A research paper soon to be published by the Marketing Science journal claims that getting rid of DRM altogether would ultimately lead to a reduction in piracy. The paper follows the line of thinking which suggests that restrictive DRM acts a deterrent to legitimate consumers.
Ironically, piracy advocate website TorrentFreak has republished parts of the report, but don’t let that put you off, because the original research was conducted by respected researchers from Rice and Duke University.
The paper is called Music Downloads and the Flip Side of Digital Rights Management Protection, and it states categorically that DRM does not prevent piracy at all. “Only the legal users pay the price and suffer from the restrictions. Illegal users are not affected because the pirated product does not have DRM restrictions,” which is kind of what we’ve all been saying for the past three years.
Case in point: the Steam version of From Dust was released a few weeks ago with DRM which prevented players from accessing the game without an internet connection. The same game was cracked by pirates and distributed in torrent format, sans any form of DRM or online requirement. The end result was that while paying customers suffered the consequences of always-on internet DRM, those who pirated it could play as they pleased.
“In many cases, DRM restrictions prevent legal users from doing something as normal as making backup copies of their music. Because of these inconveniences, some consumers choose to pirate,” Dinah Vernik, assistant professor of marketing at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business says.
Vernik goes on to say that “removal of these restrictions makes the product more convenient to use and intensifies competition with the traditional format (CDs), which has no DRM restrictions,” says Vernik. “This increased competition results in decreased prices for both downloadable and CD music and makes it more likely that consumers will move from stealing music to buying legal downloads.”
The paper has yet to be published, and these are just some choice preliminary quotes. The music industry has already pretty much ditched DRM, with few vendors still selling encoded music. The RIAA has admitted that DRM is on its way out, and Steve Jobs famously said back in 2007 that “DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.”
So what’s up, video games industry?
Removing DRM could decrease piracy says study << Comments and views
