Gates: It's time for convergence

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Your want more sales or fewer pirates?

"Region Coding is not DRM. "
Its a digital restriction is it not? What about CC's DIVX is that DRM? Didn't that exist before DVD copying was possible? So DRM would exist even if piracy didn't. Your argument that DRM wouldn't exist if it wasn't for piracy is therefore incorrect.

" The problem the industry is faced with is people that take that movie and convert it to MPEG and post it on the Internet as well as those who do direct copies. That MPEG can be downloaded by millions without having..."

Do you want more sales or fewer pirates? Its the sales that pay the bills, you can cut piracy to nothing, but if you lose all your sales in the process you have no money to pay your bills.

For P2P piracy, DRM can only work if it 100% effective, because 1 copy is all thats needed to seed the network. Since sooner or later you have to ship the DRM key to the viewer program, DRM can never be 100% effective even in Gate's wildest Palladium dreams.

(please prove me wrong by giving me a scenario that can't be broken).

For friend to friend piracy, the DRM is applying restrictions to *all* customers, not just the pirates. Suppose you disabled writing a downloaded movie to a DVD, if you gain 50 pirate customers that way but lose 100 genuine customer, you are down 50 sales.

So it comes down to this test: "does the DRM lose you more customers than you gain?"
If the answer to that is "yes" then DRM is not the answer to piracy.

With music we already had examples of this, Apple sold 20 million this year by turning down the DRM. Thats 20 million sales that could have been made last year and the year before and the year before that. Those sales were lost pursuing this crappy DRM, rental scheme.

Some stores have since tried the DRM without the rental part, they're not successful either. So its the DRM thats stopping the sales not the rental.

For movies I don't imagine DRM will fair any better.

Posted by: Nigel Johnstone   Posted on: 01/08/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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