Yeah, this is another rant about Big Media, but not in the way you’ve seen before (or at least not in the way I have!). You see, they’re spending/wasting all this time and money figuring out ways to ensure that the music/movies/books we download can only be used as many times and as many ways as they decide to allow. Doesn’t anyone remember what happened with software copy protection back in the 1980’s? Companies spent more time figuring out ways to ensure that their 5.25″ floppy disks containing the latest games couldn’t be copied than they did designing the games themselves. And then, within hours of its release, some enterprising cracker would trapse through their protection scheme, copy the data out, and release an updated version to all the bulletin boards. This happened time and time again, and I don’t believe there was *ever* any software-based copy protection that actually stood up against this. So why does Big Media think things are any different now?

It’s been said many times before, and will be said again: the best copy protection is proper marketing and product design. Make it so that the easiest way people can get what they want is to buy it from you — then they won’t worry about copying it from their neighbor.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 14th, 2005 at 12:22 pm and is filed under music, rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.