HD-DVD Key Fiasco: Will they ever learn?
Can they really stop an alpha-numeric code from leaking out over the internet? Of course not! In case you are under a rock, recently, an encryption key used in the encryption scheme for HD-DVD’s (AACS) has been discovered and posted everywhere on the internet. This key basically means that people can decrypt HD-DVD’s to make copies (illegal or fair use).
The folks who would have you believe you should not be able to use movies, music, and other media you purchase, HOW you want, would also like to ensure their policies by various Digital Rights Management schemes. HD-DVD was supposed to be hard to circumvent. Well, I don’t even have an HD-DVD drive in my house, yet I could go out and download HD-DVD movies already! Good work on the DRM, folks!
Now, the key to breaking this is a simple string of text. I’m not going to post it here (at least in text, let’s hope my images don’t count!), because I don’t really care to come under fire from anyone, I’ve had enough trouble with Cease and Desists in the past. That’s another story.
You can still easily find the key in many places. thepiratebay.org has it posted blatantly on their site’s home page, while there is a video on youtube of a guy playing a song he made with the lyrics being the code, over, and over, and over. Digg.com has had a controversy surrounding the key. They originally took down posts submitted to digg, relating to the key, due to pressure from higher-ups. Users revolted and digg changed their stance, defying legal threats. Awesome. Others have made images, t-shirts, anything you can think of, as part of the rebellion.
But can they really sue people for hosting a simple readable string? Perhaps. Can they suppress this string? Absolutely NOT. When will they ever learn that they are in the business of providing content to users. THEY are providing to USERS, and not the other way around. It’s simple business sense, if you want customers, you can’t treat them like criminals and tell them what you want them to want.
Apple seemed to be on the right track with iTunes selling some of EMI’s works without DRM. In fact, if I had the resources I would setup a distribution network going against the DRM grain. I reall feel that if content is made available to users at a fair price with convenience they want, users are probably going to go out and buy the content, it’s just easier. In order to thwart piracy, customers need to be given what they want, and it needs to be more economical for them than piracy.
To some, more economical will strictly mean dollars and cents. There are always going to be some people out there who would rather waste a bit of their time and energy finding some content, downloading it from an unpredictable torrent, then cataloging it and making changes as they need to organize it into their library. I don’t think this is the entire population though, it’s just sensationalized and exploited more due to the resistance of content providers to the internet.
For many, time and convenience translate into money. I went to get my oil changed and paid $20 for it at some place even though I had a free oil change at the dealership. Why? It was more convenient and time-effective for me to do so. I don’t mind paying a small price for that. So if I had to pay $3 for an album instead of downloading it, while knowing I’m doing things legally, I’d be very interested.
We could get into the economics of selling an album for that price, but I’m fairly confident I’ve run the numbers and could come up with a similar figure. $1 to the artists (no different from now), $2 to the content provider. More money if people want to buy the physical album in the store (there are more costs in distributing music this way). Digital distribution costs next to nothing to setup and run. Bandwidth isn’t even that much anymore, look at youtube and how much streaming VIDEO they give away for free, basing their income only on advertising. It could be done, it would just mean thinner and less made up jobs in the organization. Just getting rid of the fat.
My point is, it’s disgusting that these content providers still haven’t learned their lesson. They need to cater to the desires of their customers, it’s pretty obvious why they are losing them, and it has more to do with their business practices than it does with the internet. The internet is here, it’s now, it’s real. It is an enabler, there is no doubt about that. But how it enables who and what, is determined by who uses it. Pirates are using it now, Record labels and Movie studios are trying to disarm it, instead of embracing it with open arms.
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