I was listening to my NPR Science Friday podcast yesterday discussing the topic of who owns your digital data, broadcast on July 31st. The discussion covered a variety of different issues, including recent attempts by Facebook to retain rights to anything you post there, how Google plans on archiving all information digitally (it’ll take 300 years), and the ability of Apple to remove content from your iPhone any time it wants to.
One thing brought up in the discussion, however, was the idea of purchasing content. When you buy an album through iTunes, for example, you can burn that to a CD, putting it in a form that you can then access anywhere or anyhow you want. Music is one space where this kind of transaction has been pioneered and largely works well. In the software space, however, it isn’t really like that. If I buy a game through Steam, for example, I’m given a limited number of installs, otherwise I have to purchase it again [you can burn a backup, though, in that particular case]. More to the point, if I purchase a game on my PS3 or Wii digitally (i.e. PSN or WiiWare), I can only play it on that machine. What happens when the PS4 or Wii 2 comes out? Can I still play those games? Will they still work?
There are some forms of Digital Rights Management, used by the game company Electronic Arts (EA), that actually limit the number of times you can install the software. For the game, Spore, you would buy your DVD and then could install it 3 times. That’s it. So, if you reformatted your computer and needed to reinstall it, you’d lose one of your turns and have to do it again. EA had to intervene and remove that DRM because people got so pissed about it.
As another example, Brooke bought Bejeweled for her cell phone awhile back, then got a new one. So far as we can well, we can’t transfer that game to her new phone. So, did we ever really “own” the game? Because, if I “owned” it, I should be able to move it onto a new phone, just like if I bought a new stereo, I could put that same CD into it. Or a new TV, I could still watch the same DVD on it.
So yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what comes of this as more things go from physical media to digital media. Movies, likely, are going to go that way where you won’t buy a DVD anymore: you’ll have a digital copy of the movie. And while that digital copy will work for awhile, what happens when the new hot tech toy comes out that can’t play that old file anymore? I’ll have to buy it again.
I guess we’ve gotten used to physical media over the years, where I could take that movie on VHS and copy it over to DVD. Sure, it wouldn’t look as good, but at least I wouldn’t have to buy it again. It just seems like some of these efforts by corporations trying to “protect their property” are going so far as to turn what you think you own into something more like a rental. And, personally, if I think I’m “renting” something, I don’t think I should be paying so much to use it.
This isn’t something that worries me tremendously: it’s just something to think about.
I’ve always found the DRM stuff to be simultaneously hilarious and frustrating. Of particular note is the DRM package that Sony put on some of their albums that came out a few years ago that would actually break Windows if you tried to remove it, requiring a reformat and reinstall. On one hand, I can’t help but be entertained by such spectacular failure (especially when it’s trying to address a practically insurmountable issue by trying to prevent music piracy), but at the same time, I had to send a bunch of people away from the Help Desk because Sony had broken things enough that it was outside our scope of service. That just sucks.
I frankly don’t think there’s much that can be done about it. The only remotely reasonable DRM method I’ve seen is the more recent version of iTunes DRM where they just embed an account origin identifier in the file, enabling it to be traced to the original account if it turns up pirated. Even that’s not particularly useful – you can’t do much with it without violating privacy laws – but at least it doesn’t prevent the legitimate usage of the product like so many DRM mechanisms do.
My guess as to the Playstation Store and WiiWare products is one of two possibilities: that they’ll set up some kind of mechanism allowing you to install things that you’ve bought previously on the new system, or they’ll just make the old stuff obsolete, so you have to keep the old system if you want to play it. That seems rough, but it’s the model that video games have worked under for most of their existence – backwards compatibility being only recently an option. Not that I think backwards compatibility should be abandoned – I’m just saying, the logic of “well, people bought SNES systems even though they couldn’t play their NES games” has a certain sense to it.
As far as “renting” goes in terms of your last big paragraph there, you should probably consider the price difference between most online-purchasable games ($30 tops) to physical media-based games (can start at $50 or $60, depending on system). You may, in fact, already be paying your requested reduced price. $30 to rent a game for the duration of a game system generation doesn’t seem all that steep to me (it’s what, $10 to rent a game for 5 days from Blockbuster?). It’s a little different when you’re talking about music, but what can I say? This is why I still buy CDs. One of the reasons, anyway. That and my CD collection neurosis.
One addition – I’ve heard the point made a few times that ultimately, the music industry is going to have to totally revise its business model in order to stay relevant, and I think that’s very much true, but I think the short-term attractiveness of a stopgap like DRM is going to prevent that from happening pretty roundly. A few bands (Radiohead being the notable example) have been bypassing record companies altogether and selling the music directly to their fans online, even to the point of allowing the price to be dictated. I wonder if that isn’t the future in some way, although there are some economies of scale that give record companies some holding power (i.e., most small-time bands can’t afford high-quality recording and production, since expertise is still required even with the advent of Garage Band, and tour planning is much more costly for a small-time band). I’d tend to think that musicians will figure out a way to make that stuff work, though. Be interesting to see what happens.
Does anyone know any more details?