I've seen this said many times about DRM and Copy Protection. I generally agree with the sentiment but I also understand why we think it's needed (I just don't necessarily agree with all the reasons). This post was prompted by my experiences over the weekend.
On Saturday night I sat down to watch Avatar on Blu-ray. I had missed it in the theatres so I was looking forward to the weekend so I could I watch it. The Blu-ray came with a DVD version of the movie as well, which I thought was a nice touch. Plugging the movie into my HTPC setup, I was greeted with a lovely error from AnyDVD (which I use because my DVD collection is split between R2 and R4 with the occasional R1 DVD). The error explained that AnyDVD had failed to read the disc and I should check the status window for more information. It seemed that the BD+ check had failed.
Not a problem, I thought. It's a Region B Blu-ray, so I'll just turn off AnyDVD and start watching it. I don't need AnyDVD to remove the region coding in this case. My pizza is beginning to get cold at this point, so I just want to get on with the movie. I obviously need to update AnyDVD to support the latest Blu-ray DRM. So I disable AnyDVD and the disc starts playing. After I get through all the copyright and warning notices (and most of a slice of pizza), I finally get to the disc menu, which I see for about 3 seconds before I am booted back to the Total Media Theatre 3 Platinum startup screen with a message stating that my hardware is not HDCP compatible.
It's right too. My HTPC is connected to my Projector via HDMI. It turns out that the projector does support HDCP over DVI-I apparently, but that's not how I have it configured - and I wasn't aware of that at the time in any case. AnyDVD would have removed that requirement, so I decided to see if there was an update. After a bit of searching it turns out they did have an update, it just wasn't rolled out to their website yet (so I had to grab it from the forums). A couple of reboots later and the movie was finally playing. I could finally enjoy my (now cold) pizza. I'd considered plugging the DVD in, but why the hell should I have to pay more for something I can't use? I bought the Blu-ray, so I wanted to watch the Blu-ray. In retrospect, I wonder whether that is exactly why the DVD was bundled.
People that pirated the Blu-ray of Avatar didn't have to deal with any of that. After a (presumably 50Gb) download, they'd be away laughing. So why exactly would I want to continue to be a legal consumer of movies? I pay them my money and then I get punished for it. I must be masochistic. You could argue that I have a non-standard setup, but I'd have had the same problem using a standard Blu-ray player and my projector (although I admittedly haven't verified).
Fast forward to Sunday. I decide I'm going to continue my second Dragon Age play through on the 360. I connect to Xbox Live and start the game up. I am greeted with a message telling me that the game couldn't connect to the Dragon Age Servers. Fine, I don't need to be connected anyway (my Xbox is definitely online, as I connected to Live just fine). I hit Resume Game and it starts loading. A few seconds later I am booted back to the main menu because some of my DLC apparently could not be found. Strange, as I'm certain I haven't deleted any of it. This DLC came free with the Collectors Edition.
A quick google search tells me that sometimes this can happen and the solution is to re-download the DLC. So I delete the offending file and try to start up the game again in order to re-download. Oh wait, that's right, the Dragon Age servers are down at the moment. Crap. Now I don't have any way to download that DLC again. So. my Dragon Age save game is currently unplayable (unless I started a new game so it wasn't associated with that DLC).
After being deprived of Dragon Age, I figure I'll start up Mass Effect 2. I decide to start up a new character on Insanity difficulty to get the remaining two achievements I need. After starting that up I am greeted with a message welcoming me to the Cerberus Network and asking me to enter my code that came with a new copy of Mass Effect 2. You see, they have this plan to incentivise buying new copies of the game rather than renting or buying a used copy.
That's all well and good, but I have already used the code that came with my new copy of Mass Effect 2 when I went through this process the first time I played the game. So apparently it's forgotten that I already have a Cerberus Network activation on my account. I'm hoping that this is somehow related to the same reason the Dragon Age servers were down (both games are published by EA) but I'll need to verify that later. Just wanting to do some gaming and not jump through hoops right then, I hit Cancel as I'm pretty sure I've played Mass Effect 2 without connecting in the past, and sure enough, I can start a new character.
A close call. I was lucky in that case and it all worked out in the end. Wait a minute. I was lucky? I was lucky to be able to play the game (that I paid full price for) in spite of the DRM. Screw that. This would have been lessened somewhat if EA wasn't so intent on controlling the whole process. If they just used Microsoft's DLC strategy, I might have still been able to play (I at least pay Microsoft a yearly subscription fee to keep Live running). But regardless, it illustrates the point fairly well. Pirates don't care if EA's (or Microsoft's) servers are offline or glitching.
The pirates have it pretty good. They don't have to pay for their content. They don't have to deal with DRM. They don't get told over and over again that they shouldn't pirate the movie they already paid for. They don't have to sit through trailers for movies they might already own but don't have a choice to skip. They aren't at the mercy of an infrastructure that might go offline at any point for any reason (and eventually - indefinitely). They get to experience the content when they want to. It's on their schedule, at their convenience. I'd like to hope that I'm an edge case with my experiences, but it does feel more like "when" DRM goes wrong, not "if".
Until we make purchasing content as easy and convenient as pirating it. What kind of argument can we really make against those that pirate that content. When we make piracy look like a better experience, we can't be doing ourselves any favours with our paying customers. I've heard the argument that "Well, it prevents casual copying". Bullshit. And even if that were true, we shouldn't be indirectly educating the casual consumer on how to remove the DRM so they themselves can use the content. We make piracy more attractive with this kind of crap.
When I say "easy and convenient", I don't mean simply during the purchasing phase. It has to be end-to-end and it should include similar freedoms (that they'd get otherwise). Things like the Gamers Bill of Rights are on the right track (and even Steam and iTunes DRM to a degree - they do a pretty good job of getting the DRM out of your way). The pirates don't deal with DRM, so why are we punishing our customers?
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