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Poor Spore
Tuesday, September 16, 2008 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe
The new game Spore from Electronic Arts (EA) has been described as a cross between The Sims and Civilization, which sounds like months of lost productivity. Yay!But although the game is selling well, there has been a remarkable backlash against its digital rights management (DRM) "features."
On amazon.com, Spore has a one-and-a-fraction star rating. But look at the reviews (a small sample is shown at right) -- they are all about DRM. The few reviews that focus on the game itself are much more positive.
Mac Slocum has an excellent article with more details on O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing blog. He writes in part:
If the backlash to Electronic Arts' new game "Spore" serves as a sign of things to come, strict digital rights management (DRM) restrictions are transforming from consumer annoyances into full-fledged business mistakes.
Corvida at Read/Write Web has a similar perspective:
There's no doubt that Spore would've been pirated regardless of the DRM system. However, users of P2P networks are now encouraging others to pirate the game in order to teach EA a lesson. [...] We hope that EA will learn from this experience and the feedback of their customers.
The emerging consensus is that "overly restrictive" DRM will cause customer revolt. And "overly restrictive" is determined by the customers.
Labels: DRM
11:26 AM Permalink | |
Digital rights management in Web 2.0
Tuesday, July 08, 2008 — posted by Ethan Duty
The argument for digital rights management (people will steal your stuff) sounds good from a retail perspective. Who would buy the book when they can get a pirated copy for free? But if retail sales aren't the focus of your company, there is value in the illegal proliferation of your stuff.This does not mean piracy is good. Pirates take from the producer without investing anything back, leaving that producer with fewer resources to make better stuff, and thus slowing the progress of knowledge, technology, and perhaps civilization as we know it. But piracy is an additional form of marketing. Unprotected content results in additional readers at the expense of lost sales. But "free" content will reach consumers that cannot afford or justify the cost of a book, so your content gains exposure to individuals who otherwise would not have access to the information.
Let's say you're a consultant. You attract your clients by being the authority on certain information. One way to prove your authority (see the connection, authority and author) is to create white papers and books that others find useful.
The more people that read and use your stuff, the bigger an authority you become on the topic. If piracy drastically increases the copies of your books being used, you have that many more people that recognize your authority.
The more individuals that recognize your authority, the more likely they are to come to you for answers not available in the book. Since cloning isn't perfect, the public cannot pirate your personal knowledge and experience, and you get to charge the money for consulting services.
With everything going to the web, attention is rising in value. Your content is just one drop in a vast ocean of stuff and announcing your existence and value to potential clients becomes ever more difficult.
If pirated copies of a book generate more searches on the author and drive traffic to your site or blog, then perhaps there will come a time when you can't afford DRM.
Labels: business, DRM, web 2.0
1:07 PM Permalink | |
No more DRaMa: DRM-free books
Wednesday, June 25, 2008 — posted by Alan Pringle
O'Reilly has announced it will start selling some titles as ebook bundles free of digital rights management (DRM) in July. I'm sure a lot discussion went into that decision because we have grappled with this very issue for our Scriptorium Press titles.When we decided to release our FrameMaker workbooks in PDF format in February 2006, we opted not to use DRM restrictions that prevent printing or that lock the file to a particular computer. It was not an easy decision to make. We don't want our materials to be pirated, but at the same time, we don't want to implement DRM that can make life difficult for legitimate users. (What if you get a new laptop and your PDF file is locked down to your old one?) We also did a survey a few months ago on digital books, and folks made it very clear they would avoid files with DRM.
With the recent release of our Publishing Fundamentals: Unstructured FrameMaker 8, we took our sales of digital books even further. For the first time, we are offering buyers the option of purchasing a new reference book as a PDF file; previously, we offered digital versions for older reference books that we no longer printed. Another change with this latest release is that buyers who get the printed version also get the PDF version free. As is the case with our other digital versions, the PDF file of Publishing Fundamentals: Unstructured FrameMaker 8 is free of the DRM restrictions I mentioned earlier.
Releasing our content without any DRM may seem foolish to some. ("You're too trusting!" "You're inviting people to steal your stuff!") That being said, DRM can be a huge hassle for people who actually paid for the material, and it also can be cracked. Those are two big reasons we have opted not to use it.
10:35 AM Permalink | |