DRM only screws legitimate customers.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) was added by media companies in order to prevent piracy. It never has. In fact, piracy rates have increased. How can this be? Pirates circumvented DRM with very little effort. They always will. It was a sign of their technological ignorance that the media companies ever believed DRM would work. People familiar with technology knew this from the start. In fact, many of us tried to tell them this through public outcry.

The only people who have been screwed by DRM are customers like me who buy their media legally. The media companies’ best customers have been punished for buying their products while the scofflaws enjoy DRM-free media. Even when the media companies saw this was happening, they continued pursuing even more DRM implementations. The only conclusion I can make is that they hate their paying customers.

There are many examples of DRM screwing legitimate content customers out of using their legally-purchased content. Gizmodo lists 5 of the more recent  high-profile cases in a newly-released article.

What annoys me most about these high-profile cases is the fact that the people who made money off of these abandoned customers don’t seem to care. The content creators who contractually forced DRM down the stores’ throats haven’t done a thing to help them. The stores hands are tied because they are not allowed to distribute DRM-free versions of their files because of their contracts with the media companies. Do the folks in the media industry really despise their legitimate paying customers so much that they can screw them without blinking? Apparently they do.

The time for DRM to disappear is now. It hasn’t stopped piracy, but it has screwed enough paying customers that many are likely becoming pirates because of their hatred for how the media companies have treated them. The only way to guarantee that your media will continue to play in the future is to either pirate it or buy software to strip the DRM from it, which is something the media companies say is illegal. People who once loved buying music are now bitter toward the media industry. In reality, DRM may be inadvertently increasing piracy, not hindering it.

Think about it. If you see that something you are doing is not working, and even worse, you see that it is screwing your best customers, a logical company would abandon that practice before your customers stop buying your products. All I can say is those media companies must be run by some of the stupidest people on this planet.