\n — @adurdin is thinking aloud

How to sell to a pirate

Paul Battley, to the media industries:

• There is no point in putting restrictions on the sale of the legal copy, because your free competitor has the same product.
• When you region-code the product, you prevent me from buying it.
• When you don’t sell the product in my territory, you prevent me from buying it.
• When you put DRM on the product, you prevent me from using it on the device of my choice. I don’t want to be locked into buying Apple products forever, for example. And that prevents me from buying it.
• There’s no point in putting DRM or other restrictions on the product, because it’s already available. Give me commonly-accepted formats in a choice of bitrates. What’s the worst that can happen? I upload it to Usenet? It’s already there!

He also makes the point that:

Even though it’s free, pirating stuff is still a bit of a hassle. You [the media industry] could definitely beat them [the pirates] on convenience and speed of release.

Although you know what? The media industry had better get its act together quickly: the options for piracy are only getting simpler and easier.