Re: FYI: DRM is Evil. Very, Very, Very Evil
There is no problem with "Intellectual property" owners protecting it. I merely insist that it not punish the rightful owner of the product bearing it. DRM is incompatible with that. Best case, ask your consumers to cooperate with you in protecting your work. If there's a cost to the consumer--for instance, if the consumer needs to be always online, or needs to get permission to reset the activation count, or whatever, and that cost places the burden of proving innocence on said consumer, instead of guilt on the pirate of the IP, solely for the benefit of the person who sold it to you, then it's unjust.
Now, if you don't mind the DRM, and it doesn't hurt you, and if the net effect is that the content is protected from would-be pirates, then great! But if ever there should exist the possibility that this no longer be the case, for example you run out of activations in the middle of the night, your Internet connection goes down for a while, or the business goes bust, or whatever, then the burden should fall to the content owner, and not the consumer. It is the former's problem to solve and not the latter. Certainly the former promises that the latter should be able to use what they paid for; if they did not, then there should be no sale, and the DRM purveyor should simply tell the consumer up-front that their product may at any time not function as advertised because of the protection measures it incorporates. Perhaps change from "Sale" to "Rent" since that is after all a more accurate description, with reduced prices to match.
Let's have another silly, but apt, analogy. Shops are often the victim of casual theft. We solve that problem by finding and punishing the thieves, because they break the law. We don't tag and track every shop-goer with portable cameras that follow the purchaser of goods to their homes and observe them using those products rather than selling them on at a profi t, just in case it turns out one of them is making money from theft. Shops soak up more in theft than software houses lose to piracy, and theft actually results in lost revenue, where piracy might not even make a dent in projected sales targets because the creator has long since recouped all of the costs and are now taking in pure profit from distribution.
So yeah, I really don't mind compensating people for their work. I absolutely mind shouldering their problems. They are not mine to solve, and I suffer by participating in a scheme which vainly attempts to solve those problems for them, at my expense, for no good reason. I am not compensated for that inconvenience, and once they have my money they have no real incentive to support me when the cost-benefit does not align in their favour, no matter the clear ethical impropriety in separating me from my money. Indeed, the closest I've ever got to satisfactory DRM is with software that gets regular upgrades for a reaso nable number of computers that is not arbitrary but is purely for the benefit of the developer to know which keys are being pirated; in that case the upgrades pay for continual availability to the DRM servers, but you've still got the issues of malice, bankruptcy, etc. and now you're not really selling software, but a subscription. I could probably live with that if it were made clear up-front and the prices made sense.
JMO, of course.
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