Right, and you point out something important which is that people who don’t want to pay, people who are pirates, don’t get bothered by the DRM, they go out and buy the cracked books or download the cracked books for free. It’s only people who are foolish enough to pay for them that get locked into these platforms.
Interpretation
DRM (Digital Rights Management) fails to deter those who seek free access to content, leaving honest consumers at a disadvantage.
Cory Doctorow highlights the irony of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems in his quote. He suggests that those who are inclined to pirate content will bypass these protections effortlessly, while honest consumers, who are willing to pay, find themselves restricted by the very systems meant to protect them. This illustrates the often counterproductive nature of DRM and raises questions about consumer rights and the effectiveness of such measures in the digital age.
In practice
During a panel on copyright, this quote can illustrate the frustrations of legitimate consumers.
Content isn't king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you'd choose your friends -- if you chose the movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.
He hated it when adults told him he only felt the way he did because he was young. As if being young was like being insane or drunk, like the convictions he held were hallucinations caused by a mental illness that could only be cured by waiting five years.
... the Kindle is a "roach motel" device: its license terms and DRM ensure that books can check in, but they can't check out.
We are now spending half a trillion dollars on foreign oil, importing 62 percent of the oil we use, and we haven't had the leadership in D.C. to do anything about it. We've got to move to other sources of energy. But we've gotten way behind, and will continue to pay the fiddler. It's not a good future.
Imagine if we can just talk to our computers and have it understand, 'Please schedule a meeting with Bob for next week.' Or if each child could have a personalized tutor. Or if self-driving cars could save all of us hours of driving.
About three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
The trouble with energy farming is that the energy isn't always where you want to use it, and it isn't always when you want to use it.
If you look at iPod, iPod wasn't viewed as a success, but today it's viewed as an overnight success. The iPhone was the same way. People were writing about there's no physical keyboard. Obviously nobody would want it.
What technology makes easy is not always what nurtures the human spirit.
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