(David) DRM: A History of Combatting Crime and Criminals
April 12, 2009
When last we spoke, I went over the sheer power modern pirating has; pretty much anyone can do it without cost. Even consoles are not safe, though at the moment they take a little more technical finesse to pirate games for. How have companies begun to react to this?
Digital Rights Management: DRM. Essentially, it is anything which allows manufacturers to put limitations on the software (and sometimes hardware) which you buy. This ranges from forcing your game to connect online so they can check if it’s a legit copy to only allowing you to install the game three times for the rest of your life. The game companies have acted very harshly and tried to put the hammer down on pirating. Here’s an example where the game “Spore” will cease to work if it doesn’t connect to the internet in 10 days.
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/52547
The problem, of course, is what happens when you go on vacation? In the cases of games which only install three times before they stop working, what happens if you get a new computer, then have to format it a few times because of a virus? The community of gaming, like pirating, is much more savvy and aware of these things, particularly because it’s already very difficult to operate a computer for most of the population.
http://torrentfreak.com/spore-most-pirated-game-ever-thanks-to-drm-080913/
If you would take a moment to browse the title of the above link, it appears that many people have pirated Spore because of the DRM, as opposed to the DRM slowing it down! This is an amazing phenomenon, simply because we have seen many ages of censorship and cracking down on media. Comics have been neutered, as well as television, movies, and books, but this single incident has cost EA (the publishing company) many millions.
I will say, in my honest opinion that this is because of the internet. The internet has given power to the consumer, the public masses, that they have never before enjoyed. If a comic was censored you would have to either a) buy it because you like comics or b) go without any. If a television show had a very unpopular policy, let’s say that they increased the amount of commercials cutting five minutes off the show, you had a similar a or b choice. On the internet, though, you have the right to free information.
If you don’t like a company, you can pirate their games. If you want to know what a company is actually doing, searching a blog post describing the company policy can be done on the inside of 20 seconds. People have actually bought copies of Spore, found that the DRM was so harsh they couldn’t get it to work, and then pirated it so they could get a working copy!
There is an interesting repeat of history here, considering the give-and-take of companies cracking down on these crimes and the people snapping back. I have no particular citations, but look at the current anti-drug laws in the US. Many of the offenders of marijuana use in prisons are small time users, they are often not the people who poison the supply of drugs, nor are they the people who make all of the profit, nor are they the people who produce the majority of it. The laws only serve to punish the common person who wants marijuana, and leaves the true targets and drug lords untouched. It only serves to make the public angry and cost millions in dollars.
In gaming, DRM is aimed towards stopping pirates, people who crack the software so that anyone can use it with a simple download. However, the people who are most affected are the people who buy it; they will have to deal with the inconvenience of typing in serial codes and having the internet verify their copy. A true coding genius, of which there are many, will simply strip the entire setup of DRM off of the copy of the game (And they will; no company has created a DRM that wasn’t cracked in weeks, sometimes even weeks before the game was in stores!). Once they distribute it, the pirates will never ever have to deal with it, so the pirates go completely unaffected while the mass public is punished.
My point here is that these sorts of anti-criminal policies (3 strikes laws, zero tolerance, DRM, etc) rarely hit the intended targets and always indiscriminately nail the public. The public will react to this treatment and rally against them until they disappear. It’s simply that the internet allows it to happen much faster and more viscerally than in person.
In short, the culture industry can only go so far before the mass public lashes back. The power they (the Culture industry) are purported to have is great and affects the way we live, but we the people are not animals to be kicked around. On some level, they are following our rules as much as they like to believe that we are following theirs. The question that comes up, then, is, “Does the culture industry simply fill a role that we desire at our will, or does the culture industry impose its own will over ours?”
-David Kim
Your post reminded me of the music downloading programs. I can’t think of the name of the big program that went around a few years ago, but it was very popular. There was even a lawsuit about the company’s policies. (Limewire is another, similar site, though I’ve never used it and so I can’t say anything about how it works.) The program I mentioned above had the advantage of also releasing unpublished tracks, so fans could listen to music that the artists never intended for them to hear. This had a potentially positive effect for the artist, as well as a negative one. The benefit would be that potential fans might become enthralled with the music, and purchase legitimate copies. Of course, the downside is that fans don’t have to purchase legitimate copies at all. This relates back to video games because pirated games may actually encourage customers to buy legitimately subsequent games.
I’ve been propagating this book all semester after I was forced to read it for class, and even mentioned it in a post of my own. “Free Culture” by Lassig. Google it, it’s free! Everything mentioned here is discussed in great detail, that is, issues related to piracy, issues related to who controls the media, the negatives and positives or pirating, etc. In relation to what Lauren mentioned, Lassig talks about four types of pirating, one of which is the “try before you buy” type, or those that download music, video games, movies, etc. before making a purchase decision. Many companies are taking on this approach, allowing 30 day trials or similar of fully functional software, such as Adobe products. The downside as mentioned is that people may download and not pay. Of course this is inevitable, just as much as it is inevitable to have shop lifters at your local record store (Wal-Mart for many =/ ). But to respond to David’s question, I think its all a cycle, to which the current state is unbalanced, allocating the media or “culture industry” a monopoly over culture. We know what we like, but when it’s not available we move onto the next thing, unless you’re a die hard fan, in which case you would seek such out.
-Chris O.
~Lauren