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We covered the Keurig's DRM'ed Coffee Pod three days ago, but today Blackmoore provides us with a link to a Cory Doctorow article: Why DRM'ed coffee-pods may be just the awful stupidity we need.
In it, Doctorow argues that this case might conceivably lead someone to initiate legal action which could eventually, given a technically-savvy judge, result in common sense being applied and legal precedent being created. Blackmoore also provides this quote from the article: 'But of all the DRM Death Stars to be unveiled, Keurig's is a pretty good candidate for Battle Station Most Likely to Have a Convenient Thermal Exhaust Port.'"
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Why Stupid DRM Might Be Good
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I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday March 07 2014, @04:50AM
The previous case that you cite was lost because the judge determined that the DRM on the cartridges was not protecting the software (which could be dumped via other interfaces) and so was only being used for vendor lock in. The ruling Doctorow wants is to say that DRM can't be used in a specific situation, with wording sufficiently broad that it can be used as precedent in other situations.
It's difficult, without completely suspending any knowledge of how the legal system works, to understand how he thinks this will happen. In most other industries, the players providing DRM are not the ones forcing it on you, so they don't have the same kind of lock-in requirements (and, unless you can prove a cartel, it's generally not a problem for manufacturer A to require their customers buy things from manufacturers B or C if they want to interoperate).
The reason we got rid of DRM on music was that the studios finally woke up to the fact that DRM wasn't reducing copying or increasing revenue for them, it was just working towards granting Apple a monopoly on music distribution. They were heading to a world where only Apple could sell music and you could only play it on Apple-provided devices, at which point their bargaining position would have been very weak. They wanted to be in a situation where there were lots of competing retailers and device makers, all cutting their margins razor thin and keeping the price of the music stable.
The best hope for removing DRM on video is for Netflix to keep growing. Eventually, the movie studios will realise that they're creating a monopoly in the channel. Unfortunately, with both Amazon and Google playing in that market, all with DRM, and little consumer demand for moving videos between them it's less likely to happen.
sudo mod me up