andygates

Against my better judgment, I was so tempted by Norse Code and Boneshaker (sci-fi vikings in Rangarok LA, and gold-rush steampunk zombies respectively) that I bought some DRM'd ebooks from the lovely BooksOnBoard.com.  You can tell this won't end well, can't you?

The executive summary: Buy books, download books, move books to reader. Book-managey software says it needs an update: comply. Books no longer work, managey-software no longer sees reader, books on reader say "no".  Sundry reinstalls and re-registration does nothing.

Gamma flash, rampage!

From a customer viewpoint, I just spent good book money on broken things.  I have been ripped off.  I am angry.

If I'd downloaded skeezy ripoffs from Bittorrent, I would have got working books.  It's like the publishers are giving their products to an idiot child and asking me to trust that they'll get here and not get used for toilet paper.  Ignoring the insult implicit in publisher's use of DRM ("We think you're a thief, just shut up and pay us"), this is an enormous amount of trust.  It's the publisher and the retailer that get my anger because it is them with whom I have dealings.  Adobe's just some crap I need to makey worky.

As it happens, Adobe Digital Editions - the sinner in this little play - has junk key management and there have been DRM-cracking scripts available for months.  A bit of nerdy hoop jumping and lo, I have un-DRM'd versions of both books, and that is good. 

So please, Random House, Barnes & Noble, ditch the DRM, it hurts paying customers.  BooksOnBoard, and the rest of the industry, put some pressure up the pipe to get rid of the DRM, because I'm not buying any more when I have to go through all this frakkin' hassle.

A while back, I noticed a trend in our heavy media files: For the first time, user-created content had topped media-produced content.  In short, there were more home movies than there were MP3 rips.  Which is why I'm genuinely surprised that Western Digital have launched a portable hard-drive with crippled file sharing.  It's dumb file-type stuff, so you can share your holiday photos but not your holiday movies.  Only copyright-breakers share movies, after all.

Now, that seems like an annoying-but-understandable thing to do in a shiny dumbed-down version of the world where only media output matters.  But from what I've seen of my own users' data space, it seems glaringly daft.  Regardless of your stance on DRM and file-sharing and all those hot-button issues, there's a lot of 2.0 fat content.  This product isn't protected: It's just plain broken. 

I can't keep the grin in any longer.  Vista's extremely silly Protected Media Path (PMP) has been hacked.  That didn't take long, did it?  Alex Ionescu describes how he did what he did in his blog, but daren't release actual code for fear of a black helicopter visit by DMCA attack lawyers.

The weird thing is that the commercial success of the entire IT sector relies on many perfect copies being made form everything.  That's the whole point: it's why cassettes were good too.  We get involved, we dick around, we don't just passively consume.  Mixtapes are cool to share.  The business model that was appropriate for manufactured pressings of vinyl - few high-quality originals dispensed from the central vendor - is totally and catastrophically broken by fast easy digital copying.  That model assumes a need for relatively low losses as the product is relatively expensive to produce; with digital media the cost of reproduction is trivial but the bean-counters haven't yet worked out that this means that massive unit losses are financially acceptable. 

The example of the MP3 player - mine is full of personal rips and allofmp3.com downloads - is canonical: because I can get lots of cheap easy music, I do.  Some I pay top whack for, and that's the profit.  But I wouldn't have bought the half-dozen CDs I have recently unless I had been energised and enthused - and engaged - by the dozen downloads.  And (listen up, suits) I would not have bought all eighteen; or all six, more likely one or two.  I would have passively flicked over MTV and Scuzz and shrugged and done something else.  Rob Zombie has a dollar to spend on shampoo and carny chicks because of piracy.

Anyway, there's the memetic imperative.  Information wants to get copied.  We, as memetic entities, like copying information.  "Hey, have you heard this?" is a memegasm.  And to play something, you have to decrypt it somewhere along the line.  So even without black-hat snarkiness at the corporate bishops, DRM will fail every time.  And it deserves to fail, and it will not be mourned. 

A wise geek observed that the internet routes itself around damage.  DRM is getting the same treatment, and with good reason: encrypted, unplayable data is damaged data.  The internet will route around it.  All things being equal, if you insert broken and healthy data into the memestream, the broken data will be copied less and will eventually die (a phenomenon which also explains the self-healing of Wikipedia and survival of healthy bittorrents).  DRM data is broken as designed.