Hey, remember when music companies were all like “you can’t rip our CDs, so there,” and then people said “Hey, I can use a Sharpie and defeat your controls“? Or when the music industry said “Fine, dammit, you can download an MP3, but you can’t make any copies,” and then people said “Hey, I cracked your encryption scheme.” Or when Apple finally told the music industry, “We’re not using DRM (Digital rights management) anymore, and also, I need four lattes” and they all sulked and pretended that they were, like, totally going to dump Apple and then gave up DRM altogether?
Guess what? A bunch of economists have proven that if they’d just not bothered with DRM, it would have dealt with piracy much more effectively. WHOOPS!
Shockingly, when people have a choice between the same product, where one has no restrictions and the other wants a urine sample from everybody in the room before it’ll play back, people choose the one that’s not a total PITA.
Of course, we happen to think something else is killing the music industry’s profits, but it’s nice to see intellectuals clown RIAA once again.
