[FC-discuss] a DRM idea

[Nicholas Reville]

Yeah, it's difficult when dealing with entire physical formats.  But I  
think it could start with software and hardware (iphone) and then go  
from there.  Strategically, it might be worth writing off Blu-Ray and  
just focusing on trying to change digital video download services.   
Blu-Ray is very unlikely to remove DRM during its format lifetime.

nicholas





On Jan 12, 2009, at 12:37 PM, Ben Miller-Jacobson wrote:

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> I like it. This would probably work in many cases. Unfortunately,
> however, if this is overused it looses it's effect. Consider, for
> example, what would happen if we rated every HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movie
> poorly because of the DRM inherent in those standards. I predict  
> that it
> would simply lead to rating deflation long term because it applies to
> literally everything in the category. On the other hand, if we
> concentrate on the worst offenders or pick a smaller number of
> individual targets (perhaps targeting one company at a time, for
> example), this could be a powerful tool.
>
> Ben Miller-Jacobson
>
> Nicholas Reville wrote:
>> Hey hey everyone,
>>
>> Just jumping on this list with an idea that I'm not really in a
>> position to work on right now, but want to throw out there.  With
>> Apple's removal of DRM on (more of? all?) it's music, I think there's
>> a very real risk that people will assume the DRM issue is dead.  For
>> example, there's a feeling that because movies (dvds, blu-ray) and
>> games have long come with some DRM on them, it's a non-issue for  
>> those
>> formats.  That mentality could bring our great progress to a halt.
>>
>> The other day, I was commenting on a DRM post by Cory on boingboing
>> and I thought about what seems to be have been the most effective  
>> anti-
>> DRM action since the rootkit stuff, which was people rating Spore  
>> with
>> 1-star on Amazon.  This strikes me as a tactic that can make a major
>> financial impact on companies that use DRM and is very easy to do for
>> folks that want to avoid DRM products and let others know to avoid
>> them.  It could be *extremely* powerful if applied to a large number
>> of products.  Imagine an executive trying to decide whether a DRM
>> system is worth the 3 point drop in star ratings that he'll get if he
>> deploys it.
>>
>> One way to approach this would be to have a blog (defective by
>> design?) that posts a new product each week that overuses DRM and  
>> asks
>> people to rate it on Amazon.  That would be a great place to start--
>> even on a less well known blog, we can all subscribe to the RSS feed
>> and act on new posts.
>>
>>  But an even stronger approach would be to write a Firefox extension
>> that checks pages at Amazon and other sites against a database that
>> says whether something uses DRM or not.  The extension is basically
>> invisible until you come to a page that is selling a DRM-laden
>> product, at which point it pops up and says-- "Hey, this product uses
>> DRM, restricting what you can do after you buy it.  We recommend that
>> you avoid it and that you consider rating the product."  If you can
>> get someone to install the extension once, they'll probably act on it
>> a whole bunch of times in the future.  It could quickly create a huge
>> disincentive for any company to put DRM on a product.
>>
>> So I don't know if other folks have suggested this before, but I
>> wanted to get it out of my brain and towards people that might want  
>> to
>> take a project like that on.
>>
>> Thanks for fighting this fight everyone,
>>
>> nicholas
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
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