Digital Rights Management (DRM) part 3

Not all publishers are so greedy and protective, however. An example of CD Projekt, a
Polish software producer and publisher shows that one can earn money and still be loved by the
society for making cheap games with no DRM that still are ones of the best on the market. They sell
huge numbers of copies not only because of high quality of products, but also because they
guarantee no problems with running the software. They also add lots of free gadgets such as books
and thematic pendants to original copies of their games so gamers just want to buy them. In opinion
of journalists and users this policy is a lot better than making it harder to copy games
(Supercoolljuk2, 2012). Concluding – some producers realize that selling well prepared products is
a better way of increasing sales and improving their image than aggressive anti-piracy policy and
spending money on expensive DRM instead of giving customers a product that people want to buy.
Commentators on Facebook say:
“This is absolutely ridiculous. I played and loved the first Witcher, and I own the second for the
PC. Even still, I'm buying the Dark edition for the 360. They're amazing games and I fully support
companies like this.. “(Chris Price).
and
“With increasing DRM technology and anti-used game measures in the upcoming console
generation I'm foreseeing a 2nd collapse of the video game industry. However after reading this
some faith in humanity has been restored.“ (Ted Moore).

Ubi Soft has recently admitted that they think about changing their DRM policy, after
strong criticizm from the side of gamers and journalists.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) part 2

Ubi Soft, a computer games publisher protects its games in a way which doesn't let
customers play them if they don't have a stable internet connection, because it is necessary to check
if a copy is not illegal. There is no need to say that hackers soon found a way to bypass this
protection and run games with no internet connection. Owners of genuine copies still have problems
when the servers happen to be down or they do not have access to the internet connection. On
February 7, 2012 some of Ubi Soft's games were unplayable due to company's data transitions
between servers. This also shows that if the company went bankrupt, people who had bought their
games wouldn't be able to play them anymore (Souppouris).

What is more some new Ubi Soft's games have a restriction of only 3 installations, after
which a copy becomes useless. This means that if one changes a video card in his computer, he
loses one installation. Www.1up.com journalists tried to test Anno 2070, a new pc game on different
computers to check how it works on different hardware specifications, but unfortunately they
discovered that they lost all installations after the third test.

"While it's correct that copies of Anno include three activations and that changing hardware
may trigger the need for reactivation, the vast majority of Anno customers never encounter this
scenario," reads a statement issued to Rock, Paper, Shotgun by Ubisoft. "On the rare occasion when
a customer does need additional activations, Ubisoft customer service is available to quickly resolve
the situation, and we encourage those customers to contact us directly so that we can ensure they are
able to continue to enjoy their game." Society of gamers is shocked with this policy. One have to
ask for permission to install a game he/she have already bought for $50 (Pereira 2012). And again,
what will happen when Ubi Soft changes its policy or ceases to exist? Software industry is a very
unstable one, companies sometimes disappear in really short periods of time, it may be a matter of
months. After that, legal situations of programs is often unclear. Rights to some of them can be
bought by other institutions which may continue the customer support, but unfortunately in many
cases software becomes available only in pirate ways.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) part 1

The industry does not only actively fight pirates. It also tries to protect its products by
including DRM technologies in digital media, like CDs DVDs or even files of different formats.
These DRM technologies are meant to protect the media from being copied, however hackers
always crack them in no time leaving only legal copies with additional useless features making
them working worse than the illegal ones. These DRMs make legitimate users unable of making
back-up copies of their discs, so they have to buy new ones in case of problems with scratches on
the surface. Pirates do not have such problems.

All legitimate DVDs contain unskippable content such as advertisements and anti-piracy
warnings which threaten the viewers with legal punishment for copying it (Allessandroisback,
2010). Pirate copies of films are ready to run immediately and the original ones – make us wait
even a few minutes during which we have to watch advertisements (even though we have already
paid for the movie) and read text in which the FBI threaten us. Many people choose piracy, just
because they do not like being disrespected, as one can read in the comments under a YouTube clip
with these warnings. Why do they have to loose time for these video clips, since they have already
paid for the film in a shop? The answer is fairly simple – distributors believe in the power of
advertisements and just want to earn even more money.

One of the first examples of DRM was the Content Scrambling System (CSS) chosen by the
DVD forum in 1996 to protect DVDs by using an encryption algorithm. Manufacturers of players
have to pay for the license and also implement it in their products to make them able of decrypting
and playing content of the DVDs. In 1999, at the beginning of the DVD era, before even it became
a technology cheap enough to be popular worldwide, Jon Lech Johansen developed an application
called DeCSS, which cracked the CSS and let users watch DVD movies on Linux, which was then a
system on which there was no official DVD player software available, thus leaving people no
choice but to buy expensive Windows or BeOS operating system.

On March 31, 2006 Toshiba released their first consumer-based HD DVD player in Japan
and its DRM technology, the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) was already cracked in
December of the same year. Many commentators conclude that the concept of DRM makes no sense
and is useless because the money spent on the researches could be as well spent on developing new
products. Products without DRM would also be cheaper, making them available for a wider range
of customers.

Loses caused by piracy

There are numerous studies concerning loses caused by piracy, for example according to a
report The True Cost of Sound Recording Piracy to the U.S. Economy
by Stephen E. Siwek the U.S. economy loses $12.5 billion in total output annually, it also loses
71,060 jobs, workers lose $2.7 billion in earnings annually, U.S. federal, state and local
governments lose a minimum of $422 million in tax revenues annually. These studies however are
not necessarily true, because the people who conducted them were counting not existing money, but
only hypothetical “loses”, in fact they calculated how much the companies might have earned if
piracy hadn't existed. They assumed that if someone downloaded a song, a company lost the dollars
it was worth, but to make their results look better in the eyes of RIAA and other organizations
responsible for protecting rights of artists. But does the fact that someone downloaded a thousand
songs worth a dollar each mean that if this person could not do it, he/she would buy them all?
Maybe he/she would just buy fifty percent of them, and downloaded a whole thousand only because
it is easier to find a whole discography of a given band than just a few selected songs? In fact it is
more convenient to click just once and have everything one may need plus some unnecessary files
that will soon be deleted without even being listened to. Scientists can check how many times a
given file (which may contain unlimited number of sub-files) was downloaded, but they are unable
do determine the purpose for which someone downloaded it. It is not difficult to show that these
studies are not completely trustworthy.

Moreover they can lead to ridiculous situations with people being sued and facing penalties
as high as $150,000 per song. RIAA has already settled some cases for as little as $3,000 but still it
sounds ridiculous. A 12 year old New York city girl, Brianna LaHara was frightened after she
learned that RIAA sued her for downloading songs using Kazaa music-swapping service. Brianna
was among 261 people sued for copying thousands of songs via popular Internet file-sharing
software — and more of them can be just children. RIAA representatives asked why they sue
children answer: "We don't have any personal information on any of the individuals." Concluding,
they conduct hundreds of lawsuits almost automatically without even thinking about the personal
situations of the pirates (NYPost.com, 2003)

The RIAA has recently had some problems with credibility. It has collected $105 million
dollars from the owners of LimeWire, which is a file sharing service, to compensate the damage it
has supposedly caused, but unfortunately no artist received anything. The recouped money is
destined for reinvestment in new anti-piracy efforts and will not be used to compensate any artists
(Ernesto, 2011).

Recent studies show that in fact pirates are the biggest group of customers for digital media
and buy significantly more than others. They just consume more than any other social group
(Michaels, 2009).

Anti-piracy campaigns

In 2009 in New York appeared ads with a message to citizens that downloading music and
movies without paying for them "kills jobs" in the city. The argumentation is that New York is a
capital of American TV, literary and phonographic industry, but what percent of the New Yorkers
work in media? Only about 100,000 New Yorkers work in the movie industry, which is not much
compared to over 8 million people of total city population and almost 19 million citizens of the
metropolitan area. One may judge that such campaigns choose wrong slogans. Saying that people
should buy music and movies to fight with unemployment may sound somehow ridiculous
(Sandoval, 2009)

The American Chamber of Commerce has recently started a website
www.fightonlinetheft.com on which one can watch a testimonial of a woman saying that her friend
died because of taking some medication purchased online. She says that Marcia Bergeron died five
years ago, a day after she had visited her home in Canada. In a video promoted by the US Chamber
of Commerce, it is said that Marcia relied on the web for most of her shopping. The woman was
complaining of flu symptoms. After her death the coroner reported that the cause of the death was
cardiac arrhythmia caused by metal toxicity, in other words the drugs poisoned her to death. There
is also a quote from the Wall Street Journal:

"This isn't college kids swapping MP3s, as in the 1990s. Rather, rogue websites set up
shop overseas and sell U.S. consumers bootleg movies, TV shows, software, video games, books
and music, as well as pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, fashion, jewelry and more... The Internet has
been a tremendous engine for commercial and democratic exchange, but that makes it all the more
important to police the abusers who hijack its architecture. SOPA merely adapts the current avenues
of legal recourse for infringement and counterfeiting to new realities. Without rights that protect the
creativity and innovation that bring fresh ideas and products to market, there will be far fewer ideas
and products to steal."

It is interesting however, that the idea is to fight this kind of abuse in the Internet and not in
the real world. There are many votes that the government should rather control what is being
imported to the country than create laws that allow many abuses and can be potentially used in
many other ways and for many different unspecified purposes. The opposers claim that physical and
digital merchandise shouldn’t go together in the legislation. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), for
instance, claims that pursuing fake goods in real merchandise can be accomplished in many other
effective ways, for example by inspecting shipping containers. Moreover, shouldn't be Department
of Health Care Services responsible for taking care of inspecting drugs imported to US and sold in
this country (SaM, 2011)?