Holger’s weblog

another DRM-gone-bad example

March 7th, 2006

You know how media companies keep telling us that digital rights management (DRM) is necessary to curb piracy and give us, the consumers, a better experience with the digital media we buy (err, license) from them? Of course “better experience” basically means only being able to play it on devices that the DRM system is available for and making it illegal to even make other devices compatible with it through the use of patents and encryption techniques and cleverly lobbied-for laws that make even software that only serves to play your legitimately bought media on unsupported (Open Source, for example) devices an illegal “circumvention device”.

What they always fail to tell us is what happens if something goes wrong and the DRM device that is legally allowed to play our files either becomes unavailable or defective. I mean seriously, do you honestly think that closed, proprietary DRM “standards” will still be supported 10 years from now? No way, you still want to watch that movie you paid for and downloaded today, most likely you’ll have to pay again for a version with an up-to-date DRM. What should really serve as a warning sign is what happened to Microsoft’s Media Center users after they installed the Upgrade Rollup 2 package from Microsoft – their DRM stopped working and they were unable to play any of the files stored on their device that were “protected” by this software. Well protected indeed…

It’s a scary thought that even a simple update could keep us from viewing content that we paid good money for and we are completely at the mercy of the DRM vendor to fix the problem and make the content we legally possess available to us again. It should make us see that DRM is not making our lives better and it sure isn’t, at least in the long run, making our culture richer. We’re still able to watch movies that were made 100 years ago because we know how to play them – will we, 100 years from now, still be able to watch movies and other media made today? If the media companies have their way, I seriously doubt that… and it would be a sad world where a large part of our cultural history is lost forever.

Technorati : DRM, Media Center, Microsoft, OSS

Entry Filed under: News,Technology