Okay, as a nerd I read countless articles on just about any topic, including DRM.
I don’t understand DRM. Who does it benefit? What is the return on investment? As a business leader, you’d think the corporate big-wig types would think about this little detail when spending billions trying to implement it.I guess it was designed with the intention to thwart media piracy. Stop people from “stealing” their imaginary assets. First off, it’s information. You can’t steal it unless the end result of the theft is somebody not having that asset any more. But in the case of digital piracy, when somebody “steals” your product, there are two copies instead of one, and they are the exact same. Well, this was the traditional case before DRM came into being.

Enter stage, DRM – Digital Restriction Management. Here’s how it works. You rent a movie on iTunes, this costs you money. It’s “hi-def” so it should look flat out amazing on that wicked projector or big-screen which also cost you money. You need an expensive hi-def player (such as a brand new macbook) in order to play it on that hi-def display and hi-def audio system. You click play, and a pretty window comes up saying that your expensive screen doesn’t support the copy protection so go fuck yourself.

Lets say you downloaded the DRM movie or music that you payed money for on to your desktop and now you want it on your laptop. You are going on a flight or some journey away from your desktop computer and would like to consume the media you purchased. Well go fuck yourself, that’s not allowed and it won’t work. What you can do is purchase ANOTHER copy for your laptop, and one copy for your iPod. So you get to purchase the same movie 3 times.

This DRM stuff just gets in your way really. It restricts you from managing your digital content. Hence the name Digital Restriction Management.

Now, lets say you’re an evil pirate – the “bad guys”. You download the movie – for free – and watch it – for free – whenever you want – for free – on whatever device you want – for free. It’s easier too; just download and play. No special cables, no special displays, no special computers, no special anything. Just cheap, off the shelf “hi-def” stuff. The only real downside to being an evil pirate is that you’ll have more money to spend on junk food making your ass huge as you sit all day long watching free hi-def movies. You’re not even stealing anything because nobody has lost anything. You made an exact replica of something, like a photocopy of your mom’s recipe for apple pie. She has a recipe, and now you have it too. Imagine that! Sharing!

Now lets take games; they have DRM too. You have to install the special DRM software (which you can’t uninstall EVER) which makes you need the original CD in your drive every time you want to play, and you can’t install it on two computers (such as your desktop for home playing and your laptop for playing at a friend’s house). Also, it often times will corrupt something important, or slow down your computer (or at least the game performance). Lets say you get bored of a game for a year and get a new computer in the meantime and then get interested in the same game again. Well go fuck yourself, that’s not allowed and it won’t work.

Well you could just go download a cracked version of the game for free. In this case you won’t need the CD every time you want to play. So no CD to get cracked or scratched. No loss. Also, the game runs faster. Also, no DRM crapware is installed.

Well as a savvy consumer, who wouldn’t pirate? I never buy games. I never buy programs, I never buy music. I pirate everything – UNLESS it has no DRM, in which case I’ll buy it. It’s been several years since I last bought something This is just great, financially. I have ten-thousand songs, hundreds of movies and a few computer games. That would probably cost more than I’ve made (or could make) in my lifetime if I liked to go fuck myself. But I like to share. I like free. And I can’t justify paying an outrageous price for some broken app/game/movie/music. If I pay for it, it has to work everywhere I want it to. I have to be able to copy it if I want, I want to be able to share it with family, friends and strangers. And I want to modify it any way I want. All this for no extra cost, without difficulty. Pretty high demand? No way. People do it for free all the time. Open movies, music, games, and programs. Look at Open Office, Linux, indie bands and indie film makers. And to top it off, the free stuff is almost 100% of the time infinitely better quality. I don’t know why, but the “you get what you pay for” mantra works in reverse for consumable media.

But I found this really fun game – World of Goo. It works on my PC and my Mac. It has absolutely NO DRM. It only cost me $25. Most DRM games are way more expensive than that. And they usually suck really bad.
I gave a copy to my girlfriend and we played World of Goo together. It was fun. No DRM headaches. Only one copy purchased. Sure, I could have saved $25 and pirated it faster than it took to purchase. I would end up with the exact same thing.
But the authors of World of Goo are doing a good thing. So I’ll pay them to be awesome like that. Actually, I looked at all the media I pirated this last month and calculated a rough cost approximation. I took this dollar value and rounded up to the nearest hundred. I wrote this value on a cheque and mailed it to my favorite charity – the UNHCR.

Yea. Fuck the fat-cat retard DRM goons, I’ll give my money to people who can’t eat this week. They haven’t done anything for me, and deserve every penny.

To the goons: thanks for making piracy easier than the legal alternative.