What I don't like about DRM

There's a whole group of companies that decided it was better to punish their clients than to provide a good service. DRM (Digital Rights Management) is not logical, it's not a necessary evil, it's just a road full of little rocks we are supposed to travel barefoot while smiling and thanking and paying a toll.

Let me explain a little why I think DRM is bad. Let's suppose you have a computer, it runs a version of Windows. You purchased a game and played it a little, it had DRM, but for you it was almost as if it had nothing. Some years later you upgrade your machine and change to a different Windows. The new Windows has some security measures that prevent the old DRM from running. You still own a valid license of a game that's no longer usable in the old machine, because the old machine is broken. You have every right to install that game, but you can't. Because the old DRM does not work, and the company that made the game no longer supports it.

This could also happen if you changed your operating system to Linux and tried using Wine to run the game, or if you changed your computer to a Mac with OS X. The non documented tricks a DRM does to prevent unauthorized use just don't work well with emulations. A game that could have a broader gaming base just decided that it was better to cut a lot of machines from it.

Of course, this is if the DRM scheme lets you play the game in the first computer at all. A little Internet search shows that a lot of DRM software just doesn't let legal and valid users play their legally owned game. It could be something as simple as being a programmer and being told by the DRM that you can't play the game because you have hacking tools installed (in this case a debugger). So the company doesn't only tell you how and where you can play your game, it also wants to dictate what other things you do with your machine. And there's also DRMs that let you install the game a finite amount of time, and/or requires authentication via Internet. So, if the company goes broke or decides to bring down the authentication server, you can no longer install that game. Seems to me you are giving too much power to some publishers over you.

Same goes for movies or songs purchased with DRM. DRM enforces some restrictions on you, some bad restrictions that prevent you from using your legally owned media from using it in ways not covered by the DRM. Let's say I legally own a series on DVD, but some years from now the dvd format will disappear into oblivion. So, what prevents me from keeping copies in another formats? I'm not talking about copies that are used to exploit the media simultaneously in different places. I'm talking about keeping the copies for yourself. If there's no DRM, I can do it. But if the DVD or the new media format are DRM infested, then I can't do that, because it's qualified as an illegal use.

So, as you can see, I'm completely against DRM. I'm strongly opposed to letting corporations rule the way I can use things. I totally against letting them abuse me.

The Boycott

There are several classes of Boycotts, but I think that I may be the only person to boycott coke because they played and played a real crappy song in the radio some years back. I only ended that boycott when coke launched the Final Fantasy IX ad. This happened quite a few years back, but it serves as a perfect introduction for a boycott I started a few days ago.

I had been writing about the need to have an open codec associated with the new VIDEO tag present in HTML5. I had linked the petition to get youtube to support ogg/theora along with a second link that I later removed, a link to the same kind of petition for VIMEO

I had read the beginning of that forum message, and I was linking a lot both what it said and the respectful reaction of the community. But I hadn't read it till the end because it was long and I was writing a blog post. After publishing the post, I went over and finished reading, and at the bottom, I found a message from Andrew Pile, part of the Vimeo Staff. He wrote "Going to close this now since "+1" reposted a hundred times doesn't really help other than to clog up the front page. We fully support Ogg/Theora as an upload format. As for playback, the likeliness of that happening is close to zero at the moment."

Once I've read that, I took out the link from the blog post, in part because the voting was already cancelled. But another big part of that had to do with the attitude. For Vimeo, hundreds of people manifesting their accord with the original poster (that's the meaning of +1, an approval vote) don't serve any purpose at all but to clog up the front page. For them, hundreds of users manifesting themselves to the point where that appearing in the front page constantly is something that gives up a bad image, it doesn't matter that they are not doing anything destructive, that they are only trying to tell Vimeo the road they want it to follow.

After thinking it seriously for some hours, I sent an email to Vimeo. It says "I've seen that although you support Ogg/Theora as an upload format, you don't support it as playback format, as Andrew Pile said it, "As for playback, the likeliness of that happening is close to zero at the moment.".

Allright then, you have every right to do so, but the likeness of me entering your site to watch videos till you change this is close to zero at the moment. I know that I'm only one user, but I know I won't be alone in this.

Good luck and please fix it soon, I'd love to have a reason to return. "

So now you know, this is a boycott, and everyone that wants to jump aboard will be welcomed.