Amazon, Audible uses drm to lock in customers

Amazon, Audible uses drm to lock in customers(brandonsanderson.com)

2 points by the_mungler 3 years ago | 3 comments

brookst 3 years ago |

I find these kinds of articles frustrating because I generally agree with the politics, but the presentation is so polemic and disingenuous that I instinctively disagree with the dishonest and poor reasoning.

For instance:

- Casting annual subscriptions to Amazon Prime as nefarious. I’m happy enough with my prime subscription. I have enough agency to make other decisions. I don’t need to be rescued.

- The idiotic argument that , because pirates can and do remove DRM, therefore DRM is solely used to restrict authorized use. Seriously? Can anyone read this with a straight face? It’s like saying that because burglars can bypass door locks, the only possible purpose for locks is to keep people out of their own houses. I’m a DRM skeptic, but this flimsy position makes me less sympathetic to the anti-DRM camp.

the_mungler 3 years ago | |

Yeah, the article certainly goes a bit over the top. As far as drm goes though, the lock analogy doesn't hold. You can't lockpick a house and then distribute unlimited unlocked free copies of it. DRM only needs to be broken once and can be widely distributed, but makes the experience worse for regular customers. There are tons of examples of this all over. Netflix only streams in 720p to browsers (except for edge). Video games with drm can be impossible to run on computers with unusual setups (Sure, I get cheating can be a problem, but this even happens for some single player games). Sometimes software will refuse to work because it is trying to "phone home" to verify a license while some servers are down.

But yeah, generally I think this article isn't the best on the subject. Just hadn't been posted on this site, so I thought it would be good to discuss.

brookst 3 years ago | | |

The lock analogy isn't perfect, but it's qualitatively correct. The assertion is that locks that are easily defeated necessarily have no legitimate purpose.

DRM, like my front door lock, serves the purpose of deterring casual theft, not of eliminating all possibility of theft.

There are better ways to do that than DRM, and DRM is more of a pain and risk to legitimate owners than door locks are. But the over-zealousness of anti-DRM crusaders leads them to extend their arguments to ridiculous extremes. That's what bothers me: if DRM does more harm than good (as I believe), why use laughably false and disingenuous arguments to make the case?