DRM Quotes

I'm not a lawyer I'm a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM.

If you tell people they can't burn CDs of their music, as almost every current legal music service has done, or they can only burn one CD with a track or pay per track per burn extra, nobody is going to go for it.

What's the right way to think about the distribution part of Steam? You need to worry about viruses and people trying to publish other people's content, but the underlying thing is to eliminate that barrier between people who create stuff and people who want to have access to it.

Right, and you point out something important which is that people who don’t want to pay, people who are pirates, don’t get bothered by the DRM, they go out and buy the cracked books or download the cracked books for free. It’s only people who are foolish enough to pay for them that get locked into these platforms.

The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen.'

For every IP block, DRM, and who-knows-what security feature Hollywood spends thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on, some piracy kid will undo it for free and within a couple of minutes.

... the Kindle is a "roach motel" device: its license terms and DRM ensure that books can check in, but they can't check out.

Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customer's use or by creating uncertainty.

I still haven't heard anything from Apple about my hacks. There is a tool based on my work reverse-engineering Apple's FairPlay called jhymn that's been hosted on a U.S. server for over a year and nothing has happened.

I can write a program that lets you break the copy protection on a music file. But I can't write a program that solders new connections onto a chip for you.

Mechanisms that prevent Keurig machines from using off-label coffee pods are annoying but relatively harmless.

The music world has taken a huge dump, so maybe there's a connection. So if Apple decided to do this, maybe they do their own version ... whatever they want to do it's a home run for music. Unless they screw it up, and try to put something on it so that they can own it - I'm calling it out, proprietary formats are not a good thing.