Quote: that had the sole function of reading a tiny bit of data and telling me if I could actually watch my legally purchased DVD...Region encoding is okay on its face. It prevents cheap importers from undercutting the prices of local distributors. Its not worse than tariffs on
imports.
And anyone who thinks that eliminating tariffs on imports is a good thing had better take a good long look at themselves the next time you complain about
outsourcing manufacturing to Mexico or customer service to India.
Many people, especially on the internets, think the purpose of DRM is to stop piracy.
It isn't.
The purpose of DRM is to stop casual piracy. To make it more annoying to pirate a piece of software than to pay the regular price. The idea is
to make Joe Sixpack who can't tell the difference between a crack and a torrent pay for their stuff. And there have been a lot of successes in this.
Witness Valve's "Steam" network, which has been enourmously successful despite being essentially a gaint piece of malware whose only purpose is
to prevent you from playing games. Witness also X-Box live or any similar stuff. They all make money.
The trick is to make the DRM virtually unnoticeable to the average viewer. And most of them won't notice it. Oh god, it takes ten second rather than five
for my movie to start! Most of them will be out of the room making popcorn while this happens.
Now, there have been hiccups in the process, which there are bound to be. But just because there have been a few strains on the system dones't mean the
idea itself is inherently wrong.
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Epsilon