You cannot take that away from me

I was going to do some introductory post for this new blog… but of course, something much more interesting is available as a subject, so of course I won’t argue with that. In this case, the ever-hot subject of piracy and DRM is at hand. Jeff Atwood noted the rule that software creators live by, but that’s almost taboo to speak of loudly:

But let me be absolutely crystal clear about one thing: as a programmer, if you write software and charge money for it, your software will be pirated. Guaranteed.

The core of this issue is that people are people, so there will always be some that can’t afford it, some that have some agenda that justifies their piracy (“EA is evil!”), or maybe they do it simply for convenience. There’s a hundred different reasons, and it’s all about how human beings react to things and about our feelings. As such, it’s somewhat silly to think that we can solve the problem using technology alone.

Technology and all the advancements we’ve made is there simply to improve things for us as people living our normal lives. The better technology gets at cooperating with humans, the more likely it is we’ll use it and be pleased with the results. However, as soon as we start trying to employ technology to combat human nature, human nature is likely to win.

Take the DRM discussion for PC games as an example of this. It’s an obvious failure for that very reason — instead of providing assistance to the people that use it, it’s trying to combat human nature. Not only does it not work (games are still getting copied), it annoys people. It’s another one of those bad ideas that is repeated over and over. It’s pretty simple to see why all kinds of technology meant to combat human desires is destined to fail really… in a world where duplication of contents is essentially free, there’s only one tier of effort.

Let me explain what I mean by that through a few examples.

Consider a scenario where a record label is trying to protect their music by applying copy protection to their CDs (I know, madness!). It would seem like a clever thing to do at first glance, but here’s where there’s only one tier of effort. Once one person out there cracked the copy protection or even ran the music through his sophisticated all-digital stereo equipment back into recording software, it’s shared and completely effortless for everyone else. Well, the record labels eventually (yes, it took a good while) learned that it was pointless and started actually providing services to people instead.

Forward a bit in time, and you get DVD region locking. Hardware locks this time, can’t break that can you? Well, all it took was one brilliant man with alot of time and equipment to open the format up to the world. Again, once open the effort is gone… and as a result, region locking is a joke nowadays.

And still we end up here, with Spore. The game was on pirate sites before its release, and turned out ot be one of the most pirated games of 2008… yet legitimate owners who pay for the game can only install it on 3 computers and there’s no tool for moving it onced installed. Okay, so I get (in all ways related to DRM) a better product from a bittorrent site than I get from EA Store, and history repeats.

These things are all about how people work, and not at all about how technology works. Human ingenuity and stubbornness means that there will always be some brilliant computer wiz nutcase out there who will take on the challenge of breaking your scheme… and since there’s only one tier of effort, all it takes is one person (or group of people).

And more on how people work, you cannot take things away from people that they perceived to be theirs without them feeling let down. People used to be able to buy a game, and play it on any computer. The fact that only a tiny percentage of people actually want or need to use the game on more than 3 computers is irrelevant, because lots of customers will still feel that you’ve taken something away. And you cannot take things away from your customers.

McDonalds in Sweden tried a trick several years ago when they introduced those tiny boxes of sauce you can add to your menu. When they introduced the sauce, they removed the ketchup dispensers. If you wanted ketchup, you had to ask for it on while placing your order. Clever trick to get people to buy more sauce, you could think… but in reality, the only thing that happened was customers getting annoyed, even though you could still get free ketchup. Reflect for a bit on why? Indeed, there was a time before the ketchup dispensers were put in place, and people still flocked to McDonalds like moths to a spotlight on a summer night. But once there, people got used to them, and you cannot take things away from your customers. Regardless of how you try to motivate it or how few people actually used the particular feature you removed, people will feel cheated.

From a business point of view, it makes absolutely no sense to pay money (and lots of it) for something that provably doesn’t work, and annoys your customers to boot. Yet business leaders keep holding on to DRM and all these others restrictive ideas. Why? Human nature again — just as people will feel cheated when you try to take something away from them, a perception that someone is stealing something from you provokes a very emotional response within most people, who react to protect their property. This reaction is so strong that anyone trying to challenge it immediately get categorized as a thief or someone who thinks stealing is a fine thing to do.

Letting this sort of primal reactions of protective fear control the actions of a company worth billions can’t be a good state of affairs. There’s a lot of talk about the lost potential income of pirated games… so how come no one is talking about the lost potential income of games that customers shy away from due to invasive DRM measures or due to the bad PR in connection to it?

2 Comments

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  By Johan Svensson, Monday, December 29, 2008 @ 16:35

  We’ve just had a couple of DRM/piracy/copyright threads on PA, and… yeah, that turned into shouting matches where neither side would concede.

  DRM will always fail because it puts a lock on the product – but at the same time, they also include the key with the product, because otherwise the customer can’t use it at all. So all it takes is one guy to find out where the key is hidden and how it works, and then the DRM crumbles.

  I freely admit that I downloaded Fallout 3. Played it for a bit, checked it out to see if it wasn’t overhyped crap, had kinda fun, but was busy with other games (hello WoW and L4D), so I just deleted it.

  A week ago I saw that Webhallen had it on sale for 300 Swedebucks, so I decided to buy a legit version.

  Now I have to put up with a disc check every time I start the game. I paid money for a less useful copy. Once that annoys me enough I’ll just grab a no-CD fix (not crack, _fix_) and strip that shit right out.

  As an interesting aside, I discovered that the actual disc check is done by the launcher… but not the actual game binary. So I can just start the game binary straight away and skip the entire disc check. Still, can’t change video options outside of the launcher, but at least it’s something.

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  By slicedlime, Monday, December 29, 2008 @ 17:22

  I think the most interesting part of what you just said there is the first part about Fallout 3… you downloaded it. There can’t be a clearer proof that the DRM simply doesn’t work.

  I guess the whole discussion would feel much more relevant if we were talking about “should we allow people to pirate the game or should we put in this annoying DRM that works”.

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