Ditching DRM could reduce piracy, prices, inconvenience By Terrence O'Brien posted Oct 9th 2011 8:22PM This may run counter to what your common sense tells you but, a new paper out of Duke and Rice University says that ditching DRM could actually reduce piracy. The study, which relied on analytical modeling, showed that while copy protection made illegally sharing content more difficult it had a significantly negative impact on legal users. In fact, the researchers say, "only the legal users pay the price and suffer from the restrictions [of DRM]." Many consumers simply choose to pirate music and movies because doing simple things, like backing up a media collection, is difficult with DRMed content. Even the most effective DRM is eventually broken, and fails to deter those already determined to steal. Meanwhile, abandoning these restrictions could increase competition and drive down prices (as well as remove a serious inconvenience), encouraging more people to legitimately purchase content. You can check out the November-December issue of Marketing Science for more details.

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yea briliant idea. lets sit back and watch every software company fold all at one time.

my bets Sony and MS fold first and second and ninty folds last.
i also bets on the dog?

You could pirate music easily but you don't see the music industry folding... conspiracy!

They should give us an offer we can not refuse.

In all seriousness, no! I mean I do break the DRM on digital copies from blu-rays, as I want to be able to put them on my phone and tablet, but it is not the same in games apart from in a few cases

Always on DRM is retarded, as it just means many people can't play, but Steam DRM is absolutely no problem whatsoever and should have no negative impact apart from the weird people who refuse to install Steam because it is awesome...

Music industry: Live events
Despite music being like the most pirated media going around they are well supported by the growing concert scene that is booming because that is the only major revenue stream now for music companies in today's day a age.

Movie industry: Theaters
Priaters have standards now when it comes to movies, DvdRip or nothing at all, we have consumed so much priated media we are sick of the crappy ones and demand high quality, when it comes to movies we dont want shaky cams or heads on screens, so if you want to watch a movie thats just came out, then the theaters are the way to go or wait a few months for the dvd rip.

Then you have Games, little separates pirated games from non pirated in terms of experience, actually instead of enhancing the experience aka theaters and concerts do for legit buyers its the complete opposite for games with constrictive drm that makes pirated games offer a better experiences in alot of cases. This is where the whole drm war has been lost and will continue to fail. What needs to happen is that buying the game offers a better experience to pirating it, also pricing has to drop as well. PC prices are just too high, and with digital distribution it should be super expensive especially in some of the poorer nations. Reward paying users, have updates that only update for legit buyers, free DLC that legit get free but pirated have to pay up. Make the buying experience better is the only way forward in reducing piracy and capitalizing on the large pc market.

It's one of those noble ideas that sounds like it should work...but it doesn't.

There have been a good number of games that released without DRM or released for free and only asked for a donation yet they still showed up in record numbers on torrent sites.

People are assholes and they don't want to pay for things. DRM is something that's needed so rather than trash it, it would be best if we could find one that isn't so obtrusive (which is an extremely difficult problem).

what was that game where the devs said this and then released it and it had a really large number of pirated copies....world of goo?

its an old saying. i heard it in alot of tv shows.