Broken Hive Mind

Dear Home Entertainment Industry,
Any company that tells you their DRM will keep pirates from copying your material is stupid or lying to you because they think you are stupid. Buying or developing new DRM and copy protection stuff all the time is probably costing you LOTS of money. This drives the price up for consumers, widening the gap between expensive legitimate media and cheap pirated media even further. Worse, it creates compatibility problems meaning they can’t even view your content after they buy it! Your mistakes are making pirating media even more attractive, completely defeating the purpose of the copy protection. You may dismiss that comic as silly, but remember: The guy that drew it has a degree in physics, and was a contractor for NASA at the Langley Research Center. He seems like a pretty smart guy, and it would probably be a good idea to listen to him. He drew a comic about music DRM being dead, but you skipped the funeral, and are now trying to pull off a Weekend at Bernie’s. His comic gets millions of visitors, and his simple art has made him enough money to make the comic his day job. Clearly, he understands a good bit about marketing, and quite a bit about technology. Google seems to think he’s a pretty important guy.

Lets get down to business. You can’t keep pirates from pirating your material unless you stop making material. If you cut the crap and just sell the media unprotected at lower cost, most of the people who buy pirated copies will just buy your material instead. They’ll love it, use it, and maybe share it with other people who will then buy even more of your stuff! Media pirates win over DRM every time. They can defeat your expensive copy protection on one device, rip the media to an unprotected format, make a gazillion copies, and then sell them for a far lower price than you can manage. The cost of your DRM may be more than their costs from start to finish. They will continue to win as long as you keep spending money on your crappy technical bandages. Instead, think like a pirate. Emulate them. Hell, use them as a distribution platform! Research how to easily distribute your content to more people for less cost, and then do it. Media piracy will all but dry up because nobody will need to pirate anything, and you will make even more money!

It’s amazing to me that this DRM stuff is still around. For me, believing DRM will prevent piracy is a bit like believing the world is flat. We’ve seen that it’s not true. We’ve circumnavigated the global market, and we’ve seen the results. Media pirates still pirate the media, and consumers are finding it more and more difficult just to PLAY the legitimate media. Yes, I know I could just buy a receiver that decodes HDMI’s audio stream before passing it to the TV, or buy an HDCP stripper, but I shouldn’t be FORCED to spend more money just so it’s slightly harder to copy your products. I don’t need to copy your stuff, and if I did, you couldn’t stop me anyhow. Devices with HDCP compatibility and other DRM products must cost more to make, and this cost is passed on to the consumer. These devices don’t mean I get any better audio or video quality, they just mean I have to deal with more headache and confusion. I’ve finally got my HDCP compliant setup working, so I can ignore your DRM crap, just like the pirates do. I’m getting really close to where I’d rather do without your products than buy them from you.

Do us all a favor and get rid of all this DRM crap so we can all get back to watching movies and playing video games.

Sincerely,

Mark Smith