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I’m not pirating music or films, and I will gladly pay huge sums of money to huge world-wide record companies and film studios. But if they insist on protecting their publications with DRM, I will in turn insist only to pay half the price at the shop counter in return for less accessible content.

It is no secret that DRM, or Digital Rights Management, have been used widely throughout the DVD and CD publishing world for some years now. DRM is not a technology in its own, but rather an umbrella-term used to cover the various technologies that exist, intended to prevent illegal copying of DVDs and CDs.

CD is short for “Compact Disc”, a standard originally developed by Sony and Philips between 1979 and 1982. DVD stands for “Digital Versatile Disc”, a standard developed by Toshiba (and others) in the early 1990s. But you don’t need a Sony or Philips CD player to play your latest music CD, nor do you need a special Toshiba DVD player to watch a DVD-movie. This is due to the interesting phenomenon known as a “standard”.

Sony, Philips and Toshiba made a great effort to get other hardware manufactures to create CD and DVD players that could play the new format. They also allowed CD and DVD manufactures to create and sell CDs and DVDs. This all helped the formats to be widely accepted into every household. So when you buy the new James Bond movie, Casino Royale, you expect that you can go home and watch it, using one of your various DVD players in your household – even if they aren’t manufactured by Sony, Philips or Toshiba.

How DRM is bad User Experience

The way many DRM technologies work is by deviating a little bit from the CD or DVD standard, making the disc non-compliant to that particular standard. This works due to the odd fact that many optical computer drives aren’t that tolerant for errors in the CD or DVD. Regular players like the one in your Hi-Fi system or below your TV-set usually are though. Since most illegal copying takes place on computers and since it is now harder to get the computer to read the original CD or DVD, this in turn results in a medium that is harder to copy – not impossible, but harder.

The problem with this tactic is that it is not bulletproof. Like I wrote above, many standalone CD and DVD players can play the corrupted medium – but not all! There are many, many cases where a perfectly good car-audio system, home stereo or top-of-the-line DVD player are not capable of playing DRM protected CDs or DVDs. Just as many cases exist where computer CD-ROM or DVD drives are capable of playing and copying these same DRM protected CDs and DVDs.

In the early days of DRM the manufactures still labeled the DRM protected mediums the same way as the real CDs and DVDs. They got the certified “Compact Disc” or “Digital Versatile Disc” logos printed on them. In many cases these logos where removed due to huge outrage from the public. Personally I couldn’t agree more. It was like selling cheese at the supermarket labeling it “Lo-fat, only 2%” when it actually contained 25% fat. Putting the Compact Disc logo on an optical disc that did not live up the the Compact Disc standards was not good business practice (is it even legal?).

Let’s forget the fact that most consumers don’t bother to check for these missing logos, nor that they are still called “CDs” and “DVDs”. The biggest issue by far is that they still expect you to pay the same amount of money for a product that is only half as good. A product that can only be played on half of your players, not to mention the fact that you are not allowed to take backup copies for your car etc. – even in countries where this is actually allowed with real CDs and DVDs.

Dear record label and Dear film studio, please be fair and either drop the prices or just drop DRM altogether!

This story was inspired by many years of irritation over DRM. Recently spawned by a story on Slashdot where new DVDs released by Sony are reported not to work on multiple DVD players. Sony responded that it’s up to the manufacturers to update their hardware.

Technorati Tags: DRM, piracy, Sony, Philips, Toshiba, CD, DVD, storage, music industry, film industry, movies, file sharing, accessibility, user experience, uxp, video, security

This entry was posted by Thomas Watson Steen on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 14:33 (GMT-1) and is filed under Accessibility, Security, User experience, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.