Cory Doctorow's talk to the Microsoft Research Group (17 June, 2004) on DRM has become very well-known. Earlier today I read with pleasure his piece on BitTorrent (Boing Boing), a response to Wired magazine's long piece (by Clive Thompson) on Bram Cohen, BitTorrent's author:
It's a very good piece, and Bram gets some great licks in; the only place I took issue with it is where Clive talks about Microsoft DRM being useful to "keep content out of pirate hands" -- there is not a single piece of content in the history of the universe that has been "kept out of pirate hands" (i.e. kept off the Internet, or prevented from being stamped out in pirate CD factories abroad) by DRM. It's a weird kind of Big Lie strategy by the DRM people to talk about how DRM can prevent "piracy" when there has never, ever been an example of this happening.
Wired seems to be a little soft on DRM these days; the recent Wired spin-off, Wired Test, featured page on page of reviews of music players, media PCs, and PVRs with hardly a mention of the fact that all of these devices were fundamentally crippleware, and all controlled by entertainment companies who can and do arbitrarily remove functionality from them after they have entered the marketplace, so that the device that you've bought does less today than it did when you opened the box. If you're publishing a consumer-advice magazine, it seems like this is the kind of thing you should be noting for your readers: "If you buy this, your investment will be contingent on the ongoing goodwill of some paranoid Warners exec whose astrologer has told him that your pause button will put him out of business and must be disabled."
Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired, responded to this response, and Cory has in turn replied:
- There's no reason to believe that DRM makes more content available
- There's no reason to let the studios "call the shots" -- we haven't before this
- There's no reason to believe that DRM makes media cheaper, quite the contrary
- The features that make your "reasonable" DRM palatable to the market today can and are rescinded tomorrow
