Part 1 – DMCA

Piracy is bad. We can all agree. But like many of the world’s ills, it’s somewhat unavoidable. In my opinion, if you treat your customers well, and create quality content, you’ll probably make out ok. Alternatively, if you treat everyone like a potential criminal and lock your content down to the nth degree, you will likely just alienate your paying user base and hardly affect the people who were going to rip you off anyway.

But that’s just me. I can hardly blame a company for taking the pessimistic view of humanity and going the latter route. What I have a problem with is anti-circumvention laws. Because they redefine what it means to own something. They criminalize tinkering, tweaking, exploring, repurposing — aka “hacking,” for some definition of the word — your own goods.

If I buy a book, I can use it however I want. I can read it; I can use it as a coaster; I can skip ahead and read the last chapter. But when I buy a Playstation 3, I can only use it in the ways that Sony has intended. I paid for the system. It’s in my possession, but it’s not mine. For example, if i try to run software on it that Sony does not approve of, I am breaking the law, regardless of the nature of that software.

This, I believe, is not only wrong, but counterproductive. Sony (or any other company) has every right to try to protect their content through convoluted DRM schemes. And the consumer should have an equal right to do what they want with the products Sony sells them. To seek legal, rather than engineered, solutions just encourages laziness. After all, if you protect your end-user devices with laws, rather than smart technology, you’re likely to get burned.