(no subject)

[which_chick]

I am pissed off by stupid DRM crap.



I have here a legitimate laptop that I bought legitimately. I bought it in the United States, where I live. Now, on this legitimate laptop that I bought legitimately, tonight I put in a DVD that I legitimately borrowed from my cousin Sandra. It was a legitimate and honorably purchased Authorized Commercial Version of South Park, season 5, and what I had was the whole legitimate thing in its original package, which I borrowed from my cousin just like I'd borrow a book from her. I was trying to engage in fair use of entertainment media on a legitimate laptop with a legitimate and honorable product.

So I put that thar legit dvd in my legit laptop, whereupon the fucking laptop said, with its pre-installed Dell Media bullshit player *and* with its pre-installed Windows Media bullshit player that it was not able to play the DVD because the region in the DVD did not match the region in the laptop. Fuck me.

The laptop is legit, has a legit copy of the OS, and the whole thing was legitimately purchased in the country in which I live.

The DVD is legit and was ALSO legitimately purchased in the country in which I live.

I SHOULD NOT BE HAVING ANY PROBLEM AT ALL PLAYING THIS DVD ON ANY DVD-CAPABLE PLAYER THAT CAME PRE-INSTALLED ON MY LAPTOP.

And yet, there was a problem in the sea of legitimacy.

Y'know, I can fucking download an entire season of HBO's Dexter off of the internets via the magic of bittorrent, an activity that I freely admit is illegal as all hell. When I do that (and I know this because I have done it), I can play that bad boy on my laptop without any effort at all. There is no grief.

However, if I have a legitimate dvd and a legitimate laptop and I try to make them work with each other, as I have EVERY FUCKING REASON TO EXPECT THAT THEY WILL, I get a ration of shit.

Attention, peeps in charge of DRM: This is not how to get me to drink your Kool-Aid. This is how-not-to-do-it.

Comments

[ksleet.livejournal.com]

stupid DRM crap

That's doubly redundant under most circumstances...

There is an enormous flap going on about this in the PC gaming industry right now, as pirated copies of popular games tend to outnumber legit ones by grotesque numbers of four to one or more. To fight back, the bigger publishers insist on including draconian protection schemes that edge over into being rootkits (and sometimes actually are rootkits.) The software is zero-day cracked anyway, of course, with the result that pirates get a much better user experience than legit users.

Me, I play my big-name games on the consoles these days, not the PC. This may not be a coincidence.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I don't know... the 4:1 ratio is pretty terrible. Suddenly, the "software is free or nominally-priced, connecting to a server where you can play the game with other people costs a subscription" model makes a lot more sense. Heck, at least that way the companies get paid.

I'm not sure how to fix the software piracy issue, for the game industry, for the music industry, and for the tv/movies people. It's all one problem -- in these, our modern times, it is totally way too easy to make and give away an endless number of "as good as the real thing" copies of digital media once you have one legit copy to use as a master. The means of production are in the hands of the masses (やった! 勝つのはコッミス!), the costs of production and distribution are effectively zero, and the perceived risk of prosecution for piracy is pretty damn minimal.

It's easy.
It's free.
You're not going to get caught.

Given those three arguments, the moral fiber of yer average nineteen year old on the "piracy is wrong" front is not going to hold up any better than a jackstraw in a tornado. (Interestingly, not all of today's young people see piracy as particularly wrong in the first place. See this article (http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/the-generational-divide-in-copyright-morality/) for a look at what kids-today think.)

The RIAA's efforts to increase the perceived risk of piracy by suing the people who pirate music... well, I guess they're trying *something* to stop the patient from bleeding to death. Their general plan of action, though, is about as sensible, measured, and effective as shooting into a cloud of mosquitoes with a cannon... and people can see that. I know that they're working punitive damages for the deterrent angle because the costs of prosecution make chasing after only the lost revenue totally-not-worth-it, but still it's over the top excessive and people can see that. A body would get FAR less penalty by just fucking shoplifting the damn CDs. They gave Jammie Thomas a fine of $9,250 per song, twenty-four songs worth. Now, if she'd stolen 24 CDs of music, at twenty bucks a CD, she'd have stolen $480 worth of stuff. In Minnesota, that'd get imprisonment for not more than 90 days or to payment of a fine of not more than $1,000.

Efforts to convince people that copying and duplicating and bittorrenting and shealing (like sharing and stealing, together) and whatnot are WRONG -- those are okay, but I don't think they will be entirely successful, at least not for a while. In the early eighties, I would not have believed that bars would be nonsmoking. Ever. But they are, now, in Maryland and in a bunch of other states across the country. Attitudes can change, sometimes in surprising ways.

The thing that I think we most need, though, is a paradigm shift. The old model doesn't work anymore. I don't know what the new model is going to look like, but there's going to have to be one, here directly. Artists should be paid. Consumers of media should have a reasonable freedom to do with it what they want. (Households with the pre-K set should be allowed to rip/burn their Disney DVDs to get around the Grape Kool-Aid death of The Lion King or the way that Finding Nemo got scratched to hell by little Timmy trying to stuff it in the DVD player himself.) There has got to be a better way.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Also, see this article (http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512&) on game piracy and making-a-living with computer games. Trenchant and entertainingly written, with some good thoughts on the subject.

[ksleet.livejournal.com]

Waaaugh! I was just about to post a reply here linking to that. Your internet-fu is superior.

But I found that author made a very, very good point, one which seems so simple but which people genuinely hadn't thought of -- at least, I certainly hadn't made the connection. Pirates aren't buying the game. Most pirates will never buy the game. Therefore these pirates are not part of the market. Therefore the smart PC developer will consider markets made out of actual people who buy games.

The fact that Sins of a Solar Empire, an complicated game in a niche genre with no marketing machine behind it, is one of the best if not the best-selling PC games of the year, beating out the flashy first-person shooters that pirates love, is a rather telling bit of evidence here.

[dellcalarry.livejournal.com]

If the system is complaining that the region setting is wrong, then the fix is to either set the DVD drive to the region for the disk you want to view, or to set the drive to the "all regions" option. I have, on rare occasions, seen similar problems where the region on the drive was just not set, causing any disk to fail to play since it will never match.

If you were not familiar with it, you can get some decent information about the different region settings here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code).

Other than manually changing the region for your drive using software (or editing the registry), the only other solution I know of is to try updating (or in some cases downgrading) the firmware of the DVD drive. The purpose of this is to change the drive to use all regions. How well this works, unfortunately, depends on the drive and what firmware versions are available to be installed.

If you can post the model of DVD drive in your system (or the model of computer) I'll be happy to look up firwmare updates for you.

Larry
Dell Customer Advocate

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Failure to read for meaning, there, hon. The problem isn't that I got an error on my laptop. The problem is that, given a perfectly legitimate USA laptop with dvd drive in it and given a perfectly legitimate USA DVD set, I had to fuck around to get the damn thing to play. That's bullshit. It's not particularly Dell-brand bullshit. DVD region codes are not Dell's fault. My previous laptop (Sony Vaio) threw the same crap at me on occasion. My laptop before that one (Vaio, also), I couldn't get to play certain DVDs no matter what I did. It happens.

In this case, I was ranting at how the media companies embrace that peculiar brand of stupid wherein they treat their authorized customers like criminals. Right now, the media experience for good-users who actually buy stuff is really starting to suck more than the media experience for bad-users who illegally download their entertainment. I do not understand why the media companies do not get this. It's wrong and stupid and I wish they'd quit.

[dellcalarry.livejournal.com]

I did realize you were commenting on the situation in general, and not just this particular situation. Personally I agree with what you are saying, although that is my opinion and not necessarily Dell's (come to think of it, I don't really know the official position of Dell on this matter). Since I can't actually change anything I wanted to at least provide what information I could to try and help minimize the difficulty you were having. It is, I admit, a work around and not an actual solution to the problem, but I figured that was better than nothing.

Larry
Dell Customer Advocate