Can’t play your iTunes Music Store (iTMS) content on your strange device? Tough. That was never a condition of sale. The only thing Apple owes you is the right to play the content in their ecosystem – that was explicit agreement when you bought the content. Apple’s devices play DRM free content fine, so avoid DRM if you don’t like it. I bought one album in all the years’s Apple music was DRMed. Since DRM free music in iTMS and other providers like eMusic almost all of my music purchases have been electronic.DRM is lighter now than it was when Apple started and we made it that way through our purchasing habits. Online music selections are DRM free and eventually movies and TV shows will be too.
Note, the other big digital distros, Valve’s Steam and IGN’s Direct2Drive are also much easier to live with than their disc based PC DRM rivals. Contrary to warnings back in 2003 that DRM schemes such as Steam would be terrible for end users, they have proven to be hugely successful.
One edge that they have is non digital distribution DRM schemes are invasive and punish customers – chief among these is Securom. As an example, quite a few of my purchased disc based games allow a set number of installs (typically 5). Five might be enough for some, but as you can see from this site I review a lot of computers. Games get used for testing, and until recently Securom only tracked installs – ignoring when you uninstalled the game. That was stupid oversight. What that means to me is I have to email EA support any time I decide to go back to Mass Effect, it’s first DLC pack, Spore and Crysis Warhead. It’s really my fault for not reading the fine print – that’s $150 I wish I had back.
As someone that likes to replay good games – particularly as new hardware makes them run better – this is an irksome routine. EA is great, and they add activations to my limit within hour of a request, but why do this? Mt time is wasted, and EA has to pay someone to staff their help lines.
Meanwhile it takes a pirate less time to steal the game than it takes me – a legitimate customer – to install a title that I have bought. Outrageous!
Consumers (like me) are learning – we simply won’t buy the games if they has overly restrictive DRM. EA is learning, it seems their next big PC title, Dragon Age is free of restrictive DRM. Securom probably cost them sales and it seems to be on the outs.
So, pressure is applied at both ends to make DRM livable. Given commercial success or failure (in Securom’s case) we can expect to see DRM restraints loosen rather than becoming worse. It’s what we as consumers want, and increasingly the providers who want our money are listening.
