5 ms·
DRM is such an utter and absolute waste of effort and money. Think of the millions of man-hours that have so far been misallocated on trying to "secure" digita
by beedogs 14y ago
DRM is such an utter and absolute waste of effort and money. Think of the millions of man-hours that have so far been misallocated on trying to "secure" digital content. It's just sad.
- arrrg 14y agoEh, I think DRM has been pretty effective for Apple so far, still is, even with this. Pirating iOS apps is very uncomfortable, uncomfortable enough that those who can (i.e. those who have a credit card and are not completely broke) will in general buy, not pirate. I mean, even their gift card distribution is now so effective (you can buy them everywhere you go) that even without a credit card, the app store is pretty damn comfortable – so even kids are not necessarily forced to pirate.
- bo1024 14y agoBut the fact that pirating is uncomfortable does not constitute an argument that Apple has been better off with DRM than it would be without.
- arrrg 14y agoThe DRM makes pirating less comfortable. If you could just go to some website and download the app and drag it into iTunes to get it on your device (that’s what dropping DRM entails) pirating on iOS would be very comfortable, probably on a level with using the App Store.
- myko 14y agoI think 80% of folks I know who have iPhones have them jailbroken, most of these people are pretty non technical as well. It's been a long time since I've used an iPhone for anything other than development, but I don't remember it being very difficult to jailbreak, and pirating apps isn't a difficult step from there.
- mtgx 14y agoI would imagine, even if most users can't do it themselves, other family members or friends will do it for them, in the same way they've been installing Chrome on their computers before. This can quickly (a few years) lead to a large portion of the users using jailkbroken devices, and getting used to having their device jailbroken.
- cglace 14y agoIf you are willing to help lots of nontechnical people jailbreak their phones you better have a lot of time for the thousands of support questions they flood you with.
- ghshephard 14y agoI'm pretty tech savvy, I work with very tech savvy people. Many of them write firmware, network routing systems, and spend hours a day JTAGing various spins of our NICs. I don't know how to jailbreak my phone, nor have my dozen or so google searches yielded anything useful, nor do any of my colleagues have jailbroken phones - despite being precisely the type of people who want to. Jail breaking used to be straightforward a couple years ago, but for anyone with a recent phone (I have an iPhone 5, colleagues have iPhone 4S's) - it's become pretty difficult. Any links or pointers appreciated though....
- saurik 14y agoI doubt that most of the people who pirate have a recent phone: they probably have hand-me-downs from their parents or purchased the device second-hand off of eBay. In fact, if you consider piracy a feature, you probably purposely purchase an older phone: Apple still sells the iPhone 4, which continues to be trivial to jailbreak.
- ig1 14y agoIt's pretty hard to argue that DRM doesn't reduce piracy. The overwhelming evidence from the last several decades (everything from the piracy rate on Commodore Amigas vs DRM'd consoles to modern ebook DRM) is that DRM has a significant impact on reducing the amount of piracy that occurs. Most of the arguments against DRM aren't about it's ineffectiveness in reducing piracy, but rather its implication for privacy and ownership rights.
- bo1024 14y agoAlso the question of whether reducing piracy increases sales.
- mtgx 14y agoPDF's convert to epub pretty well these days. You can even use good Text-To-Speech engines to read the converted epub aloud to you afterwards, so you get the benefit of having the equivalent of an audiobook, too.
- mikeash 14y agoThe trouble is that piracy reduction is the wrong end of the stick. What content creators benefit from is increased purchases, which does not necessarily follow from reduced piracy. I would agree that it's fairly clear that DRM reduces piracy, but it's not at all clear that this then results in increased sales.