My biggest gripe about DRM is that it's been used by publishers dishonestly for so long.  DRM, for the most part, has been used almost exclusivley as copy protection.

Like someone else mentioned, copyright laws should be basically enough. But there's a gotcha: Reproduction and transferal.

If I truly "owned" the contents of a book or the contents of a DVD then why can't I make infinite copies and resell them?

Companies spend millions making something they own what they make. But the consumer's rights under copyright laws should also be respected.

yes i kno this is an older post

but what is the difference between this and microsoft DRM with microsoft office?

u can only install it on three computers and it requires internet activation.

The problem is that some companies want to devise or buy ever-more elaborate protection for the investment they've made in their products.  However, they don't consider the moral issue - in protecting their product, they're feeding a desire in some of their consumer base to bypass and disable that protection.

If they're going to protect their investment, they should do it in a way that is actually effective but doesn't put the consumer off the product or make them want to bypass or disable the protection.

None of this is rocket science, but the way executives approach DRM makes me think they're from another planet.

well how do u think we got here?

What is an effective way?

Well of course its not, its economics!

And it is not a moral issue. It is an economic issue. Bad company decisions = lower profits. The problem is, they do not understand the basic economics involved. What they are doing is essentially increasing the price (by adding the grief which comes with DRM) and expecting the demand to increase. In reality this leads to a lower demand, not higher. And since the only added 'price' is grief to the consumer, their income per unit sold does not increase, causing a drop in profits.

Actually moral hazards are a very important part to many economic issues. Right now we have consumers who steal games insulated from the consequence of their action (whether or not they think that because something is cheap to reproduce it has no value therefore they should not pay for it, it's still stealing), and an industry that relies on ridiculous end user licences, release day patches, the fact that their consumers can't actually return a product, hidden DRM schemes, and the ability to put features in print and not actually liveup to the what is listed on the box without consequence. I think if one issue was addressed more, you might have less problems with the other (and no, I don't mean that stopping thieves would actually make developers create better games).

I do agree that the more hassle a consumer has, the less likely they are going to be to deal with it and therefore it would lower demand. I would like to see the numbers though, in how much DRM schemes actually add to the production costs of a game (on average).

Please stop this misinformation.

Theft: you take something from somebody. You: +1. Owner: -1

Copyright infringement: you copy without permission. You: +1. Copyright holder: 0, potentially -1 but it's hard to prove. Estimates of sales lost due to copyright infringement vary wildly, and the methods used to obtain them are anything but scientific.

Stardock itself often argues that people who pirate* games most likely wouldn't buy them anyway. If you insist unaothorised copying is theft because it means lost sales, you should go after movie critics and sites which allow people to publish comments. In case of theft, the owner always loses some value because we're talking about physical property. In case of copyright infringement, it's about copying information.

I have nothing against paying for development costs, or seeing ads in a game like Quake Live. But to say that there's correlation between the price of a game and development costs is a big stretch. News flash: you can't treat information as if it was physical property, because it isn't. It's funny, because more and more musicians realise obscurity is a bigger threat than piracy.

* what a silly name. Equaling inauthorised copying with rape, murder, theft, destruction.

Go ahead and justify stealing all you want. I didn't say it was stealing because it's a loss in sales or that it was stealing because pirates who buy the game would buy it. I am sure a lot of pirates don't have enough money buy the game, and then there are pirates who don't think anything is valuable that doesn't belong to them, and then there are pirates who are fed up with being screwed by publishers and developers going after paying consumer. It's stealing because you are taking something that doesn't belong to you. It has nothing to do with costs. The value of something is only correlated with costs but the value may have very, very little to do with costs. Just look at branding. A brand is hardly a physical thing. It's an intellectual, social thing but it has a value. Contracts aren't physical things. They can be if they are written down but verbal contracts are real. People don't pay 100 dollars for a pair of sneakers because it's a the sum of rubber and cotton involved, they pay those high prices because of something that isn't phyisical at all. The fact that get something physical return is only partially relevant.

This silly notion that something has to be physicial to be stolen is the kind of thought process that belongs to the dark ages, not the 21st century.