Awesome, I did a search earlier and it didn't come up, and someone else asked me where it went in a private message, I assumed the worst (This is the Internet after all). Thanks Rob, My mistake, we'll have your journalistic integrity card FedEx'd back to you this instant. Black Edition with no limit.
In totally unrelated mental ramblings...I was thinking about the problem we face today. I then pretty much came to the following:
This goes way over games and movies, our rights are what is at stake. I don't care if every game company and movie studio goes out of business, because that's a cheaper price than our freedom that we have fought wars to protect, and are trying to spread globally. The constitutional rights of the many outweigh the rights of the few in this case, because the few still have legal recourse to punish the criminals. We cant condone removing everyone right to make a copy of things they paid for just because 50 companies are claiming they aren't getting enough money. If it got to that point, then people would have only themselves to blame and could only be mad at themselves, and that's still a cheaper price than trading our freedoms for security.
The government needs to stop pandering to lobbies, and stick to national defense, taxation, and national level social programs. As Americans we have a constitutional right to back up our media. Period. That means DVDs, CDs, Games, and anything else that falls under media. Freedom means that you have to accept the good with the bad, you don't get to ban everything you disagree with. Freedom of speech also means sometimes, you are going to hear things you don't like. Stores call theft shrinkage, and accept it as an operating cost, and that's for physical objects. They know it's not cost effective to stop theft, so they give it only a cursory attempt, and accept the rest. The difference is that, in the case of media, we have a constitutional right to make copies, and they aren't supposed to interfere.
Did anyone think it's ironic that Ubisoft used a pirated crack to make their own game work?
DRM breaks games, and does nothing to stop piracy. It's like banning guns. The people who follow the law (Non-Criminals) are no longer armed, while the people that already break the law (Criminals) are still armed like they were before. Passing laws has no effect on people who don't follow laws in the first place.
If there were no DRM to break, there would be no 1337 cracker teams taking credit for cracking them. Companies would make more money, because they no longer have to license DRM that does not work, and people could actually use their own software that they paid for. My constant battle with EA over my EALink purchased games and serial keys makes me want to smother puppies.
There is not a single peer reviewed report stating that DRM does anything positive at all, only the DRM creators themselves suggest this. A quick web search by a 5 year old can find a crack for almost anything, thus circumventing the DRM. It's illegal, and its till there. Seems like a waste of time to me, maybe we should focus on a realistic solution instead of a moral one. And no, I'm not talking about Abstinence only, because we all know that doesn't work either. The best part? They keep making new versions of the DRM and telling everyone that THIS version is hackproof. Right. Thats why Securom is at version 7.
I find it ironic that the Library of Congress is running afoul of DRM now.
http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/DRM-a-major-problem-for-Library-of-Congress.html
Because someone decided to pass an arbitrary law on the number of copies you can have (3!) for digital content. Then, they decided you cant make a copy until its ALREADY DAMAGED. Hmm, well their is the copy in the RAM, and the copy in the swap file, then while its transmitted over the network their is another copy!
We need less laws, not more, so the market can regulate itself. Politicians don't understand technology, and laws that apply to physical objects very rarely transfer over well into the digital domain.
It's a lot harder to get freedoms back after we allow them to get banned by people who don't see the far reaching consequences of their actions. They just want a platform to stand on to get re-elected.
So Rob, I agree with you. Piracy is bad, and they have a right to try and discourage it, as long as their methods don't include interfering with our rights to use our media as we see fit. Serial codes are fine, and banning leaked codes makes sense to me, as the buyer can contact the company and get a new one if it's leaked or stolen. I think PGP like keys stored in databases are great, maybe they can ship every game with a little mini-cd with a 4096 bit key, that's great. Disk based security is not. Music DRM which limits copies is not (Which is why their giving up on this totally, someone finally figured out that its not worth the cost).
It's not a bubble wrapped world, we cant ban knives because their sharp. We also can't allow a constitutionally given right to be castrated because a few well funded companies have problems with some people not paying for their kicks. Let them go after Pirates and sue them if they want, but don't try and mess with my constitution because it seems like a simpler path to simply curb everyone's rights as a whole instead of going after the people actually responsible for the mischief.
At a very basic level, I find DRM more morally bankrupt than piracy. They know what their doing, their doing it on purpose, and they think their ends justify their means. Well, they constitutionally don't.
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