Most software trial versions I’ve used did not have DRM, but were crippled in various ways compared to the full (paid) version.  For instance, in engineering or design software, saving or printing might be disabled.  In a game, only a subset of the levels might be present.

If I could use the full featured version of software for a trial, by agreeing to accept the DRM and abide by the license restrictions, I would have no complaint, provided that if and when I choose to buy the software, it is not encumbered by DRM.

The general reasons I oppose DRM is that it makes the product less useful to me, or even completely useless.  For instance, the DRM on video discs (DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, etc) makes it very difficult to watch the video on a computer running Free Software.  While preventing people from watching DVDs on Linux was probably not a specific objective of the studios, it has that effect.  Even in cases where people have reverse-engineered the DRM to make it possible to play the media with Free Software, laws such as the US DMCA may make it a criminal offense to perform that reverse engineering or distribute the resulting software.  This is one reason why most Linux distributions are not able to include DVD player software.

Note that copyright law only protects creative works, while Ed Felten observes that “There is nothing creative about this number — indeed, it was chosen by a method designed to ensure that the resulting number was in no way special.”

The number is also not a “circumvention device” within the meaning of the DMCA.

DRM is intended to prevent unauthorized copying of music, movies, and software. However, it also prevents copying and use that is within fair use rights provided by copyright law. In many cases, DRM is also harmful to computers and other equipment. For instance, the Sony CDs with DRM installed a rootkit on user’s computers, even if they declined the license agreement, rendering those computers vulnerable to malware. Other CDs with DRM have been known to cause physical damage to car CD players.

Products which support DRM are thus considered to be Defective by Design, and the campaign is intended to educate the public on the problems caused by DRM. If people vote with their wallets by purchasing products that do not use DRM in preference to those that do, sales of DRM’d products will decline, and manufacturers will have more incentive to provide non-DRM products.

Media companies have been trying to get Congress to mandate DRM (beyond the existing DMCA legislation), and we need people to tell Congress that DRM is harmful.

We (the public) should be glad that they are using a flawed implementation, as it will facilitate construction of devices to thwart HDCP and restore some of our fair use rights. For instance, HDCP devices will not allow the use of full resolution of a non-HDCP monitor, by downsampling the video. There’s no legal requirement to do this; it’s simply an attempt to close the so-called “analog hole”. In other words, Hollywood assumes that we’re all a bunch of copyright infringers and makes our viewing experience worse, while in fact having no measurable effect on actual copyright infringement.

Just say no to Digital Restrictions Management!

I didn’t buy a copy of DVD Copy Plus back when it was being sold, and in any case I prefer to use Linux to solve these problems. I was expecting to have to jump through a lot of hoops to copy a video DVD on Linux, but a search turned up a paper explaining how to do it. In case the information is useful to someone else, I’ve put the paper online at floobydust.com.

The backup process worked fine, and the resulting disc plays in my DVD player, so I’m happy. Of course, normally one should make a backup of a disc before the original goes bad, but in this case I got lucky.

I dreamt that I went into a bookstore to browse. I pulled a book from a shelf and opened it, only to find that the pages were all blank. Thinking that this was a printing error, I looked at another copy of the same book, but it was blank as well. Hmmm… looked like a whole print run might have been defective.

I found a different book in another section of the bookstore. It was blank too! I ran around checking random books throughout the store; they were all blank.

I found an employee and asked about it. He explained to me that these are the new and improved electronic books with DRM. When you buy the book, they activate it and you provide a thumbprint on a spot on the inside cover of the book. From then on, the content becomes visible when you scan your thumbprint on that spot again, and disappears when you set the book down.

I pointed out that this was ridiculous, and that I couldn’t decide which book(s) to buy without examining some of the content in the store. I ended up in an argument with the store employee, who tried to convince me that it was unfair to the author and publisher for me to be able to see any of the content before I’d purchased the book, or if I let other people read the book without paying. He said that if they didn’t have protection like this, authors and publishers wouldn’t have any incentive to write and publish new books. He also pointed out that the new books had the great feature that they only had to have their batteries recharged every week or so, and that the charging system (a plate that you set the book upon for a few hours) was available for only $49.95, with a $20 mail in rebate if I also bought three books.

I decided to buy one book just to see how it worked. It was some sort of technical book. I went home, thumbed the cover, and started reading. The phone rang. I set the book down (open, pages down), and answered the phone. When I picked up the book again, it had gone blank, and I had to thumb it again.

I found some useful information in the book, and I wanted to share it with a friend. I figured that the easiest way to do that was to scan one page, crop the scan, and email it to my friend. I put the book on the scanner, but the resulting scan was just a blank page. I tried to take a photo of it with my digital camera, but as soon as the camera tried to focus on it the page went blank.

I decided that I’d just tell my friend the information when I next saw him. But when we met, I couldn’t remember the information. As soon as we parted, I could remember it again.

I was upset, and took the book back to the bookstore to complain. The store employee swiped the book past the activation system, punched a few buttons, then told me that I couldn’t have a refund because I’d already read part of the book.

I took the book home again, thumbed it to make the pages visible, then tried to subvert the DRM to make the pages permanently visible. That would be illegal under US law (the anti-circumvention prohition of the-DMCA), but if I just did this in the privacy of my own home, who would ever know?

When I started trying to hack the book, the pages all went blank, and thumbing the cover would no longer bring them back. Worse yet, police arrived at my door minutes later and arrested me.

I woke up very scared and angry.

What happened in the dream may seem like a ridiculous fantasy. Unfortunately the technology needed to make all of this happen (except forgetting the content when I saw my friend) already exists and is in the process of being commercialized. Pages that can be blanked are quite possible with digital paper, which appeared in some products in 2004. Finger recognition technology has been available for several years. Inductive charging systems have been demonstrated for notebook computers and other electronic devices. Various tamper-proofing systems have been used in consumer products. Blanking the pages when you set down the book can be accomplished using low-cost three-axis accelerometers, though they would also blank the book if you hold it too steady. And blanking if the book is scanned or photographed can be accomplished with infrared sensing (most cameras use infrared for autofocus).

In 1997, Richard Stallman wrote a fictional account of DRM of electronic books viewed on computer displays in the mid 21st century, in his short story The Right to Read. When I first read the story, I thought that it was completely implausible. Unfortunately events since that time seem to indicate that we are moving in that direction, and technology developments are such that the scenario he describes may soon be possible with actual physical books, not just computer displays, because a physical book may actually be a computer display.

In the film The Princess Bride, the grandfather (played by Peter Falk) at one point explains to his grandson “When I was your age, television was called books!” Will my grandchildren believe me when I tell them that in the good old days, you could lend books to friends, and that there were even organizations that purchased many books for the express purpose of lending them out?

This scheme limits entry to the market for players, [...] This plan won’t stop filesharing, though

I speculate that the primary objective must be to enforce region coding. I doubt that the studios are really naive enough to believe that people won’t be able to extract player keys, given the dismal history of such “protection”.