Tag Archive for 'digital rights manufacturing'

The iPad Might Mean the End of Intel Macs, and That Scares Me

Yeah, yeah, the iPad wasn’t all that great, and it’s underwhelming, and it won’t cure cancer like we thought it would, blahdeblahdeblah. We all know that, and that’s not what I’m going to rant about right now.

The iPad is the first device to use an Apple-designed processor. This is something one could easily have predicted when Apple bought PA Semi in 2008, but now that Apple’s finally gone and used their newly acquired chipmaker to actually make their own chip, the potential ramifications begin to sink in. Now that Apple makes their own processors, what’s to say they’ll still be putting Intel’s in their Macs?

One can see why they wouldn’t want to. Continue reading ‘The iPad Might Mean the End of Intel Macs, and That Scares Me’

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IEEE’s “Digital Personal Property” Is The Stupidest Idea Anyone Has Ever Had. Ever.

Magical Unicorn Fantasyland with Rainbow
So I’m looking through my RSS reader and see this Ars Technica headline: “Goodbye, DRM; hello ‘stealable’ Digital Personal Property.” It was like a fucking trainwreck. I could not just pass by the article. I had to read it.

Consumers hate DRM—all that “phoning home,” the outside control over one’s behavior, the fact that you can’t resell encrypted digital media, the worries about activation servers dying. But what if digital rights management could be turned into “consumer rights management” and people could actually own and fully control the digital content they purchase? That’s the dream of Paul Sweazey, who’s heading up a new study group on “digital personal property” at the IEEE.
[...]
Digital personal property (DPP) is an attempt to make consumers treat digital media like physical objects.…[DPP files] can be freely copied and distributed to anyone, but here’s the trick: anyone who can view your content can also “steal” it irrevocably.

And why would anyone want something like that? Well…

Digital content lends itself easily to the creation of identical copies, so crafting a system in which digital content can be “stolen” is trickier than it might sound. The idea is to make it a “rivalrous good,” one that, after being taken, deprives someone else of something.

Which is exactly what DRM attempts to do; DPP, at its core, amounts to nothing more than changing two letters. Of course, that’s not just because it tries the same thing. It’s also because it fails spectacularly in the exact same way. Much like every DRM system ever, “the scheme will be cracked, and once it is—even if only a few technically-savvy people can do the necessary work—content will flood P2P [file-sharing] networks,” says Ars.

The fact that people who have actual jobs and educations still consider these kinds of ideas is absolutely baffling. I mean, they’re presumably sapient enough to know how to wipe their own asses, so why does the fact that DRM doesn’t work continue to elude their common sense?

Given that digital content just isn’t like physical content, I ask Sweazey why we might want to force it back into that model…His answer is that such freely-copiable [sic] goods breaks the basic business model of human commerce by making goods nonrivalrous; it no longer has aspects of a private good, and this makes it difficult to sell.

You know, Mr. Sweazy, you’re right; freely-copyable goods do break the basic business model of human commerce. That’s certainly a problem. Now, you go run along and play, because us adults have to go back to accepting reality and coming up with a solution that works outside of Magical Unicorn Fantasyland.

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RIAA Declares Death of Digital Rights Manufacturing, Causes Everyone’s Head To Explode

TorrentFreak reports that the chief spokesperson for the RIAA has gone on record saying that DRM is dead:

Jonathan Lamy, chief spokesperson for the RIAA declared DRM dead, when he was asked about the RIAA’s view on DRM for an upcoming SCMagazine article. “DRM is dead, isn’t it?” Lamy said, referring to the DRM-less iTunes store and other online outfits that now offer music without restrictions.

DRM, which advocates claim is an acronym for “Digital Rights Management,” stands for Digital Rights Manufacturing, and refers to a number of technological methods by which media companies can manufacture legal rights for themselves out of thin air. These synthetic rights allow the gigantic corporation to prevent a legitimate buyer of a song, movie, video game, or other piece of media from doing anything particularly useful with it. It has been used by music distributors throughout the 00s as a sales reducer.

The RIAA, or Retrospectively Irrelevant Association of America, has long championed the use of DRM on music, asserting that la la la la la, I can’t hear you, la la la la la. The sudden change in attitude has so far caused 40 deaths and 900 injuries worldwide related to high-decibel emissions of “wait, what?”

Update: Actually, no, they didn’t. They just said it’s not on iTunes and stuff anymore, so that means something. Oh well.

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Revelation: The Xbox 360 Is a Form of DRM

Interesting IM conversation I had with my boyfriend:

Him:
BULL
it’s [Splinter Cell Conviction] exclusive to 360…
Me:
Oh noes. That’s so terrible because I don’t have a 360.
Thank you for being so upset at my misfortune despite the fact that you, yourself, lack it.
Him:
no, i wanted to be able to play it wherever I am
on my laptop

Oh. My. God. The Xbox 360 succeeds at causing problems for the consumer who wants the convenience of things like portability, as well as preventing other corporations (Sony and Nintendo) from competing when it has an exclusive, while monumentally failing to prevent piracy. The 360 is DRM!!!!

Granted, this is true of most game consoles, but it’s more fun to hate on Microsoft.

UPDATE: Apparently “360 exclusive” means “Xbox 360 and Games For Windows” in Microsoft-speak. Oh well. I guess I’ll have to replace Splinter Cell with the Grand Theft Auto IV DLC for my analogy to work. Or anything Halo-related besides the first two games.

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The Indie Paradox: Paying Rent Without Depending On Corporations

If you're not indie...Piracy happens for two reasons: people don’t have a lot of money, and 90% of everything is crap (or DRM’d, but that makes it crap). Therefore, by getting everything free, you won’t lose any of your hard-earned cash on that 90%. Unfortunately, because no money is going to the creators of the other 10%, they won’t continue making things for everyone to download free.

Large corporations have come up with a solution: go into the manufacturing business. They are now Digital Rights Manufacturing companies, creating new rights for themselves using a revolutionary new process known as “fellating lawmakers”. Their revenue stream comes from licensing these digital rights at high prices, and suing people who don’t pay. But it’s too expensive for indie artists and creators, and it doesn’t win you any friends.

Because of this situation, indie game developers are doing horrible things like experimenting with in-game advertising. I’m not saying this as a knee-jerk reaction to the horrors of annoying ads bombarding us. I’m saying this as a knee-jerk reaction to the horrors of depending on the advertising industry for revenue.

Think about it: TV series with devoted fanbases are cancelled because they don’t make enough ad revenue. Millions of websites depending on Google AdSense would go broke if their accounts were inexplicably terminated (I’ve read about this happening before but can’t find a link detailing it. Maybe I’m typing the wrong words into Goo…gle…wait a minute). And remember when GameSpot fired Jeff Gertsmann when their advertisers didn’t like his reviews? For people who call themselves indie, it’s not very indie-pendent.

The best way to be indie in any medium, be it game development, filmmaking, music, writing…hell, even running a business in general, the only party you should be depending on is individual people. Some may know them as “customers”, or “users” who “generate content” on your “social media application”, but let’s avoid such corporate-speak, as it makes baby Jesus cry and is killing America. But there’s still the problem of how exactly to make money on individual people anymore. In a world where art is hard work and people don’t seem to want to pay for it, one man will stand up to explain his opinion. That man is me. Reread the previous two sentences in a movie trailer guy voice, then click the jump-cut-continue-reading thingy:
Continue reading ‘The Indie Paradox: Paying Rent Without Depending On Corporations’

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