Apple should get significant credit here. It was Steve Jobs' open letter of 2007-02-06 to the big four labels calling for them to go DRM free that got the ball rolling. EMI agreed, and Apple started selling DRM-free tracks from them on 2007-05-27.

Amazon's public beta of their MP3 store launched on 2007-09-25, four months after Apple had started selling DRM-free music. Amazon was the first to get contracts in place with all four major labels for DRM-free music.

The iPod won the music player market, so if you tried to sell music with DRM you need to either (i) play by Apple's rules or (ii) have mundane tech users being confused when they can't play the music they bought on the what at become THE standard music player.

In 2006, during discusion of the Broadcast Flag DRM, an 82 year old senator was given an iPod and started to realise that lots of DRM wouldn't work with it. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2006/01/history-and-senator-st...

You are right in general though. Going DRM free not only won't hurt any publisher, it will only gain respect from customers and will improve the quality of their products in a sense of improved usability, because any DRM means a crippled product (i.e. limited platforms availability, inability to make backups and etc. and etc.).

The problem is, that most legacy publishers are rarely customer focused and think that DRM helps their profits. And unprincipled distributors like Netflix are ready to oblige. But the irony is, those publishers only hurt themselves by continuing using DRM. It's mostly innovative publishers, or self published studios (and crowdfunded projects) that have common sense and avoid using DRM. Luckily some distributors are also principled enough to reject DRMed products from publishers. But such are a minority still.

[1] http://www.gog.com/forum/general/list_of_drmfree_games_on_st...

1. Publishers decide to treat all potential users as criminals, and insist on using DRM in their products.

2. Distributors accept that, and help these unethical publishers to sell those products.

3. Users accept being treated as criminals, and buy these products from distributors.

It starts from the publisher of course, but anywhere down the line, one can refuse to accept this. Distributor can refuse dealing with DRMed products from publishers. Users can refuse buying DRMed products from distributors. Any participation in that chain proliferates DRM, and one can't excuse this participation with the fact that it was initiated by the publisher.

Supporting unethical practice can't be excused with fear of going out of business by the way. Also, publishers need distributors and users not any less than distributors and users need publishers, if not even more. Therefore voting with your wallet (on either distributor or user level) is not senseless. Except that distributors have more leverage on publishers, because of their scale, in comparison with an individual who buys only DRM-free products. Therefore distributors can be blamed more for DRM proliferation.

Publishers of new games (especially expensively developed new games) are more likely to fear a loss of revenue, especially in the crucial early period after release, without DRM.

I'm not really sure why bigger size of the budget should reduce the common sense of the publisher. Legacy publishers are obsessed with DRM, but DRM has nothing to do with revenue whatsoever. It doesn't reduce any piracy, and only cripples the experience for legitimate users. It's stupid from common sense business perspective, and there is an increasing amount of big budget games which come out DRM free. I view it as simply mentality issue. Legacy publishers can't understand that they should start being customer focused. New ones have no issues understanding it, therefore they don't use any DRM.

Practically all do, I already explained above. Being unable to back up the installer is already DRM, and it's coming from Valve themselves, not from the publishers.

Always on-line DRM and such is another level of nastiness, but the above is DRM too.

My theory is that if Steam goes belly up, I can do a backup of my games, and use the same avenues pirates use to circumvent Steam. Hopefully they would release control of their games though if they went belly up.

As far as poor customer service, I suppose I have been lucky so far.

Yes, that's one of their downsides. Even their reasoning is becoming less and less sensible. They claimed they still can't figure out how to offer long term support on Linux. May be Docker can help them.

GOG's position is totally understandable.

FatELF would of addressed at least some of these problems, but was largely rejected by the larger community of people not shipping proprietary products on Linux: https://icculus.org/fatelf/

Ping me at [email protected] about this anytime.

they just have saner fallback times than other ill talked solutions from EA. but besides its pretty eyes, its the same virus.

good luck running online games as root.

These settings are up to the game developer themselves. You are right about the offline mode, but it does not apply to all games.

Steam is not DRM-free. It's just gamer-accepted DRM.

Steam's DRM is still DRM and has all the downsides that come with it. You're exactly right that it's accepted by gamers due to Valve's cult status (which I honestly don't understand given that I only have mediocre to terrible experiences with their games and services) and the fact that people have bought huge libraries through Steam and have to defend their decisions.

If Steam works on the new account you can start deleting plists.

- Great selection. Just about any game can be bought on Steam

- Steam sales. Amazing, unprecedented prices for games

- The DRM successfully stays pretty much out of the way for 99% of users

- Centralized game management. I don't want to have twelve different game distribution clients, each with one or two games. I would much rather have just one

- Centralized automatic updates. Less of a big deal today than years ago.

It's great that you had a good experience with your particular customer service agent. But what if you request a refund from someone who is feeling unwell that day, had a death in the family or is just feeling like being an asshole. Then you're account could be blocked with limited recourse.

In this day and age there really is limited point to DRM. Everything becomes available on Torrent sites anyway and all it ends up doing is treating legitimate, paying users as second class citizens.

Edit: This also means, to the original comment, that Steam does not necessarily make it especially easy to evade SecuROM Hell or other DRM methods, as games on Steam can still have their own protection schemes. It only makes it easier insofar as those are normally marked and games have with Steam only another, better option. Maybe that was meant.

I'm a little surprised that they haven't been dinged by the card companies yet if reports of whole accounts being blocked based on one chargeback are true. Even Valve are just another retailer to the likes of Visa and Mastercard, and the card services tend to take a very hostile view of merchants who try to evade their obligations under the card service policies if something comes to their attention.

I'm also surprised there haven't been more legal cases considering the implications of SaaS, on-line media library services, software that requires phone-home activation/DRM, and the like. There are obvious ways that such systems/services could provide unfair leverage against consumers in the event of any dispute, and as you mentioned it seems very likely that they would fall foul of the law here in Europe, or at least in several national jurisdictions within Europe. The US tends to give businesses a lot more slack to play with on such matters, though.

I have experienced both. For instance songs are very cheap when your monthly income over £1,500 but when your monthly income is £300 (that's the equivalent in pounds in the country i grew up in) that's a bit too much for just one song.

Same for everything else since they're all price for the US,UK,etc market.

Now that i can afford it i choose to pay for the content i like (it's my way of encouraging the people creating the things i like) even though i could still pirate it.

Then again I'm still forced to pirate some things that can't get legally.

Wish i didn't have to but it's not like their giving me a choice.

I guess "essential" has many definitions, huh...

So if we judge by that, the right to participate in culture is more important than the right to food (or more likely, is simply more often challenged and disagreed with).

If the whole legal regime around copyright is having the effect of preventing people from participating in their culture/society, those laws are immoral and should be opposed.

I also fail to see how copyright laws are preventing anyone from enjoying their culture.

I guess this is what you get when you allow business-minded people to define what being human is all about...

It's sad when idle consumers come to believe they are entitled to the product of another's labor for free.

That'll be 5 bucks, you read my comment. Pony up.

But if I use my culture as a basis for a song that I write and I wish to sell it to make money, then you're dang right I see it as stealing if someone takes it without my permission.

If an artist wants to share it openly, then that's excellent. But if the artist wishes to make money from their effort why is it your "right" to demand otherwise?

It's not about being business-minded, it's called having rights over your own property.

An artist who works alone deserves your money but an artist who agrees to work with a third-party does not? Because the third-party might get a piece of the pie dictated by the contract the artist agreed to? That's an extremely weak defense of not paying for content.

Are book stores okay? Because I'm sure they make money from the books they sell that they didn't personally write. Well, that's not an exact comparison but I hope you get my point.

I have to say, I am astounded at the level of entitlement people seem to have when it comes to consuming content others worked to create. I want it, therefore it should be mine is the mantra of this type of thinking.

Although, I agree with you on the copyright laws, they shouldn't be extended like they have been. But that's an issue to complain to the people who write the laws, not the content providers who take advantage of them.

that works when the law makers are ethical and neutral. When the "content providers" get in bed with law makers to create laws favourable to themselves, then what?

I want to participate in culture by creating a derivative work based on the disney micky mouse figure. But i m disallowed, because of the said laws, unless i paid disney some amount of money. Do you think disney deserves this money?

Your complaint is with the law, it has nothing to do with the content providers. You say but the content providers influence the law with money. In that case your complaint is with the system that writes the law. Your ire is misdirected and likely will cause nothing to change.

Of course, there's civil disobedience to consider. It would be an interesting way to combat the laws at hand but I'm not sure how to go about that in terms of media consumption. I suppose if enough people did it at the same time.

But you fall into the common problems with these type of discussion; you act as if your choices are limited. For instance, with piracy it's usually "they don't make it easy and/or cheap enough for me to buy so therefore I must steal it" which is a self-limiting range of options. It totally ignores several options such as simply not consuming the content in question and move on to something else. You present only one option in your desire to create, a derivative work based off of another's content. That's not your only option in this case.

Finally, this idea that this stuff is a part of our culture and we're locked out of it. I would say if we're locked out of it so tightly that we can't enjoy it then I wouldn't call it part of our culture. But this culture defense is new to me in these terms, it's an interesting idea. It will ultimately fail in the end but an interesting defense nonetheless.

That's begging the question. We could change the law, but first we have to ask if we should, and in what way. That's why chii asked: Do you think disney deserves this money? Only after we answer that, will we know what the law should be.

It's like that silly issue where everyone gets mad every year at international companies following various country's tax laws to reduce their tax obligations as much as possible but never actually demand a change in the laws themselves. They rail against the company as if that will change anything.

But to answer the question again, yes indeed, Disney deserves that money because that's what the law states. I don't understand how I can make that more clear. The fact that they get any money at all from their original creation is directly tied into such laws. Without those laws they have to hope for the best on the goodwill of people to compensate them for their work. As for deserve? They created it didn't they? Do they deserve anything at all? If they do, for how long until it could be considered public domain? Should anything be considered public domain after a time at all? That's what the law is for, to answer those questions. If you want to change the law, the current law applies until you change it. You can't start at zero and build up, you have to start with what's already established. Therefore, Disney deserves that money because of the law as it stands today.

The term 'deserve' implies something ethical. Your statement here is so much horseshit - nothing is 'deserved' because of the law, it is only legal because of the law. It is their legal money, but it is not necessarily their deserved money.

Just because someone slips in a by-clause that lets them legally rob a bank every fortnight, doesn't make that money their deserved money, or the robbing of the bank ethical.

I think the thing I've been missing is so far is because Disney is the example, which is a big company, and big companies are evil right?

Let me toss a wrinkle into that logic.

Newly graduated college student makes an animated short. Took months, maybe years, to get it done. Took weeks, maybe months, of hard work to get it visible to the public. Public loves the film and wishes to buy a copy. Someone makes a "derivative" work that copies the characterizations of the original animation. For some reason, derivative work becomes popular. Original creator loses out. Screw the original creator right?

You do realize that the most likely outcome of allowing derivative works to happen too soon is that the big companies with their huge resources will swoop in and wipe out the small guys in no time flat? You think I'm defending big companies with these statements? I'm defending all creators regardless if they are Disney or the dirt-poor artist down the street.

If you have a problem with Disney being able to continue making money from their original characters, despite some of their characters being based off previous stories in the public domain, because copyright laws keep getting changed then you're problem is with the system that allows such things. Attack the system, not creators because you'll almost always come across as unfair to them in some way.

No, just a few :) My problem with Disney is that in protecting their own interests, they also extended copyright on tons of other people's works as well. http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2014/pre-1976 I believe the original creator, big or small, is not as important as the rest of the people in society. If big corporations make most of the money from derivative works, that doesn't prevent other people from making their own as well. But copyright means there is a state-granted monopoly on nearly all creative works.

If you have a problem with Disney... then your problem is with the system that allows such things.

How would you "fix the system" so that only certain people get a say? Disney can lobby if they want, I just want them to lobby for different things.

You keep using that word without realizing that the rest of us may have already moved on to a different concept of ownership.

How shall we define the act of taking property without due compensation that the owner of said property expects?

You simply want to redefine things so you can apply your alternative interpretation of ownership in a way that allows you to obtain someone's property without compensating them for it. You feel entitled to someone's work because it's easy to duplicate it. It could take an artist weeks or months to create their work and you feel they deserve nothing because you can copy it in seconds. That's a sad justification.

Whether the fact it can be easily duplicated is irrelevant. Someone created that work with their time that they can't get back. They spent a moment of their life away from other things creating this that they can't get back. They spent resources (not necessarily money) creating this that they can't get back. None of that can be duplicated in seconds. If they wish to be paid for granting you access to that work then they should be compensated as they wish. If you don't agree with the price of admission then you don't get access. Thinking otherwise is admitting you feel you are entitled to it because you simply want it and the original creator can suck it. You are saying the creator's time and effort is worth nothing.

I simply cannot agree with that way of thinking.

Also, again my bad, I'm attributing the whole discussion onto you instead of specifically your statement. I tend to lump everything together when multiple people respond throughout a single thread as though they are in agreement with the thread as a whole. I'll have to work on that.

I fully recognize the opposing position in this debate, I understand the thought behind it, I use to agree with it. But at this point, exactly as you point out, I highly disagree with it today. For the most part, I see people wanting to alter the definition of ownership for their own benefit to the detriment of the original creator. That the simple idea that a song can be perfectly copied countless times without damaging the original copy is somehow license to demand that the original creator hand over all their ownership rights without compensation is just wrong. It is as simple as the "black and white" example of stealing bread or any other physical object. I would give more credit to discussions about stealing bread because it's possible a human being stole it to survive, no one needs the latest hit song or movie to survive. If time and resources were spent in the creation of the product then I fail to understand why it's wrong for the creator to expect compensation, if they desire it.

Rational basis? What exactly is that in this case? Because I've never seen it. If anyone can give me a rational example of why the "I want it, it's easy to copy, therefore it should be mine" way of thinking is justified, then I'll reconsider my position.

However what about books or scientific papers which are hidden behind pay walls or just incredibly expensive.

The price of a good programming book is about £20. But when your monthly income is £300 that is a lot of money. Not to mention you have to pay electricity, gas, etc. and the prices for the utilities are not that much different.

So your options are:

1. buy the book and not eat for 2 weeks

2. pirate it

3. don't do anything and let your progress as a programmer be hindered by the lack of knowledge

That's what i call being forced. There's no situation where i can say i helped the author with the little i have and progressed in my development as a programmer.

If you give in to the system they set up knowledge become the privilege of the wealthy I agree that content creators need to live but the one size fits all approach is really f*ed up.

Open it up let people pay as much as they want or set different prices for different regions piracy will fall considerably if you do and for god sake don't limit peoples access to content by regions it's a sure way to increase piracy.

If only we had a global computer network by which you could find a much cheaper used copy. Or even a free loaner copy.

This is known as the 'Australian Tax' here, and is at the point where for some software products (Microsoft's dev tools, e.g.) it's cheaper to buy a budget flight to the USA, buy them there, then return.

Geographical pricing is morally indefensible.

And it's fucking ridiculous that you have to a saloon to watch a new movie and pay a ridiculous amount of money per person to watch a single movie.

I pirate all movies I can out of basic principal, they are not getting a dime extra from me since they continue with their harassment.

I am actually very pleased with Steam as it's an excellent service. But if I would want to play a game on let's say Origin I would definately pirate that game if it doesn't exist on Steam.

Do they target you specifically with this harassment or is it just in general for the population of where you live?

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

If I want a TV show - Say House of Cards - and it's not available, or it's available much later than elsewhere, or it's prohibitively more pricey... They want the show and the only reasonable way to get it... then it will "force" people who want it to Piracy.

I would very much like a Ferrari California. It's unlikely I will ever be able to afford one - it is prohibitively expensive for me. I am not being forced to steal it. I understand like a rational human being should that if I can't afford something or it isn't available to me and it isn't essential to my survival I have no right to take it. I know that physical theft analogies aren't very good when comparing to piracy but seriously - you are not being forced to do anything. You make a choice to steal it. Whether that's morally right or wrong is your decision to make.

Second, stealing implies that the person being stolen from can't access it anymore--which is clearly not the case here.

Stealing is the wrong framework to use here.

Otherwise, yes, this idea of being "forced" to pirate something they want but don't have easy access to seems a rather silly statement.

How is Steam DRM-free? You must first log in to your Steam account in order to play. Locked down. They seem to do it with very good UX, but it's DRM.

I think this negates the first part of your thesis: that DRM-free is picking up.

Although, if the developer/publisher doesn't include an installer of some sort within the game files reinstalling without Steam might be a bit tough. Makes me wish for the old days when you didn't need installers, you just zipped up the folder as a backup. Need to reinstall? Unzip to new folder.

Not really, there are Steam games with all kinds of additional vendor-specific DRM, including SecuROM.

http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_3rd_Party_DRM_o...

Nobody would bother with torrents if there is a much easier and correctly priced alternative - when Steam started selling games in Bulgaria I stopped pirating games. When Spotify started selling in Bulgaria I stopped pirating music. When, eventually, Netflix starts selling in Bulgaria - I'll stop pirating movies.

The solution to piracy is simply knowing how to sell your product. DRM is an attempt at a technological solution to a non-technological problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs's_principle

You could make DRM "Kerckhoff hard", but you'd have to use a completely trusted architecture with secure boot and signed applications - which is not conicidentially where all major players are moving. Even then, there are a couple of loopholes (bugs/jailbreaks, you could tamper with the hardware, or you could just record the signal during playback ("analoge gap"))

And for that we are striving for newer technologies to close that gap from the analogue side. I'm not being entirely serious (yet), but thinking about Occulus Rift or Google Glass, etc.

Once we get our media/games to jack in directly to our brains, like all the cyberpunk novels prescribe, it's going to be pretty hard to get a tap between the analogue side :)

In your example, just make a computer that pretends to be your brain, and you'll get the data to post at Pirate Bay.

Steam is DRM.

Gaming is going towards more online by adding value (just like SAAS can't be pirated like traditional software) always online games by nature such as Battlefield 4 can't be pirated as well.

That's possibly why also Simcity decided to go online but the added value wasn't enough and caused a backslash.

Steam has its own DRM, and games distributed via steam may have additional third-party DRMs (including SecuROM and other similar shite).

IIRC GOG is only DRM-free games, although it is less convenient.

The only downside is the much smaller library than Steam.

The one really cool thing in Steam is savegame sync, but not even all games support it.

Yes, that was a very annoying discovery when I came back from holidays, after I'd started playing Rogue Legacy on my laptop and realised I had to hunt the savegame locations and pray they were compatible between the OSX and Windows versions of the game (they were)

Because the sames are stupidly, insanely reasonably priced. $5 for 20 hours of content? Games from time to time being 50% off? The ease of getting new content in a few clicks?

Contrast that with movies that are available for download at the same time they show up on DVD in stores: $15 for <2 hours of content that's probably not going to be that great, when my alternatives are to go to the movie store and pick it up for $2 as a rental or to pirate it for free.

The counter argument was that his small niche was not indicative of a large industry. What you are mentioning about Amazon is pretty enlightening for me to read. If you think about it, the lock-in you suffer from iTunes is an outdated and anti-consumer stance. It is absolutely unnecessary to force a purchaser to store his digital goods on the cloud.

That's not entirely true, I don't think? What about AACS, which uses a very clever master key / sub key + key revocation mechanism. People figured out exactly how it worked well before it was actually "broken" - and it was broken by stealing private keys from devices.

> For games, Steam makes it easy to avoid SecuROM Hell

Steam is DRM. Sure, it's fairly nice as DRM goes, but it is still DRM.

Depends on what you mean by DRM. Many Steam games run without Steam and only use it as a platform for digital distribution.

Which is why it doesn't work.

But it is very useful for excluding competitors and pissing off consumers.

The xbox actually had ~900 games and the GameCube had ~700.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dreamcast_games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_GameCube_games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_games