Every now and then, I get the occasional (and usually angry) e-mail from one of our readers, normally about to become one of our former readers, who proclaims himself disgusted at the state of digital rights protection and has decided to do away with anything that is not completely free of any artificially imposed bonds. My answer to them is, usually, that there hardly is any digital right management protection on our products at all.

I think that, as commercial publishers go, we have one of the most liberal policies in terms of rights management. Our PDFs can be opened on practically any platform, using nothing more than a standard PDF 1.4-compliant reader—including OSX’s built-in Preview and xpdf. All that’s needed to open them is the customer’s original password—nothing more. You can then cut-and-paste text, print at will and otherwise use the PDF file in whichever way you feel appropriate. Naturally, we don’t want our products to be copied and distributed by others, but the only real device that prevents them is the watermarking—clearly visible—on the front page of our magazines and the headers of our books. There is nothing that ties a download to a given machine, for example.

There are also no hidden “security features” aimed at revealing the names of those who break the holy bonds of our contract and—gasp!—decide to steal our content. Frankly, if you feel that you have to steal a $5 magazine, or even a $30 book, you have bigger issues to deal with. Of course, you could be really poor—but then I could point out these building, commonly found everywhere, called “libraries.” EIther way, I don’t see the point in the massive witch hunt on which so many publishers seem to be intent; I prefer to spend my time giving you reasons to behave honestly—such as convenience, better quality, good service—than trying to catch you if you don’t.

The Mouth and The Hand
The one thing that really does surprise me is how many people seem to be convinced that DRM is, in fact, the product of a massive conspiracy aimed at imprisoning knowledge. If you belong to this group, you probably have no idea how I wish you were right.

There’s a great quote by Steve Jobs that I think neatly sums up the current state of affairs with DRM and DMCA-like legislation:

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.

The sad reality is that the “massive conspiracy” is really nothing more than the natural response of certain powerful societal forces to a simple condition: pigheadedness. It goes a bit like this:

• Believe it or not, when you hear those Hollywood executives telling you that piracy is destroying their business, they probably believe it far more than you think. They are convinced of it, because it’s far easier to blame something unmeasurable, like piracy, than actually spending the time to figure out what’s wrong with their business models.
• Hollywood types tend to have two big assets: lots of money, and lot of charisma, both qualities (the former, in particular) that are attractive to other people, like, say, politicians, who see an easy way to make money by catering to these people.
• Lots of money plus ready-made legislation equals profit for a whole range of other players that exist solely for the purpose of catering to the IP owners’ insatiable thirst for more control over their products.
• Money in the hands of these new players, who become large and powerful because fighting piracy is, essentially, a lost cause, arouses even more political interest (“Did I, uh, hear a briefcase open?”), thus pushing the process forward even more.

If you accept the initial premise of needing a scapegoat for diminished success, everything else follows as a simple set of inevitable consequences into what looks like a gigantic conspiracy but is, essentially, much less exciting and original.

The Inevitable Conclusion
In general, the only time when I am bothered by DRM is when it truly limits my choices. For example, I don’t care if the music I buy from the iTunes store only works on my iPod because (a) I can buy it elsewhere if I need to and (b) I’m perfectly happy with my iPod—my choices are not really limited, although my convenience may be (but, honestly, I’ve never really had a problem with that).

On the other hand, it really disturbs that I have no way to buy a legal copy of my favourite TV shows in high definition. It bothers me that I can download better-quality videos from the Internet than I can legally buy from a store. That’s just plain stupid. And, by implementing a DRM mechanism that makes it impossible to make backups, movie and video producers have virtually assured that I will stay as far away from Blu-Ray and HDDVD as possible. I have lost enough CDs and DVDs to scratches and accidental drops to know better.

As I wrote a few years ago in one of my exit(0) columns on php|architect, illegal copying is a form of mass protest, and what its adversaries don’t seem to understand is that it takes away from their hands a valuable communication tool with their customers. The vast majority of people I know copy illegally for two reasons: either (a) they’re curious and wouldn’t have bought the product in the first place or (b) think that their choices are being limited one way or another.

By actively repressing illegal copies, all IP owners are doing is angering the people in the first group—who couldn’t give a damn about their products in the first place but may now choose not to buy the ones they normally would out of spite—and preventing the second from passing along the valuable piece of information that something is amiss. This can only result into further impoverishment of the quality of their product, and further decline of their sales.