Case in point: Steam. Steam is basically one big DRM wrapper that also prevents resale. However, one key difference is that it offers multiple advantages to users in the form of unlimited redownloads, community features, not requiring a CD, no DRM driver ugliness, banning hackers in multiplayer games, works as a decent launcher and also has an extremely convenient online marketplace. The end result is that it has been given a much warmer reception than the typical DRM scheme - people are willing to give up some of their rights in exchange for the added convenience which is a much fairer trade. I'm not saying Steam is perfect but it seems like the direction companies like EA should be going.

On the other hand, I'm very unlikely to pirate something easily available on Steam..in fact, I'm not sure I ever have. For exactly the reasons you outlined.

But Steam doesn't bother me one bit. I've not yet installed it on another machine, but my understanding is that when I do, I'll just download Steam again, re-enter my login, and wait a while for the games to sync up.

What has the world come to when the pirated version is the version that does not install spyware?

If I can't do that I download it at-will, for free, sans any sort of protection and the seller gets jack. A very simple system where (a) seller/creator doesn't do ridiculous bullshit to keep me from using their item and (b) I reward them with money.

i can understand a person purchasing a real copy of a game and then downloading a pirated version that has the DRM removed, or someone buying a CD and then downloading the same album on waffles in a variety of formats simply because it's easier/faster.

but if you don't like the DRM, wouldn't it make more sense to speak with your dollars and not purchase it? why do you feel justified in using what they created without any compensation?

Why do you think it's acceptable not to? How is it that it is OK to do some things that displease the gods of protected content creation, yet still necessary to pay them certain forms of tribute? Why should people dance to the beat of a notion that is so obviously impractical? Should a couple of very specific business models be protected from natural progression of the digital revolution? Why should the onus be placed consumers to purchase things we clearly don't need to, and not on producers to create business models that actually make sense (e.g. steam, dongles, iphone store, support contracts, server-centric software)? What is it about your ethic that makes it something other than completely arbitrary?

Because if I'm basing not purchasing it off of DRM, chances are I like everything else about it and still want the product. Gotta get it somehow!

Although I get your point, and concede that there probably isn't a significantly justifiable reason for pirating. Luckily, I've never really had to justify things to myself in terms of right/wrong so I don't suspect my strategy will change anytime soon.

That number seems awfully low, I'm having a real hard time believing this figure to be true, I just did a quick count-up of downloads on the various torrent sites I know of and I came up with about 300k, no doubt there has been more downloads when you factor in other protocols and direct downloads (eg, rapidshare type links)

I'm guessing the "research firm" probably just went to ThePirateBay and counted there - I don't think they took networks/trackers into account that aren't as recognisable as TPB.

There are a lot of people who once the file is complete, stop torrents - which would make this seeder/leecher number a lowball type figure.

I don't have any experience with games or software as the only thing I download is tv shows (only the ones I can't actually get in Australia.. I'd pay for them if I could get them) but from my experience, as soon as a show is uploaded it has a huge seeder/leecher ratio, but several days afterwards, that number appears is always considerably less.

For some anecdotal evidence, one TV show I was watching in particular had stopped being shown in Aus but within hours of it being "released" online I was seeing up to 30k seeders at times, yet several days later that number had dropped considerably down to 3k.

I just quickly typed Spore into mininova and looked at the top result by seeders and it shows the downloads as over 144k just off mininova alone, although no doubt a few of these would be incomplete, but given mininova's "market share" compared to say the rest of the torrent sharing community, the figure in the article comes across as incredibly low still.

908 Seeders 33 Leechers

and it's 12 days old.

I consider the following talk on DRM by Cory Doctorow at MSR from 2004 to be a must-read, and I do not think that age has affected its accuracy: http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

Spore's DRM does appear to suck. Windows game titles are notorious for crappy DRM. StarForce, for instance, apparently hooks both INT3 and the kernel idle loop. So, I'm going to concede Spore to the bOING bOING crowd.

But there are DRM systems that are working: iTunes, DirecTV, Blu Ray BD+.

It's an interesting CS problem and it rankles me when people are dismissive of it. Not that you were.

iTunes DRM has been broken and patched multiple times. The vast majority of its content is also available on CD/DVD.

I don't keep up with DirecTV, but I know there was at some point an active cracking community; while BD+ is still unbroken, AACS fell. These systems have been almost entirely deployed in embedded systems, which clearly makes them harder to crack. Still, the xbox360 and the wii have been cracked (can be modded).

I do not think DRM has a good track record and I think it is fundamentally wrongheaded. I don't find the current solutions to DRM that interesting -- from what I understand they just lock down as much as possible (from TCM to HDCP). However, if/when Sun's DReaM stops being a pipe-DReaM, I'll definitely pay attention.

iTunes DRM has been broken repeatedly. But the latest incarnation has survived multiple years, despite large incentive for a public break. It's been hard enough to break that what has been done has been kept private, for commercial reasons. Like it or not, it's a success story.

DirecTV had an active cracking community 7 years ago. Then they contracted a famous cryptography team to develop what appears to be a white-box crypto scheme implemented directly in hardware gates. Nobody has been able to do anything with it since. It's a major success story. What was there in 1999 wasn't so much a "community" as a cottage industry, and now it's dead.

BD+ actually has been broken. Title. By. Title. Even if that trend continues for the next several years, it's still a win for Blu-Ray, because SlySoft hasn't gotten a crack out within opening week yet, and they have to dedicate a team to refreshing their product at the whim of the publishers.

I don't have a moral concern about DRM. I'd rather use unencumbered CDs. Sure, I'd also rather not pay for satellite TV. But as a CS problem, it's really interesting. The things that people say make it "impossible" actually make it Hard. Hard problems are fun, and we learn from them.

Just to play devil's advocate, can you think of anything (reasonably popular) for sale on iTunes/Blu-ray or shown on DirecTV that can't be found free (illegally) online? What do you think about the darknet paper?

http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/darknet5.doc

What I think really happened here? This paper came out roughly a year after Ed Felten busted the SDMI watermark, and simply took his results and generalized them. Of course, SDMI is a crappy watermark; Ed Felten broke it in a matter of weeks.

My next questions are about DRM in the general context of content protection. Do you think it will ever be difficult to (find and) download an unprotected Top 40 single from the Internet? An HDTV rip of a television show? Will the "DRM ecosystem" be able to secure popular content in the future, thereby having a significantly detrimental effect on piracy? Is the security of BD+ the beginning of a trend in next-generation content protection, or an anomaly?

What I'm really trying to puzzle out is whether DRM prevents, or will prevent in the future, enough piracy (and convinces pirates to purchase? Very hard metric to quantify) to warrant the substantial inconvenience it places on legitimate customers.

That's a big part of why they work.

The trouble I think most people have in analyzing DRM is that it's not an all-or-nothing problem; it's an economic one. There will always be cammed copies of first-run movies for sale on the street and circulating on BitTorrent. But as long as it's easier to buy than to copy --- at least in the first 2 weeks of a release --- DRM is working. To achieve that, DRM vendors just need to make the cost of a break more expensive than those first couple weeks are worth in piracy costs.

I don't really have a horse in this race. I'm not sold on DRM either. I've worked professionally on both sides of this problem. What I think right now is that CS types are underestimating the next generation of DRM systems. Software and content protection is getting more sophisticated. It also dovetails more effectively with systems security than it did 10 years ago. We want locks on our platforms so they don't get enrolled in botnets; those same locks will help content providers enforce contracts.

Really? I'm a big online music buyer. I've bought well over 1000 songs online per year for the last several years, and I've never bought a song from iTunes, because I don't buy DRM-encumbered music (for both pragmatic and ideological reasons). I've bought from eMusic, AudioLunchbox, direct from artists like Radiohead and Girl Talk, Amie Street, Amazon Unbox and probably several other places that don't come to mind.

Assuming there are at least some number of people like me (and while I like to think I'm a unique flower, I'm pretty sure I'm not entirely alone), iTunes is making zero sales to some of the heaviest music buyers because of DRM. Obviously, it hasn't stopped iTunes from being the biggest online music seller...but we're still early in the online music distribution saga.

There's still plenty of time for iTunes to fall out of favor...and the longer people are exposed to the inconveniences of DRM, the more likely they are to come to distrust it and choose other options. iTunes just happens to have done it extremely well and close to transparently, as long as you're doing the things Apple thought about. But, that'll change, as more people want to put songs on their non-iPhone mobile devices, and more people want to use their non-Apple/non-Microsoft OS-based netbooks to play the songs they've "bought" from iTunes.

iTunes also had the advantage, at launch, of having as its only high profile competitors companies that were even worse than iTunes. All of the other big mainstream services were "subscription" services, where you basically got a radio station for your computer that allowed you to pick the songs, and if you stopped paying, you lost your songs. Everybody can see the stupidity in that...it takes longer to see why buying from iTunes is stupid.

So, I think it's pretty early to say iTunes hasn't been hurt by DRM, even if you assume that I'm far enough of an outlier that people like me not buying from iTunes is an acceptable trade off.

I may not matter to Apple, but this is an example of DRM degrading my experience after I paid them lots of money.

I'm responding to an argument you didn't make, but it's an argument that I think is hovering in the air around us.

It's hard to argue that the typical consumer --- the only one Apple should rationally care about --- is influenced by these issues. The iPhone is spectacularly popular, just like the iPod before it.

DRM limits the ability of the consumer, and at best it is benign. RMS is actually not being outlandish when he calls it digital restrictions management. And for what? Do they actually succeed in making it harder for people who plan on pirating to pirate? How many of these people would buy the content if they couldn't pirate it?

I think your recurring argument about "first x weeks" revenues is reasonable. But I see little benefit gained by content producers after that. All I see is a net negative for the customer. It may be more negative for me than a typical customer, but I think this difference may decrease in the future. For example, Amazon reviewers experiences with Spore :)

Is it? I've already noted a couple of cases where iTunes is hostile to users (non-iPhone MP3-capable phones and mobile devices, and netbooks running Linux, which are slowly but surely becoming more popular among "typical" consumers). I've never used iTunes so I don't know what other pains exist...but it sounds like you're aware of a few that I didn't know about. Every one of those frictions and pains is the difference between a good consumer experience and a bad one. When the balance tips, iTunes becomes the less attractive option, and all of the things that make Apple's user experience superior go out the window. For me, they never moved into the "superior" experience category, because not being able to play my music on my primary computer (which runs Linux) was a non-starter. For others, that difference is further out and perhaps not as obvious to people who only use Apple products. But, Apple market share is not that high and the small percentage it does have is not infallible. iPhone will never have a significant market share of phones that can play music (though it may be the most popular smart phone for the next year or two, even dumb phones are beginning to get MP3 players built-in), as it's too expensive for most folks. So as the next generation of phones comes along, a majority of which can play music, there's going to be an awful lot of people who can't carry their music with them, if they bought it on iTunes. I think it's a bit short-sighted to imagine that that won't have an impact.

I don't think anyone would argue that Apple hasn't done amazing things given a problematic industry (without DRM, perhaps the iTunes store could not have existed...but Amazon Unbox, and its lack of DRM, gives us a clue that maybe keeping DRM is an unnecessary and unappealing component...though Apple now has a vested interest in keeping it, since it locks folks into devices that have licensed player codecs from Apple and keeps people coming back to Apple for permission).

Anyway, my point was that iTunes loses some sales because of DRM. How many? I dunno. But I suspect it'll be more in the future.

Think of it like the Sims - easy gameplay but incredibly addictive - combined with Legos.