Yostivanich

Today on the This Week in Tech pod­cast (TWiT), one of their big top­ics that they dis­cussed was DRM or Dig­i­tal Rights Man­age­ment as the Record­ing Indus­try Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica (RIAA) and the Motion Pic­ture Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica (MPAA) refer to it or the Dig­i­tal Restric­tions Man­age­ment as the Elec­tronic Free­dom Foun­da­tion (EFF). Based on those two terms you guess that this is a con­tro­ver­sial topic and indeed it is for geeks and nerds all around. One of the piv­otal points that all geeks con­tend to lik­ing is some­thing for free, we enjoy devel­op­ing free soft­ware, we enjoy the use of soft­ware that we can tweak to our own use and the same goes with all other prod­ucts that we buy. Can any­one out there hon­estly say that they haven’t tweaked their com­puter or some other elec­tronic gad­get at one point or another, or know some­one who has. Many geeks use Open Office (a Microsoft Office clone that does basi­cally the same thing only it is free), Gimp (a Pho­to­shop clone) and dozens of other open source soft­ware. For me per­son­ally the only soft­ware that I use on a daily basis that is pro­pri­etary is Microsoft Visual Stu­dio 6.0 and iTunes and of course Win­dows XP (Note: work­ing on the Linux how­ever my col­lege basi­cally requires the use of a win­dows com­puter, so I would need a sec­ond com­puter to put Linux on.). Both of the for­mer I use for only one rea­son, not that I have to use them, sim­ply that I have found noth­ing that works as well as if not bet­ter than those two pieces of software.

How­ever I do not like the idea of my work whether it is just code, or my music being trapped and tied into one piece of soft­ware that if any­thing hap­pens to either of those com­pa­nies or the soft­ware becomes no longer sup­ported that I have lost all of my data. Imag­ine what would hap­pen if Apple all of sud­den started going under, it hap­pened before when they were at the top of their field (and yes I do know that the cir­cum­stances are com­pletely dif­fer­ent, but still it could hap­pen, work with me here). All of sud­den iTunes is no longer sup­ported by Apple, you buy a new com­puter but you can’t find iTunes to down­load and be able to play all that music that you accu­mu­lated through the iTunes Music Store. So what hap­pens, you have to sit there and burn disks of your Giga­bytes of music and import it into what­ever your cur­rent music player is at that time. This is same thing that hap­pened when Cd’s came out, all of sud­den those tapes you had of your music became harder and harder to find a place to play them. Most mod­ern cars today do not even come with a tape player. So you had to go out and re-buy all of your music on Cd. Imag­ine what would hap­pen if DVD’s become obso­lete in the next 5 or so years? Would you really want to re-spend the sev­eral hun­dred dol­lars that you spent get­ting your DVD col­lec­tion together on the new for­mat of disks (HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, no idea which yet). To geeks this seems like a stu­pid thing for com­pa­nies to force users and con­sumers (read you and I) to upgrade our media that we already bought every time a new tech­nol­ogy came out. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could buy an album once and a movie once and have it for the rest of your life.

This is where DRM gets in the way. DRM is designed to pre­vent pirates from post­ing music on file-sharing sites where any­body who knows about it can get to them. How­ever, and this is a big point, no DRM has ever not been cracked, all DRM has been cracked and with the inter­net the hack is posted on forums and such where geeks get to it and crack the DRM on their pro­tected con­tent. The reson for this is sim­ple, most of the time geeks do feel that musi­cians should be paid for their music and they do legally buy their music, they would just like to be sure that they won’t lose the media if some­thing were to hap­pen. The aver­age per­son does not, know about file-sharing sites, they only hear about them when they get sued thus increas­ing the per­cent­age of peo­ple who know about them and use them. (Prime Exam­ple: The Pirate Bay, which when sued saw it’s num­bers sky­rocket, the aver­age geek already knew about it, this was the main­stream per­son who had heard about it through the news and decided to check it out.) Lim­it­ing the expo­sure on file-sharing sites is the best thing to be done, geeks already know how to or do crack DRM and the aver­age per­son has no idea it even exists and doesn’t care one way or the other.

The point of this post is that there are free­doms from being locked into a soft­ware or hard­ware choice and instead free­ing your sys­tem and your lifestyle from choices based on what you own, and instead mak­ing the choice as to what works best for you. I use iTunes because I can find no equal how­ever all of my music is in MP3 for­mat so I can put it on my SD Mem­ory card and play it in my palm, if I get an iPod or any other music player I will still be able to play my music, along with being able to use any other of the mul­ti­ple free and open source media play­ers that allow you play mul­ti­ple audio and video files. I do not post my music on file shar­ing sites, sim­ply because what­ever I have to offer is already avail­able, hon­estly most of time music becomes avail­able on file shar­ing sites within a week or less of the music or movie being in stores. DRM doesn’t pro­tect against file-sharing because it is cir­cum­vented all the time and it only hurts the aver­age con­sumer who has to re-purchase their media files every time the tech­nol­ogy changes.

(Note about vocab­u­lary: I intend for the word “geek” or “dork” to mean those peo­ple who are expe­ri­enced in com­put­ers and in their inner work­ings and use them on an almost con­stant basis. These terms are not meant to be an insult, I am one, so don’t com­plain that I am insult­ing any­one. It is sim­ply the eas­i­est way to clas­sify a wide and diverse range of people.)