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As a user I've got an objection to DRM: it restricts me from using products that were already legally bought-and-paid-for. I bought a Blu-Ray drive for my medi
by eli_gottlieb 10y ago
As a user I've got an objection to DRM: it restricts me from using products that were already legally bought-and-paid-for. I bought a Blu-Ray drive for my media computer. My friend brought over a Blu-Ray copy of "The Social Network". It turned out that we could not play the film in the drive without paying an additional fee for a proprietary, DRM-enabled Blu-Ray video player application.
This is particularly bullshit because I paid for the hardware. They could have just built the appropriate crypto keys into there. Hell, they could have built a whole update-and-revocation scheme into the drive's firmware, something that much smaller and weaker devices than Blu-Ray drives can still afford in their electronics and firmware.
They could have built it all so that buying the hardware would enable me to play the media, no further questions asked. They did not need to sell me a piece of hardware that is outright unusable for its intended purpose without further payment for proprietary software whose primary job is just to license the appropriate crypto keys.
- 794CD01 10y agoThere's nothing wrong with selling hardware and software separately. This is the kind of laziness that gave Windows a desktop monopoly.
- AnthonyMouse 10y agoThere's nothing wrong with software competition, but that's not what this is. Otherwise you would be able to get software that does that under a free software license.
- 794CD01 10y agoDepends on what kind of software you want to buy. I can buy a computer without an operating system. I can then buy an OS separately. If I want to use that OS to run a web browser, I have many options. If I want to use that OS to run the new Tomb Raider game, which is published by Microsoft, I must buy Windows.
- AnthonyMouse 10y agoBut then in your example there isn't software competition. And there is no law prohibiting anyone from publishing free software that could run the game, unlike in the DRM case.
- 794CD01 10y agoThere is software competition to perform basic functions. There is not software competition for some more specialized cases because one competitor is far superior to the others.
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoThere's everything wrong with selling hardware that cannot work for its intended purpose without additional proprietary, for-profit software. Would you buy a car if you had to pay again to receive a steering wheel, a transmission, or a key? No. Or to take an analogy closer to home, NVIDIA and ATI both sell graphics cards. They also both distribute proprietary device drivers as binary blobs. They do not charge money for the binary blobs on top of what they already charged for the card itself. Nobody has to give anything away for free, but charging twice to use one piece of hardware for its intended purpose oughtn't be allowed.
- adrusi 10y agoThere's two parts to Bluray: the storage medium and the specification for the data on the storage medium. You can burn and read bluray disks with a filesystem, and presumably you could use your bluray reader with those kinds of disks. People who don't want to use their bluray reader to watch DRM-encumbered media don't want to pay for a licensed device.
- 794CD01 10y agoIt is not the responsibility of the hardware seller to know what your intended purpose is. To continue on your graphic card example, perhaps I want to buy them to use in my custom bitcoin mining operation, for which I have created my own more firmware that provides greater efficiency. I would then appreciate not being forced to pay extra for general-purpose graphics software I do not need.