Poisoning the Well

[robin_d_laws]

Major League Baseball has, in switching from one DRM protocol to another, made it impossible to play any downloads purchased under the previous system.As someone who makes his living from creative work, it drives me crazy to see the major content purveyors poisoning the well like this. I want people to feel that they should buy my stuff rather than

Comments

[whisper_jeff]

As I suspect you know, I have pretty strong feelings on this subject-at-large. Suffice it to say that I agree with your core point - mega media corporations are absolutely clueless, shortsighted, and idiotic. And, as soon as their shareholders realize this, there will be a lot of executives being left by the wayside as new, smarter, forward-thinking people are hired to replace the dinosaurs who are attempting to hold onto the control they once had.

The thing that blows my mind is that every time I think I've seen them push stupidity as far as it can be pushed, they prove me wrong and push it up another notch (and the MLB DRM thing is a prime example of that). Simply mind boggling.

[zonemind]

Have you even looked at a graph of Warner Music Group's market cap over the last year?! Quick summary for ya: To the crapper. Or check out the stock price line on Vivendi/Universal when it acquired the music-publishing arm of BMG last June. Likewise.

I'm not much given to serving as an apologist for stockbrokers, but CRIPES! The whole fucking reason they're going utterly batshit on this subject is precisely that investors are deserting them in droves.

[allans]

mega media corporations are absolutely clueless, shortsighted, and idiotic.

I believe that after my experience with Bioshock's implementation of securom (may 2K-Games/Take Two studios burn) we can expand this to include far more than the mega corps.

To continue with Larry the Liquidator's buggy whip analogy, now the last buggy whip company going out and forcing people to tie horses to their cars instead of adapting.

[wickedthought]

Baseball fans will buy it. Why won't they? It isn't as if Major League Baseball doesn't have a monopoly...

[richardthinks]

clueless, shortsighted, and idiotic

The funny thing is, now Microsoft and Walmart have opened DRM-free music stores and you pay a premium for crippleware-free music at the iTunes store - having browbeaten, bullied and scared publishers into buying DRM, its authors are abandoning it, undercutting the aforementioned publishers and (one imagines) scooping up market share. Sony, BMG and EMI are left holding little almond-scented pills, looking at their cult leaders and saying "I thought we were all in this together!"

...and then MLB comes along, sees the massacre already under way and goes "ooh! Almond candies!"

[sunpony]

Excellent metaphor!

[richardthinks]

Even better! You think Bill made them change it when he unveiled DRM-plan, part II?

[raconteurx]

Stuff like this doesn’t just take the stigma off piracy. It casts it as a moral imperative.

And yet it's not at all surprising. Big Content knows that consumers are sheep, or enough of them are to make it feasible to squeeze them for every cent they can. People could end this madness, were they to vote with their pocketbooks to boycott product like this, but how do you convince a sufficient number of the necessity to stand up and fight the corporate powers-that-be?

[leemoyer]

Amen brother. Amen.