Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the name given to all those unpopular and generally ineffective technologies used to try to prevent people from doing whatever they want with their digital content (movies, games, music, etc.). Security guru Bruce Schneier wrote this piece all the way back in 2001 entitled “The Futility of Digital Copy Prevention”, which pointed out that all DRM schemes can and will be broken, and the only thing imposing DRM on customers does is to treat them like criminals. Nevertheless, DRM technologies continued to be a way of life with digital content until last year, when Apple went out on a limb and offered DRM-free music downloads from a major record label (EMI). Shortly thereafter, Wal-Mart demanded DRM-free music from their suppliers, and before you could say “Metallica Sucks” DRM was virtually gone from every record label.
But while the labels acquiesced on DRM, the RIAA has not stopped their witch hunt for “pirates”, and this Ars Technica post quotes the technical chief at the RIAA as saying that DRM will rear its ugly head yet again, especially as people stop buying single track downloads and/or CDs and move to subscription services. Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow didn’t mince words about this:
The RIAA believes in “intellectual property,” which is a fancy way of saying: they believe that they get to own property, and you have to rent it. The bits on your hard-drive belong to them, and that means you have to install DRM that lets them control your PC so that you don’t do bad things with their bits. In the information age, “property” is the exclusive preserve of giant companies that can afford to register copyrights and sue to defend them, while the rest of us get to sharecrop all our embodiments of their property, from furniture to t-shirts to music to games to cars to PCs.
Meanwhile, on the software-and-games front, BioWare, the producers of the game Mass Effect said that the PC version of the game will use a DRM technology called SecuROM (which is well-known and despised by gamers everywhere for causing their games not to run) AND an activation system that will require the computer to validate itself online every ten days. But what really has people shooting steam out of their ears is that the guy who said this also claims that the very highly-anticipated game Spore will feature the same activation/validation scheme.. Les, who blogs as “Stupid Evil Bastard”, is so pissed off that he says he might not even buy Spore as a result, and my friend Solonor isn’t pleased that if he goes on a long business trip and shuts off his PC, his game won’t work anymore.
My online friend Art Wells said it best over at The Site Which Must Not Be Named:
You don’t buy software. You rent the right not to be sued or prosecuted for using it.
There’s been so much negative publicity about that SecuROM activation scheme for those two games that both BioWare and EA have announced that they won’t go through with it.