Quote:
Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel
hm. i'm not sure i see the point of it. it will deter honest people from sharing their music, but since they are honest they don't need a deterrent. it will clearly *not* deter people who want to share their music via p2p because there will always be some easy way around it ; either they will find a way to remove this information (it can't be too hard) or they will give a false email address or something...
and it is certainly costing money to personally encode each individual file served according to who purchases it, which i am quite sure is being charged to the customer.
so it might not be as evil as restrictive drm, but it seems pointless and wasteful to me nonetheless and i can't say i support that.
is amazon also using this system for their "drm-free" mp3 files ? and, is apple telling their customers clearly that this is what they are doing ? or are they just advertising "drm-free files" and slipping this social drm on silently ?
|
I don't really know if it's Apple's design to have this or if it's just something they haven't yet removed.
I do understand why companies would want to experiment with Social DRM though. How successful it would be is all theory. The incremental cost to add it should be insignificant. It can be applied to every file like Apple currently has and them randomly applied in a different manner to every x number of files. This way you know it's there but you're not sure you've removed it all. At some point people should evaluate why they don't want to be identified with their behaviour.
I don't believe in binary honesty. All people make choices. Some people might decide to leave their music on their iPod when they sell it because maybe they'll get an extra $50 for it and heck it doesn't cost them anything. Maybe they'll have second thoughts about doing that if they know their email address is on the files. If a company can change the behaviour of 5% of the people selling their MP3 player then maybe it's worth it to them.
My fundamental problem with DRM is that it violates my fair use rights. Social DRM doesn't and if it influences more people to pay for what they consume that's good for everyone.