Hulu is the network's way of beating piracy, and it's working a lot better than anyone could have expected.
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Bringing things back on topic: Did you know that Hulu uses DRM? It's true! The DRM is built right into the flash player, though, so you'd never know it's there in normal usage.
Not all Digital Rights Management solutions are bad (I'll reference Steam for this); just the majority of them.
Just because something works doesn't mean it's not the sheerest evil.
By withholding the raw data (video/audio/game/etc) from the purchaser these middleman companies are working against both ends for their own benefit:
The consumer is getting nothing more than a long-term rental of the data. He'll be forced to repurchase and repurchase the data forever, and will ultimately be left with a big load of nothing after all his payments have been made and the system decides he shouldn't want the data any more.
The creator/artist is getting a small cut of the proceeds but his creation is now in the hands of the company. When the corporation decides that the customers no longer want the data then his creation is locked away in the vault. If he tries to pull it back out after the corporate decision has been made to lock it away then the lawsuits begin.
History is riddled with examples of everything getting fucked up as a result of this corporate money-making scheme wherein artists and consumers get shat upon for the good of the parent corp whose responsibilities only extend to themselves and their shareholders (maybe). Examine the fate of Nintendo's abortive Satellaview subsystem from the mid-90s. Online enthusiast of the games transmitted via Satellaview are now forced to resort to wringing their hands and producing doujin versions from memory.
What's going to happen when the next Crash of '83 occurs and Steam shuts down? Do you think they'll mail hard copies to all prior purchasers? No way. Fuck the purchasers and fuck the artists. This is only barely related, but it's the same thing with MMORPGs. That's the only reason I don't play them. They look otherwise quite fun. But to imagine that there will be a WOW community in 50 years when I'm showing my grandchildren how sweet old school gaming can be is ridiculous.
And I don't think most consumers have taken the three seconds of thinking required to recognize this. They're happy to jump through whatever hoops the companies proffer provided that they get their immediate fix. The companies suggest that this is a compromise because they have to fight piracy. What is the compromise? They've taken my rights to ownership off the table and in exchange I get the pleasure of their existence for as long as they can continue to dupe both ends of the market? That is not a compromise, that is tantamount to a taking. How about some disclosure? Steam shouldn't be allowed to call itself a distribution company when in fact it distributes something of no value and keeps the valuable parts to itself. Rentals will always be rentals even if they last for a very long time. This is precisely the point that confuses the masses and explains why we're slipping into the throttling grasp of these companies.
The only way I could agree that not all DRM solutions are bad is if I was a shareholder in the company and I was either indifferent toward or disapproved of the industry the company was leeching from. Let's say there was a DRM system set up to control access to religious materials. Now that's a company I'd be proud to have stock in.
DRM - Evil Totalitarian Dictatorship or Karma Insurance? (Read 15519 times)