Doesn't Really Matter (to Pirates)

When I previously wrote about piracy, I mostly neglected the issue of digital rights management software, or DRM. The chapters we read for last class and the class discussion got me thinking about it more. I've never had much of an opinion on DRM, as I've never really encountered any of the problems people have had with it (like the infamous Starforce DRM that has been alleged to break people's disk drive by mistaking them for virtual drives), but now I'm starting to feel that DRM is really counterproductive.

The most prominent use of DRM to my mind is in the video game industry, where most PC games have some fairly heavy DRM measures, up to and including the need for an uninterrupted internet connection so the game can continually authenticate itself. And yet, if you look for a free download of any game, even those with the heaviest DRM measures imaginable, you'll undoubtedly find that the game's copy-protection has already been "cracked" and that the game is easily available. The same goes for copy-protected DVDs. So from this alone, it's obvious that DRM isn't working.

As I said in my previous post about piracy, the best way to get consumers to buy something that they could acquire with minimum fuss for free is to endear yourself to them, and provide them with other reasons to buy from you. DRM does the exact opposite. I haven't had DRM-induced problems getting legally acquired content to work, but I know people who have, and it seriously reduces their desire to purchase content from companies that use DRM. I still buy CDs, because I like the case artwork and owning a physical object (once again, there's the elusive "something else" that needs to be provided to get people to buy things), but if companies were still stuffing all sorts of copy-protection onto CDs and preventing me from using the music files however I want, I would cease buying physical albums immediately.

I think media companies might be hesitant to abandon DRM because they see it as an implied defeat, a sign that pirates have finally "broken" them. What they need to realize is that pirates don't care about DRM, normal consumers care about DRM. Pirates don't have to deal with DRM, because they strip it out of their media. In reality, draconian copy-protection only hurts people who purchase their media, and hurting the people who are paying for your content is a good way to never sell anything ever again.