On the stupidity of DRM …

With all the furor over SOPA/PIPA, the two idiotic, so-called, antipiracy bills in congress this week I thought it would be worth taking a look at something else monumentally stupid — DRM.
DRM, or “Digital Rights Management,” is basically encryption designed to break your computer.
“What!?!,” you say, “break my computer!?!?”
Yes, break your computer. You see for your computer to function it has to copy stuff. When you launch an application on your computer it literally copies at least part of the program from your hard drive to RAM. When you open, say, a word document, it does the same thing.
What DRM, say on a that George R.R. Martin book you just bought for the inflated price of $14.99, does is prevent your computer form doing what it’s designed to do — namely copy the file so you can share it with other people.
“But,” you say, “that’s stealing if you make a copy and give it to someone else!”
Well yes and no.
In a techincal sense perhaps.
However, DRM also keeps you from doing something completely legitimate with the file, which you can do with any dead-tree book — giving or lending it to a friend.
Same thing with music. If you want to borrow a CD I can give that to you. But with DRM I can’t simply give you the file.
The logic behind this is that the major media companies, from the record labels, to the movie industry to the big six publishers absolutely hate the new digital age. They never liked libraries, people recording songs off the radio or video stores.
They’ve always contended these things cost them money. Every time someone borrows a book from the library, it’s cost them a sale — at least in the strange universe in which they live.
What becomes interesting is something I found in a video (below) which was sent to me Friday. Neil Gaiman — you know, the guy who wrote Stardust and American Gods?

Well Gaiman noticed something interesting. Every time his work was pirated. Say in Russia where people were “stealing” his work and translating it, sales of his other work went up.
A new book would come out. People would “steal it” and he’d end up selling more books.
So after much wrangling he talked his publisher into an experiment. They put the digital versuoin of American Gods up on the publisher’s site for free for a month. Surprising HarperCollins, but not Gaiman, he ended up selling a ton of books.
This mirrors what goes on with Baen’s Free Library. The authors who are smart enough to put some of their work up for free — especially the first book in a new series right before the second book comes out — end up selling more books.
I know I found several new authors I enjoy this way.
What’s even more interesting is Gaiman talked to a group of people and found that most of them had discovered their favorite authors, not by buying their books, but because someone had either lent them a book or given them one.
So why then the push for DRM?
Well it’s very simple in the publishing industry.
The major publishers, with the exception of Baen which jumped into epublishing feet first long before theKindle, are deeply worried about this new publishing model.
They, like the music and movie industries, are used to having a monopoly on what we read, watch and listen to. They’re used to shaping the way we think thereby. Indeed they’re used to being in control — and they’re frightened of losing said control.
So they do things like pricing ebooks higher than paperback versions of the same book, or saddling you with restrictive DRM which prevents you from doing what you like with your own property — which is fundamental to a capitalist society. Of course most of the big publishers aren’t really all that fond of capitalism except as it applies to them.
The reality is, and studies have proven it, those who download music for free, on average, buy 60 percent more music than those who don’t.
Likewise free books tend to get people to go out and buy your other work. I know this for a fact because I’ve got a lot of friends who are authors and all of them who have tried taking some of their work free on Amazon have experienced increased sales in their other titles.
DRM is stupid. Not just because it prevents you from doing with your property what you like — but because, counter intuitive as it is — it actually decreases profits for the publishers and authors alike.