Monkey Island and DRM
That one dude, Shamus Young, just can't leave DRM issues alone. Thankfully. His latest analogy:

In the original Monkey Island, at one point you are captured by natives who lock you in a simple bamboo hut. There is a trap door in the floor through which you may escape. If you’re dumb you can walk over to the natives once you’re out, and they will grab you and throw you back into the hut. The second time they throw you in, they add chains to the door. The next time the door is made of metal. This keeps going until eventually (if you keep going back) they have a bamboo shack with a massive steel vault door on the front, a timed lock with an alarm system on it. It looks like the front of Fort Knox.

“How he keeps getting out is almost as mysterious as why he keeps coming back.“

In a lot of ways these DRM schemes are a bamboo hut with a vault door on the front. The keep using a bigger and bigger lock and a more complex system of authentication, but it still has to run on a machine where you can edit the executable, and all the hacker has to do is go in and disable the part that says, “Do the security check.” It doesn’t matter how secure or complex or devious the security check is, if the machine’s not doing it, it’s not doing it.

Microsoft was going to "correct" this "problem" at the Operating System level with Vista, or so I had heard. I guess that got pushed back until the next version of Windows, or dropped when cooler heads realized that deliberately crippling your customer's systems might not be a wonderful business strategy.

But I really liked Shamus's analogy here. Okay, sure, ANY analogy involving Monkey Island is likely to gain my approval! But this was a well-known problem when I was working on the security side of the software fence. As a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, copy protection and DRM is only as effective as the easiest work-around... and for as long as it takes until the very first pirate releases a crack.

To make matters worse - GBGames has an article discussing what happens to customers - or "victims" - when the reputable company they go through for DRM decides to drop the expense of supporting old DRM solutions. Basically, the customer gets screwed. The implication with DRM is that it will be supported forever, but its clear that this is not even the case with stable, long-lived companies.

This bugs me a lot. My family jumped on the BetaMax train back in the early days of videocassettes. When Sony finally bowed under pressure and Beta went away, it didn't make our library of Beta-format tapes disappear. We could still play them, so long as our old BetaMax player stayed in working condition. But that's not the case with this kind of DRM. what's the poor customer to do who bought music from Sony or Microsoft in good faith, and then finds that their purchases have been sabotaged by remote control like this?

I'm sure the companies in question would hope that said customer would throw good money after bad, and re-purchase their old product.

I think most consumers, faced with this lose-lose scenario shoved onto them by the company for which they were a formerly loyal customer, would feel perfectly justified in acquiring an unprotected version of their product from a less-than-reputable source. Oh, and as long as they are there, why not enjoy one of millions of other easy downloads, some of which might not have been legally obtain by other means on a previous occasion?

Especially when they are getting a superior product than the crap the legitimate customers are paying good money for? And how much worse is it going to get?

So I postulate the following:

#1 - Yes, piracy is killing (non-online) PC gaming. Not shooting-it-in-the-head, going-the-way-of-the-8-Track-Tape dead, and it's not solely responsible, but it's definitely a major contributor to PC gaming's marginalization over the last several years.

#2 - DRM / Copy Protection is only a short-term solution that will ultimately fail in the long term

#3 - Onerous and untrustworthy DRM solutions, like the one proposed for Spore and Mass Effect (and lest we forget, Bioshock), may actually do a lot more long-term harm and encourage piracy.

Labels: Biz

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:05 AM (Permalink)