Saturday, February 5, 2011

In Praise Of Piracy

I've had to think a lot about digital rights management lately. Not that I wanted to. But I recently did some eye-opening contract software development for a DRM-heavy media app, just as our government up here in the Great White North introduced a new and extremely DRM-friendly copyright law, and links to Don't Make Me Steal started popping up all over the Internet. You probably don't realize, unless you actually work on a software project laden with DRM, just how much Sisyphean effort goes into it. I estimate fully a quarter of the developer-hours that went into the app in question were devoted to building or dealing with the DRM, meaning a quarter of the total effort did not go into crafting a killer app. Similarly, the countless hours and dollars Sony spent on CD rootkits and impressively inept PS3 encryption did not go into building better products. All this effort lavished on restriction rather than creation reminds me of the great Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski's depiction of the Soviet economy:

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/PT2bG8WHe9E/

AMKOR TECHNOLOGY AMPHENOL ANIXTER INTERNATIONAL APPLE COMPUTER APPLIED MATERIALS

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