DRM Ignorance is Expensive

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As with many others here I have a complete hatred of DRM. My hatred began after the first $100+ I spent on iTunes a few years ago only to find out that the music is essentially useless if I ever wanted to port it to a different platform.

Since then I haven’t purchased a single bit of DRM content. Period.

With regards to music, I’ve recently discovered a great way of getting all the DRM free music you want at virtually no cost… my public library! The library even has an online reservation system where I can reserve up to 30 CD’s at a time and they’ll shoot me an email when they are ready to be picked up; usually within 24 hours.

Living DRM-Free :slight_smile:

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None of you are thinking like the average consumer. My kid sister doesn’t care if the music she buys has DRM or not, she wants the song, she buys it, and it plays on her iPod without any problems.

The average Xbox 360 user has no issues with buying things from Live and playing them on their box. In fact they probably never take the Xbox from their house, or even conciously think of using their profile on someone else’s box.

Bottom line, the people reading this blog may care about DRM and all the impacts that come with it, but the average consumer (which probably accounts for 90+ percent of consumers) could care less about the copy protection as long as it works like they expect it to, and since they aren’t doing anything out of the ordinary everything just works, it works well, and they are content.

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Microsoft’s approach to XBox DRM is typical of Microsoft: Over done with little comprehension of how it might affect the user. This is the company that foisted Clippy on us for years, and then proceeded with each release of Microsoft Office to make it harder and more difficult to shut him off. When Microsoft gets an earwig of an idea lodged into their brains, they practically drop everything else and work on the idea until it makes the Mandelbrot set look simple in comparison.

Someone at Microsoft thought “Hey, we have to have DRM on the XBox, so people can buy games over the Internet, and not share them with everyone. Otherwise, all the gaming companies will refuse to make XBox games. I wonder how complex and unpleasant I can make our DRM implementation?”

As far as DRM goes, iTunes probably has the most “reasonable”. You can take a DRM tune and burn it DRM free into an Audio or MP3 CD. This can then be played in a car, stereo, or even uploaded back into iTunes as a DRM free song. Plus, you can share your music with up to 5 other iTunes instances – even over the Internet. Also, about 25% to 30% of the songs on iTunes are now sold without DRM and for the same 99 cents. Unfortunately, the same cannot be done with movies or TV shows.

I don’t think DRM is the future. As the music industry is quickly finding out, it simply doesn’t work. Honest users who wouldn’t dream of stealing the content find their lives made miserable with the DRM while pirates easily strip the DRM off and make gobs of money. That’s why more and more music is being sold without DRM.

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Hmm, I’ve been through 4 XBox 360s. Each one has been replaced by Microsoft.

I’ve got several downloaded games that I purchased through my XBox Live account. However, they work just fine for my son’s profile even when my live account is not logged in on the new machines.

This seems to contradict your statement that the live account needs to be logged in for the downloads to work. Perhaps the live account only needs to be installed on the machine, but not necessarily active.

I don’t let my son log in with my live account so that he can’t go off and purchase more points, or download anything I don’t want him to.

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As others have pointed out, DRM only works as long as 1. people don’t get stung by it, and 2. there is no viable alternative. As soon as #1 happens then people will flock to #2 and resent the DRM as a needless waste. And of course those who want to find a way to defeat the DRM will eventually do so one way or another.

Patrick Moynihan once famously wrote that “Secrecy is for losers.” Well, “DRM is for losers.” It’s the strategy you take when you’re furiously trying to hold on to something that is slipping away. It is not a strategy for the future, for future markets, for future profits.

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First off: Of all the blogs I read, yours is the only one I read every day, no exceptions.

That said, “I have nobody to blame but myself,” isn’t right. When we don’t know how to use badly designed devices, who is to blame, the user or the designer? If DRM is necessary (a proposition I don’t agree with), then at least these companies should be bending over backwards to make it as painless as possible for their customers.

Of all the points you made in this post, that is the one I had to comment on and disagree with. You’re definitely not the one to blame here, Jeff. ( =

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[QUOTE]Martin, as I’ve mentioned several times, downloaded content is tied to the Xbox 360 hardware signature (CPU, ethernet, etc-- the hard drive is removable and thus not a part of the signature) and the Xbox Live login the account was purchased under.

Buying and upgrading to an Elite is no different than getting a repaired console. All the same issues apply, transfer cable or not. See confirmation here:
[/QUOTE]

Jeff, after listening to all your replies, it sounds like the DRM’d content is basically just tied to the Xbox Live login, similar to DRM’d songs purchased from iTunes, since you are stating that transferring the content from machine to machine works fine as long as you use the correct Xbox Live login.

Personally, I try to stay as far away from DRM as I possibly can, I just hate the fact that others control what I can and cannot do with what I’ve paid for.

“I paid for this basketball, don’t tell me I can’t use it unless it’s on your basketball courts.”

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I can’t believe your a 360 fan. :frowning:

I have to totally disagree with you on this one. DRM is a dead technology. Its the record industries last hope to hold on to its antique ways of doing business. Artist barely see any of that money. The record industry has been so focused on physical product shipments, that they lost there way and should have been investing in artist development.

The PS3 is the better buy as I see it. Just look at all the features you get with 80G version. Plus there HOME online network is going to crush 360’s. Hell the hardware is reason enough to get it. My PS3 boots up in 2 SECONDS!!! That faster than my PS2! Now that’s progress. Plus the speed and performance just kills the 360. If you want to keep your media DRM free just setup your PC as a media server and the PS3 will pick it right up. You can than stream all your media that way. Plus they just updated the PS3 codecs which supports a boat load of formats including DivX.

Here’s to hoping you don’t get the RED RING OF DEATH!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems

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Oh Jeff, you sucker. You bought into the instant gratification syndrome inherent in geeks. If you could have waited, you could have bought a Wii and gotten Rock Band PLUS Samba De Amigo. :wink:

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DRM is truly the future, as long as naive users do what you have done: Buy the same things twice.

I myself once bought such a rigid DRM-item: It was Half-Life 2. But at that time it was without competition - since then i never again bought such tight-bonded software or data, because i simply don’t wan’t to establish or support such a rigid regime.

DRM makes life not easier, but more expensive and frustrating. My audio-CD data could be copied with ease, i could use it in my car, in my iPod, Notebook, simply everywhere. With growing competition, DRM will fade, as it is just now in the online-music-market. If i can choose, i will prefer data without DRM, of course.

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Jeff: why don’t you ask for advice or help from your readers? I have never seen you do this. I read other bloggers who are proficient in their fields but still post about their issues/problems and see what readers come up with.

You, on the other hand, always post about your findings or ideas… after the fact… after you made the wrong choice. You act like you always know more than anyone else. Hop down from up there.

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Since when does DRM have anything to do with the iPhone?

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DRM is the commerical hijacking of copyright law into gaining lock-in control over the consumer through lobbying and propaganda. It is both an unfair attack on the consumer and proven to not be necessary for the viability of a market.

Personally, I voice my protest by modding my 360 and physically backing up my games in the name of fair use.

If you think this is stealing, consider this: If you’re paying twice for the same thing, who is really getting robbed?

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Totally not related, but I also recently got a 360 (I’m pretty happy with it), and I just want to mention: if you like first-person shooters at all, you really must get BioShock. It’s incredible. The thinking man’s shooter.

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The content is definitely tied to the console and not the hard drive. If you only have one gamertag in your household, it might appear that it’s attached to the hard drive because your profile is allowing you to play (or you being signed in while your friend’s profile is running is allowing you to play). Wait until you have a cranky wife who can’t play Zuma because you’re on the replacement console and you took your profile on a memory card over to a friend’s house.

The reason Microsoft tells you to keep your hard drive and all of your peripherals when sending your broken console in is that they don’t want to remove all of the peripherals and send them all back to you, not because the hard drive has anything to do with the DRM.

I’m on my fourth replacement console now and have gone through three “fixes” for this DRM problem. The first two times, I had to create a new gamertag which Microsoft credited with enough points to re-purchase all my content. They called it “Points After Repair.” This latest/third time, they have a new process where you’re supposed to just be able to re-download your content after they flip some bits on their end, but it’s not fast - I’ve been waiting four months now and still can’t play my stuff without being signed on to Xbox Live (not just signed on, but actually logged into the network too - no offline play).

Blogged the whole thing. You can start here and work backwards: http://www.paraesthesia.com/archive/2008/01/28/status-on-xbox-live-drm-and-dashboard-problems.aspx

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i miss the days when a gaming console is just that, a gaming console.

i picked xbox360 over ps3 because of the games it offers. ps3 is seriously lacking any good titles now.

my fav x360 game is Mass Effect. superbly done.

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“In the end, I broke down and re-purchased 11,240 MS Points worth of Guitar Hero 2, Guitar Hero 3, and Rock Band songs through my personal Xbox Live profile on my home Xbox 360. If you’re keeping score at home that’s $140.50 in real money. To buy the exact same content. Again.”

So you encourage their monopolistic lockdown by buying it all twice? People (like you) who just complain about it but then cave in and spend money are part of the problem, not the solution. It doesn’t encourage them to do anything other than continue their current practices.

I hate to sound like a jerk, but I really think that’s the case.

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DRM doesn’t have to be inevitable. It certainly shouldn’t be. But it will be if you keep funding it!

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There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about how the 360’s DRM is affected by the repair process. The overall description in Jeff’s original post about how the DRM works is correct. However, if you send a broken console in to Microsoft support, they will somehow update the licenses or key so all your content will work normally on the replacement. In general, the replacement process should be completely transparent.

I think the confusion around this comes from the facts that 1) this wasn’t always the case, and 2) it’s still possible that the update won’t work for whatever reason. If you get a console back from support and your DRMed content doesn’t work offline or with other profiles, you need to call them again, and they can do something about it.

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Consider the people sitting around the table when a company like Microsoft or Apple decides to implement a DRM scheme. There are the developers and architects that just might understand how difficult the problem is and how brittle the eventual implementation will be. Then add accountanting, marketing, and the voracious negotiators from the content providers. Stuff everyone’s agenda and the technology into a Blendtec (http://www.willitblend.com/) and - voila! - a gallon of warm, soupy $#1t.

Once they have your money, nothing matters to them. You get stuck with the contents of the Blendtec.

If XBL is such a value-add, why not “fail open” with the DRM? That is, if the auth server is inaccessible, then assume auth succeeded and let the user play. Sure, someone could (conceivably) pirate a game and unplug the box from the network each time they wanted to play it, sort of like rolling back the clock to use time-limited demos. It’s inconvenient and retarded, but hey, if you have the time and attention span to do that, have fun - chances are you’re not going to buy anything anyway.

However, anyone who maintains online services knows there are a million reasons why a random user can’t get to a service - their hardware or software broke or got misconfigured, some jackass started digging without calling the 1-800 number first, any of the ISPs or NSPs between them and XBL dropped the ball, or the nice people running XBL got a bad batch of crack and turned off their pagers to watch “Beauty and the Geek”. The service will go dark for some number of customers, hardware will fail, especially first-generation machines. Users will be affected; how they will be affected is a software design decision.

It’s not like these problems are new. Think of electronic door locks as a form of digital rights management - a computer decides if you have the right to go through a door. How does the system respond if there’s a fire or loss of power? Do you lock all the doors and leave the people trapped inside to fend for themselves a la Cocoanut Grove (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoanut_Grove_fire) or do you accept the risk that some people will leave without paying their bill while the system is down?

Designing a robust DRM system that consumers perceive as fair is a herculean task; doing so under the direction of nontechnical stakeholders is nigh-impossible. What you end up with is a trainwreck that rewards the greedy at the expense of the unfortunate, a thoroughly 19th-century situation.

I can almost understand Jeff’s attachment to Rock Band; Katamari Damacy kept me sane through the waning months of 2004 and reintroduced me to console gaming after a 15 year hiatus. Still, he gets everything he deserves by buying into the DRM paradigm - heads, they win; tails, you lose.