01 January 2006 Blog Home : January 2006 : Permalink
When I bought the Complete New Yorker, I knew that I wanted to transfer it to a hard drive and bought an external drive a couple days later. [...] But, you can't copy it to a hard drive. I tried everything [...b]ut, it didn't work because it is copy protected with Macrovision.
[...] What are they afraid of? The 8 DVD's are going to be on P2P sites? The New Yorker is concerned that people will be downloading 60 GBs to read old Talk of the Town snippets? That high school kids are going to be trading them in the parking lot? They will be sold on street corners along with Harry Potter? Wouldn't this huge black market of Complete New Yorker piracy just create more demand for the magazine and more ad space dollars? It is fitting of a New Yorker cartoon!
I would be downloading all 60GBs, I am that devoted. But I don't have to because The Complete New Yorker is cheap, beautifully packaged and comes with a great highlights book [...]but I do revoke my recommendation that it is worth buying. You buy it, but you don't own it. Conde Nast still owns it. You can't use it in a fair, legal and sensible manner and you don't know that until you own it, as it doesn't have a sticker reading 'This DVD is Fucked.' It is not unreasonable to expect that consumers would choose to archive and eliminate the onerous disc swapping that is caused by being spread over 8 DVDs.
In fact it gets worse. After playing with a number of tools the reviewer is able to get to the point where he has evaded the part of the DRM that stops copying but not the part that insists on DVD swapping so, as the reviewer sums up:... the copy protection was beaten quite easily - I could sell copies all day long. Maybe in a fake Kate Spade bag. But the protection lives and prevents legal, sensible use.
The issue here is similar, though not as egregious, as the Sony Rootkit affair. The point is that the publisher attempts to limit what the user may do with the stuff he has legally bought. Frequently this negates the some or all of the advantages that digital media should have compared to its traditional alternatives. Now in a free market world this is basically his choice but it should not surprise him if his artificial failure to meet customer demand does not lead to someone else trying to meet it.There’s a reason why I’m going through Baen’s pile of published books. He is the only publisher I know who gets ebooks, I mean really gets them. (Virtually?) all of his catalogue is available in ebook form – with no Digital Restrictions Management! – for a reasonable price, and quite a few are available for free in the Baen Free Library. You can read these books on the browser, or download them to your PDA, whatever works for you. Naturally, you can always buy a dead-tree version, instead. I figure, this publisher is worth the money I pour at him, and hence I pour it in quantity.
[yes sorry Baen again but it isn't a coincidence - DRM is a huge irritant to most customers and Baen seem to be the only publisher who really does treat his readers as trustworthy fellow human beings]