nature is insanity. Any effort expended in trying to fight it, which is what DRM and the DMCA are, is wasted effort that is bound to fail. Use human nature to your advantage, and you will succeed.

It looks like there are some pretty powerful forces in the music industry that agree with me that if you change the dynamics of the industry away from a failed business model, sales and profits will increase.

What brings all this up again? I bought the Perl CD Bookshelf from O'Reilly books. Perl is a multi-platform scripting language, but O'Rielly's CD is only legally readable from Windows computers. If I want to read it from my Linux computers, well, I have to act illegally to access the content I just spent almost $100 to legally purchase. I have tried the CD on several different Windows computers and it has worked on every one of them. It works on none of my Linux computers. That is complete and utter BS if you ask me. I don't know if I will ever purchase another book from O'Reilly. They are two-faced. They claim to be open source friendly, make it a point to publish a lot of books on open source technology, and then sell content in this format. We will see how they respond to the rather blistering email I sent them.

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Good. I have netflix and decided today to try to watch some movies online and spent about two hours fighting with DRM errors, before I gave up.

 

I have to agree. These companies wonder why their sales and profits are down, and they put out content that fails to work in a lot of situations. Who wants to buy something which they cannot know in advance will work? Only an idiot puts that kind of stuff on the market and expects sales to increase, not decrease.....