Nintendo 3DS Targeted in Anti-DRM Campaign
Hard on the heels of the Free Software Foundation's Day Against DRM earlier this month, the advocacy organization last week launched a new campaign targeting the Nintendo 3DS.
"The Nintendo 3DS comes with Terms of Service (TOS) that should not be accepted," wrote the group's campaign manager, Joshua Gay, in a recent blog post. "In fact, the TOS are so unbelievable that we have included a more detailed summary of them on a separate page."
Top of the FSF's list of complaints, for example, is that the device's TOS "makes a threat that Nintendo will brick your device if you use your 3DS in a way that they do not approve," Gay explained. Read more...
Dreaming of Doomsday for DRM
Consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack opined. "You can't make a dishonest person honest with DRM since they will just not pay for it anyway, and in the meantime customers who actually pay money for things (like me) get punished. ... In media companies' "quest for their 'rights,' they have forgotten that they are not entitled to my money and must convince me to spend my hard earned money on them."
Well, it's been another wild week here in the Linux blogosphere, what with the post-Natty reverberations, the departure of Canonical's CTO, and the ongoing open source debacle that is Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL).
Then, of course, there was Star Wars Day -- which, as it turned out, coincided with the Free Software Foundation's Day Against DRM. Even more than weak Jedi allusions, in fact, Digital Rights Management -- or should we say Digital Restrictions Management? -- has been a popular focus of conversation over the past few days as a result. Read more...
Global DRM Market to Grow Threefold by 2014
Growth in the global DRM market will be fueled by the media and entertainment sector during the forecast period.
Global Digital Rights Management (DRM) market is projected to witness significant growth in near future due to the continuously growing media and entertainment sector. Our team of experts says that, mobile content market is projected to be one of the key driving forces for the growth in the DRM industry. Telecom operators are offering premium multimedia content to compensate for their declining voice revenue per user. Besides, enterprise sector will witness significant growth and is projected to offer immense opportunities for implementing DRM. The industry has been experiencing losses worth billions of dollars due to the lack of DRM implementation in corporate. Read more...
Annual Day Against DRM
The music industry may have largely given up on digital rights management, a largely ineffectual set of technologies meant to interfere with the simple and ubiquitous act of copying digital files, but the risks inherent in digital locks are as present as ever. Film studios must think that somehow their application of this technology is different, that this time it will work. As book publishers experiment with electronic editions, they also assume any such digital versions must be locked down to prevent their livelihood from being stolen out from under them.
Thinkers much brighter and more articulate than I am have pointed out that strategies relying on DRM proceed from rather flawed assumptions. Above all other things what the personal computer, and its descendants like smart phones, does best is to make perfect, infinite digital copies. Coding a thin veneer over this is comparable to trying to contain a rabid badger with a cardboard box. It willfully ignores the inherent nature of the situation. Hence business models based on digital technologies would be far better served to embrace the very abundance enabled. Read more...
Good Old Games: DRM drives gamers to piracy
Independent retro games retailer Good Old Games has spoken out about digital rights management (DRM), saying that it can actually drive gamers to piracy, rather than acting as a deterrent.
Speaking to bit-tech for a future feature about DRM in Custom PC, Good Old Games' PR and marketing manager, Lukasz Kukawski, said that the effectiveness of DRM as a piracy-deterrent was 'None, or close to none.'
'What I will say isn’t popular in the gaming industry,' says Kukawski, 'but in my opinion DRM drives people to pirate games rather than prevent them from doing that. Would you rather spend $50 on a game that requires installing malware on your system, or to stay online all the time and crashes every time the connection goes down, or would you rather download a cracked version without all that hassle?' Read more...