|
the only people that DRM hurts are legitimate owners. it's just about always cracked very quickly if anyone cares. the people who will pirate things will keep on pirating them, DRM is only a minor annoyance and not an actual obstacle. They'll use off-brand hardware if necessary (part of why I use an iRiver mp3 player is that it doesn't have any built-in DRM system whatsoever, unlike creative, sony, and apple (yes, ipod) players), they write software to do what they want, etc.
DRM makes things more expensive to manufacture and develop. Since pirates don't pay anything (the whole point of piracy), the people who suffer from this are legitimate purchasers who have to pay more to get the same thing. This leads to people not buying as much, because things get artificially more expensive than they should be.
Occasional attempts at physical/hardware DRM almost always end in disaster. Take Starforce for instance. It required a CD to have specific physical coding on it, that would be present if a CD had been legitimately pressed in a factory but not if it had been burned at home (or if an .iso was made and mounted via daemon tools or the like). Problem is, the software driver for Starforce had to permanently write itself into the BIOS of your optical drive, and into the code of your operating system. It did this without asking permission from the user, and it did it in a non-reversible manner. The only way to get rid of it was to reformat your computer or buy a new optical drive. And guess what? It killed drives. A lot of them. There were so many reports of *legitimate purchasers* having their hardware destroyed, meaning that their DVD drives wouldn't read any disc, Starforce or not, properly no matter what, that Starforce protection essentially disappeared.
Other forms of hardware DRM are borderline violations of the DCMA, such as the idea of "trusted computing," and virtually all of them require a user to have hardware installed that's maunfactured specifically for it. This is also more expensive, and I'd like you to name me just ONE person who will pay more money for a machine that artificially restricts what he can and cannot do, especially when right next to it on the shelves is a cheaper product that does more.
So in the end, DRM doesn't slow piracy at all. It even probably creates pirates, because people get pissed at not being able to easily use what they already own . It raises prices and hurts sales. Someday the major compaines will realize that what people want is DRM Free software, media, and hardware, and things will be better for everyone.
|
