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The real joke is using DRM to prevent competition. Printer companies have also been doing this.
by RexRollman 12y ago
The real joke is using DRM to prevent competition. Printer companies have also been doing this.
- AnimalMuppet 12y agoPrinter companies have tried doing this. IIRC, they lost in court.
- bjt 12y agoWhat Lexmark lost in court was a case that they brought claiming that the DRM circumvention violated the DMCA. There's no law or case prohibiting printer makers or coffee machine makers from implementing locks like this though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_Int'l_v._Static_Control_Components http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_Int'l_v._Static_Control...
- AnimalMuppet 12y agoAh, yes, that's exactly what I had in mind. So they can't prevent circumvention by law, but they can make it as hard as technically possible. But as Cory Doctorow points out, DRM can never succeed, because in order to sell a working system to your customer, you have to give them the encrypted content, and the decryption engine, and the key (otherwise, they can't use it). But if your customer is your attacker (or your competitor), you just gave your attacker the encrypted content, the decryption engine, and the key, so now they have everything they need to build compatible cartridges...
- bjt 12y agoI think Keurig's and Lexmark's definition of success might be different than yours though. They don't need the DRM to be unbreakable. They just need to protect their market enough that the benefits (to them) of the DRM exceed the costs. In the case of digital media, any weakness in the DRM means game over, because file sharing is so easy. But when talking about physical goods like printer ink and coffee capsules, it's a battle at the margins. They just need to discourage enough competition that their business stays profitable.
- schoen 12y agoYou might be thinking of Lexmark v. Static Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_Int%27l_v._Static_Control_Components https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_Int%27l_v._Static_Cont... where the courts ended up rejecting Lexmark's theory that a particular way of making refilled cartridges work with Lexmark printers violated the DMCA's anticircumvention provisions. However, you could still say that the printer companies are succeeding in using DRM to prevent competition (to some extent), even if it's difficult for them to sue companies like Static Control for circumvention.