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cory doctorow
than a friendlier one, and that customers would prefer not to buy
devices that treat them as presumptive criminals. DRM technolo-
gies limit more than copying: they limit ranges of uses, such as
viewing a movie in a different country, copying a song to a differ-
ent manufacturer’s player, or even pausing a movie for too long.
Surely, this stuff hurts sales: Who goes into a store and asks, “Do
you have any music that’s locked to just one company’s player?
I’m in the market for some lock-in.”
So why do manufacturers do it? As with many strange behav-
iors, there’s a carrot at play here, and a stick.
The carrot is the entertainment industries’ promise of access
to their copyrighted works. Add DRM to your iPhone and we’ll
supply music for it. Add DRM to your TiVo and we’ll let you plug
it into our satellite receivers. Add DRM to your Zune and we’ll let
you retail our music in your Zune store.
The stick is the entertainment industries’ threat of lawsuits for
companies that don’t comply. In the last century, entertainment
companies fought over the creation of records, radios, jukeboxes,
cable TV, VCRs, MP3 players, and other technologies that made
it possible to experience a copyrighted work in a new way without
permission. There’s one battle that serves as the archetype for the
rest: the fight over the VCR.
The film studios were outraged by Sony’s creation of the VCR.
They had found a DRM supplier they preferred, a company called
DiscoVision that made non-recordable optical discs. DiscoVision
was the only company authorized to play back movies in your
living room. The only way to get a copyrighted work onto a VCR
cassette was to record it off the TV, without permission. The stu-
dios argued that Sony — whose Betamax was the canary in this
legal coalmine — was breaking the law by unjustly endangering
their revenue from DiscoVision royalties. Sure, they
could
just
sell pre-recorded Betamax tapes, but Betamax was a read-write
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