Month: October 2006

Regular readers will know that (a) I liken bad DRM to bad EAI, paying to mine information that should not need to be mined and (b) I like apocryphal tales.

Many years ago, we had a bout of prohibition in India. These things happen. Sometime after the 1977 elections.

Some states went dry, some didn’t. And in my apocryphal story, one of the biggest states, Maharashtra, was one of the Dries. You could still consume alcohol there, but only in “permit rooms” and only if you had a “permit”. You could get a permit if you were (a) a foreign tourist spending hard currency or (b) certified as having a medical condition that needed regular intake of alcohol (!). And as the story goes, the permit-issuing agency in Maharashtra, the “richest” state, grew amazingly. Naturally. Many many medical conditions. Then, some time later, Maharashtra wanted to rescind prohibition. Problem. They couldn’t possibly shut down the permit agency, it employed too many people. What would the people do? So. It was decided. Wisdom of Solomon. No need to shut down the agency. Everyone could drink. But everyone needed permits. And the agency grew. And God was in His Heaven. And All was Well with the World.
Unintended consequence or apocryphal nonsense? You decide.

So it was with some amusement I read this story in GigaOM:  Someone has reverse-engineered FairPlay and used the learning to replicate an equivalent, and is now licensing the equivalent to third parties who have felt locked out of the lock-in.

I guess you could call it an unintended consequence. Continuing along this vein, albeit light-heartedly, I can imagine a time when regulators insist that DRM “facilities” (sic, I couldn’t find a better word) are kept distinct and separate from the OS, in order not to restrict consumer choice. Choose your OS. Choose your media player. Choose your DRMboat.
In Islington there was a man. The dog it was that died. Thanks to Oliver Goldsmith.

I was talking to my son Isaac this afternoon, the subject of gaming came up, and somewhere in the conversation he mentioned that the Sony PS3 was going to be free from region coding, and how good that was.
And I thought to myself, how odd. I grew up with 33 rpm albums and 45 rpm singles, and I could buy them anywhere and play them anywhere. We even had 78 rpm “lacquer” platters, and these played everywhere as well. So I can listen to William Booth talk to his troops on my 1905 mechanical gramophone, T.S. Eliot read his poems on a 33 rpm 12″ “LP” and the latest “vinyl” single from the Arctic Monkeys, all without worrying about region coding.

Why stop with records? I had no problem with reel-to-reel tapes and cassette tapes and even CDs. The first time I hit the oddness of region coding was with my son’s console games, on an early Nintendo I think, and soon after that we had the DVD debacle that continues.

DVD region encoding offers less than zero value to the consumer; allows for unnecessary price and time discrimination between markets; promotes piracy and illegal copying as a result of those discriminations; provides no incremental value to the artist(s).

DVD encoding was brought into existence pretty much by stealth, most of us found out about it after the event. Which was probably a good thing, since it woke me up to the dangers of bad DRM and bad IPR just at the right time.

Because of the stealth approach, many people have no idea what the regions are. I thought it would amuse you to see the actual regions. Looks like a political map of something in Second Life….