[citation][nom]tayb[/nom]You guys needs to quit your bitching about DRM and copy protection. ... If I spend hundreds of hours working on an application only to find out that 90% of the people using it or playing it STOLE IT I have a right to be pissed and a right to place some copy protection on my software.[/citation]
Speaking as one of the (probably few) non-pirates around these parts, I appreciate the right of the content owner to protect their copyrights. However, DRM is generally not a wokable solution because it will always be cracked in a matter of time and once it's out in the wild, you will not be able to stop it no matter how much you lock down the retail version. Generally DRM just makes life harder for the people willing to pay money for your stuff, like when Wal-Mart decided to shut down their DRM servers and instantly destroyed the usefulness of MP3s downloaded through their store. The people who bought tracks off of iTunes before DRM was lifted now have a lot of money tied up in something they can't move around. Sony's infamous rootkit fiasco caused legitimate customers a lot of serious problems and opened up their computers to malware because it was never made clear that the music people were buying would fuck with their computers. That incident also made DRM a public concern and probably made customers even more cynical against copyright protections. Spore's install-limiting DRM basically means that people who bought the game early were just renting it instead of owning it. Famously, the cracked version of Spore was actually better in some ways than the retail version because you could re-install it on the same machine as many times as you wanted, so it actually offered MORE functionality than the legit copy. And what good are Kindle books if your reader is given away? Just about the only DRM scheme I've heard people be cool with is Steam, and that's excused because of the value of the service and the good execution (play on any computer with your steam account, for example).
You know all the history already, I'm sure. I'm not saying that most people who pirate would buy the product if there was no DRM, I'm not saying anybody's justified in piracy because DRM schemes often backfire. But there are legitimate complaints about DRM from a non-piracy angle, especially in recent years as many companies have been even more aggressive and restrictive with it. Not only does it make the experience of your product less valuable for the customer 9/10, but it will never be crack-proof and you won't ever be able to DRM your product out of the Usenets or torrents.
If you idiots stopped stealing the DRM would go away because there would be no need for it.
There's no signs that piracy has gone down, but Apple and Amazon both sell DRM-free MP3s now. This isn't really an either-or situation, especially since piracy will probably never stop.