I’m not an expert on Digital Rights Management (DRM) and the various arguments for and against it. I can certainly understand the anxiety that the net causes copyright holders of various sorts. But I do get frustrated when their (lame, weak, easily circumventable) efforts at protecting their content cause me trouble in those situations where I am a legitimate customer.
For instance, just as a thought exercise, consider this purely hypothetical situation: a friend of yours purchases a science textbook for a class. The textbook in question is almost 3,000 pages long and is printed, as far as your friend can tell, on rolling paper. Yet, even printed on such flimsy stock, the book is still as big as an unabridged dictionary. Carrying such a book around isn’t practical much of the time. Luckily, purchasing said book also entitles your friend to download an Adobe PDF version of it. Your friend thinks, “This is great! I can search it more easily, and I can print out just the chapters that I’m working with and take them with me!” So your friend surfs to some site specified in the back of the book, enters a serial number also printed in the back of the book, downloads the PDF, and goes though some arcane procedure for authorizing his desktop machine to view it.
Your friend discovers, during the authorization process, that this PDF is equipped with Adobe’s flavor of DRM. And this particular PDF, while it does not block printing entirely, only allows 10 pages to be printed per day. Unfortunately, this is a science textbook, and there’s no such things as a 10-page chapter in a science textbook. So your friend, being familiar with computers and how they work, thinks, “Surely, this DRM cannot be so stupid that I can simply quit the application, set my system clock forward one day, relaunch the application and then print out the next ten pages? Surely I could not do that over and over again until I have all the pages that I need?”
Of course, your friend does not attempt such a procedure. He’s sure that even attempting such a thing might be considered a crime. He’s fairly sure that, in the not too distant future, even thinking about or discussing such a solution will be considered a crime.
Instead, your friend decides he will install the PDF on his laptop, which he takes with him to class anyway. The DRM specifies that he can authorize a up to three machines to view a copy of this PDF. But, despite being familiar with computers, your friend cannot manage to convince Adobe’s DRM system that his laptop is also an authorized machine. Your friend’s time, like yours, is valuable. And your friend is getting sick of being treated like a criminal when he has already forked over a significant hunk of change and is a legitimate owner of the textbook in question.
Back to reality: Adobe seems to have more trouble with this DRM concept than some other companies do. I haven’t run into much trouble so far with the DRM in iTunes. But, as I was researching this post, I ran across a post over at Andy Budd‘s site which describes a similar difficulty, not with a PDF but with a copy of Adobe Photoshop that he purchased yet could not authorize on more than one machine (per the license). I think he puts it pretty well: “Because frankly, if you treat your clients like thieves, where is the motivation not to act like one?”