ANova said:
If I see something I want to buy labeled as DRM protected, I download it instead.
I can understand this. Up until very recently I was very much against stealing music online. However, after buying the Colplay album X&Y I was confronted with CD music protection in its most evil form: you must install a "driver" to be able to listen to this CD on a computer without having it skip while playing. Because I did not feel that this "driver" was adequately explained or that I had some insurance against it malfunctioning, I decided not to install it...and haven't listened to that particular album. I would not feel terrible about downloading that album illegally (I am sure it can be ripped and that this protection scheme only impedes the masses). That way I would actually be able to listen to what I paid for while sitting at my computer...which would be nice.
I now pay very careful attention to CDs before buying. I don't care that I liked CDs in the past. Digital living has changed my lifestyle and I am not going back to swapping discs. It's too bad that this has, in effect, killed all my enthusiasm for acquiring new music. Thank god I spent a fortune on CDs during the 90s or I'd have nothing to listen to.
As a sidenote, I am very perplexed about these copy protection schemes. I understand that the owners want to protect their assets, but I really doubt that it is working as they intended. All you need is one (one!!!) copy and then the spreading can begin. Like a virus, it will multiply until there are thousands of copies in a single day...and this is for something people don't care about. It would be trivial to spread a song or a CD to the entire networked planet. I once calculated how long it would take before "everyone" had it and the answer was in hours.
For example, this Coldplay album that I mentioned. Let's pretend that this CD protection is 100% bullet proof for playing back on PCs. What's the problem? Play it back on a high quality CD player and capture the analogue feed, even clean this up and
improve it, before compressing and you're done!
What I
do see is that people who are embracing the new digital lifestyle, people with means and were likely to be big spenders on all "good things" are now probably thinking twice before buying music and any hesitation can snowball into complete abstinence. Why wouldn't a high tech savvy person with means and wanting the "good things in life" rather spend that extra money on a fiber 24Mbps internet link to complement the house's internal gigabit network? These schemes are pushing people away, not from the product, but from the normal/legal supply chain.
PS. I also often wondered about these CD protection schemes for computer games. Sometimes I wonder if spending $500,000 on protection is not money wasted. At $50 a pop, to make this easy, that's 10,000 copies of the game. I think people who buy legally will continue to do so, for the most part, whether they are warned about protection or not. It's like how we all don't suddenyl commit crimes just because there isn't a police officer around. Those who steal will continue to do so and there is very little that can be done without a fully implemented system that goes far beyond bizarre CD writing strategies coupled with special drivers and virtual hardware decoders.
Long ranting post...but I had to do it!
