Firingsquad has a new article up about implementing a good DRM scheme. My initial reaction was to snort in derision, but I decided to read it up anyway. Unfortunately, it appears the snort was well-deserved.

The article is done in the context of HDCP (High bandwidth Digital Copy Protection) and movies. The whole thing hinges on recognizing the value of screenwriters and comparing them to book authors. Near as I can tell, the argument is:

1) Books are hard to copy but easy to browse
2) Books are credited by author, not by publisher
3) Books are cheap
4) Combine the three and apply it to the movie industry, et voila! “Perfect” DRM.

If you’re sitting there scratching your heads or laughing into your mugs of coffee, rest assured it’s not just you.

Sure, books are hard to copy and easy to browse. But they’re books. You can put it down for a couple days and come back to pick up where you left off. You can skip to wherever you want to read. You can highlight passages you like, make notes in the margins, fold those sacrilegious dog-eared creases at the corners.

With movies, it’s different. You pick up a DVD, you watch it through in one sitting with some nachos or popcorn and maybe one or two friends. Have you ever tried “browsing” a DVD at a rental place? If you’re like me, you end up standing there for half an hour as it plays, then realize you shouldn’t watch the whole thing now. Whoops!

As for being credited by author, come on. Just compare the credits of a movie to that of a book! A book is written by maybe one or two writers, with only an editorial team to back them up. If the writing is good, the book will be good. A movie can make no such claim. If the writing is stellar but the acting sucks, will you say it’s a “good movie”? Hah! The same goes for camera-work, editing, sound quality, costuming, post-processing, and the whole lot of processes that go into making a movie what it is. Talk about a bad analogy.

The cost factor is probably the only coherent line of reasoning there is. For the meagre amount of enjoyment I get out of a movie, it costs an awful lot. Textbooks are a blatant example where the outrageous cost results in poor students just photocopying the entire thing. But outside of that, book costs tend to be much more reasonable.

I’m quite disappointed in Firingsquad. They used to be one of the premier sites to go to if you wanted to talk games and gaming hardware. Now, after reading this piece of shoddy reasoning, I’m deleting them off my bookmark list.

Good riddance.