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DVD Versatility (or Lack Thereof)
R. Alex Whitlock
I agree with the main thrust of Cory Doctorow's piece on Google Video DRM,I think. I'll have to ponder at least a little more on the matter. But even so I found
this argument strange:
DVDs were the first widely-released DRM media. The effect of DRM on DVDs was to deprive DVD owners of the fruits of an open market in players. In the ten years that DVDs have been in the marketplace, no new features have been introduced for the platform, robbing us of the dividends on our investment in DVDs. By contrast, DRM-free CDs ushered in the era of the MP3, home karaoke, time-shifting, media servers, iPods, mashups, MP3 CDs and all the rest of the value that has accumulated in our music collections, the dividend paid on our investment in the CD format.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that CDs got at least a couple years headstart over DVDs. If not in invention, then at least in widespread implementation. I was a slow adopter on both, but by the time I bought a DVD player there were already more CDs than audio tapes at record stores.
Secondly, bearing the above in mind, DVD isn't that far behind CD in versitility. The MP3 era is being matched pretty ably by MP4, AVI, and Divx encoding. The CD in my car can play MP3s from CDRs, but the DVD Player I just ordered will be able to play Divx filed burned to DVDRs. iPods are coming with little screens these days. Too small to be useful, maybe, but not exactly the fault of DRM (besideswich, you can get portable DVD players and if they don't offer portable DVD players that can play Divx files and the like, they will).
Granted, some of this stuff is in spite of DRM and because people have been able to circumvent it. But if nothing else, it demonstrates that DVD DRM may not be benign, but is sufficiently incompetent.
None of this is to say that I am okay with DRM. I hate the fact that I had to buy a separate piece of hardware to get the DVD I purchased to play in the player I purchased on the TV I own. I also hate that a number of TV/VCR combos were rendered completely incompatible with DVD players because everything necessarily went through the VCR. So I'm not enthusiastically defending DRM here because I don't like it, but I found that particular paragraph to be pretty off-base.
Observations
Sorry RAW, but his comment is spot-on.
The difference is as follows:
If you have no DRM, you can do with the data anything you have a legal right to do under copyright laws - make personal backup copies, format shift it, and anything else.
If you have DRM, no matter how incompetent, you are inconvenienced or worse. Your rights do not matter, just what the person who put the DRM on it says you can do with it.
The fact that people have managed to strip off the DRM should not excuse that it is horrible in the first place.
Mike,
Nothing you just said contradicts my post. Nor does it support the paragraph that I took issue with. It helps make the case against DRM on the whole, but I never said or even suggested that I support DVD DRM, and unless the existence of Divx encoding and Divx players is a dream, it hasn't prevented innovation the way Cory said it did. That was the point I was making.
DRM slows innovation, but does not prevent it. But I think that was the point of the article.
CD's have been around a long time, I believe more than 10 years before DVD, but my. I'm see stuff online about CD players dating back to 1982 and DVD players dating 1996.
BUT in 1982 technology was only beginning to come into our lives. At least as we know it today. Although it took several years later for such great innovations like mp3, compact portable players, etc. to come into our lives, once it started moving is all happened very quickly. DVD, on the other hand, has been much slower. Bypassing security was the first step, some people are simply afraid to even attempt it because of pending lawsuits and other such nonsense.
Industry seems to want to slow down technological advances, and probably rightfully slow. Hard to make a profit if something new comes along to replace you. Not to mention that they are trying to find ways to continue to make money off of things they had no part in. If I buy a movie from a studio, I should be able to take that movie and copy it to my portable player, or my laptop for viewing there. The Movie industry wants to charge the creator of the portable player, or the player on my computer to be able to decode the movie and compress it, etc. Plus they want them to ensure it's DRMed there too. I certainly understand this desire, as no one wants their stuff stolen, but it limits the number of people who want to get into the market.
We can thank all the people who continue to work on such projects as breaking DRM so we can continue using our rights, but with more and more of them threatened with legal action, and more laws that restrain them, where does it all end?
I'd be surprised if the stall due to DVD DRM is even significant. Be that as it may, it is almost completely undermined by his examples. The things he's saying we can't do we can and are doing.
I've no disagreement with your assertion or Cory's that the movie industry does want to stifle and slow innovation. It's all part of the tug-of-war between the consumer who wants something for nothing and the producer who wants to be paid for each and every use. My disagreement is with the level of success that they've had. By any measure, it has been an utter failure.
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