DRM…The cancer of the digital age!

What do you think of, or what emotions fill you when you here the word DRM? For the majority of the population their response is: “What is DRM?”. For more tech savy individuals I imagine hate, anger, outrage, and rebellion come out. Why does something supposedly so “good” cause such strong reactions?
DRM is a product of several groups including Sony, Apple, Microsoft, MPAA, and RIAA just to name a few. There are many different types of DRM but all of the different types have one common goal…to restrict the way consumers use their digital media.
Music labels and movie publishers are big supporters of DRM. Why you ask? Their main goal in life is to make as much money as possible. So if you want to make a copy of a song you bought for the car, house, and mp3 player, according to them you should purchase the song 3 times. Same thing goes for DVD’s. If you want to rip and burn a copy of a DVD for personal use, while it isn’t quite illegal it’s far from suggested. It’s ridiculous how some old man sitting in some office with absolutely no grip whatsoever on reality can tell someone what to do with something they legally purchased. Music artists for example, should drop music labels all together and do as Radiohead did, distribute your own work. This approach would have a double benefit. Eliminating the outdated music labels and weed out a lot of crappy music from every teeny bopper that thinks they can sing.
Another example of DRM at it’s finest is the issue with EA’s Spore. Spore was a long intensive development for EA that had been talked about many months leading up to release. When EA released it they also tacked on a nasty surprise, DRM that limited installs and activations to only 5. Even if you uninstalled you couldn’t deactivate it to regain an activation. Now a good portion of users wouldn’t need to worry, but what about people who would be harmed from this limitation? Public outcry was started even before the game was released as soon as people found out about it. Finally after almost a month and a half, after getting flooded with enraged customers, protests, and petitions, EA repealed the DRM. One would come to think EA would have been humbled by the ordeal, but instead the opposite seems true. In a recent interview at the Dow Jones/Nielson Media and Money Conference, EA’s CEO John Riccitiello said that the whole backlash over Spore’s DRM had been “blown way out of proportion”. He goes on further saying that “they implemented a form of DRM 99.8% of users wouldn’t notice”…dream on buddy!
DRM is something that unfortunately isn’t going away anytime soon, but hopefully will not gain any more traction in the world. DRM is nothing more than Digital Restrictions Management! It’s a slap in the face to consumers and an unnecessary pay day for greedy executives and labels. With the RIAA and MPAA in the pockets of the former, one can only hope a drastic change comes to the way we license and distribute digital information.