Google shows why DRM is evil
by Steve O'Hear, editorAugust 13th, 2007 | Posted in Net TV |
2 Comments
With Google’s decision to abandon paid-for video downloads — announced last Friday — the company also inadvertently delivered a “Sesame Street-style” lesson in why DRM is evil (notice the irony?). In an email sent out to Google Video customers, the company revealed that, as of August 15th, purchased videos will no longer playback, and instead users are being a given refund in the form of a Google Checkout “bonus”.
One of the inherit problems with DRM is that if a company goes bust or, presumably in Google’s case, decides to shut down the servers it uses to verify a legitimate purchase, then any DRM’d media is rendered useless.
You might be wondering how Google can get away with it, and I’ve been asking myself the same question. Two answers spring to mind. Firstly, the customer-base of Google Video paid-for downloads must be so small that the company doesn’t expect much of a backlash, which in-turn it hopes to have tempered through its offer of Google Checkout vouchers. Secondly, and more worryingly, it’s likely that the terms and conditions of Google Video already protected the company against such a scenario — where customers don’t actually “own” the media they pay for but instead license it in some way that allows for any future changes in service — including a DRM server blackout.
Whether or not this is legal — and I’m no lawyer — it’s a blatant abuse of trust, for which Google deserves to be held account.
(Also see Cory Doctorow’s take).
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As the previous author mentioned, ‘vasalls’ it trully reminds me of the medieval lifestyle.
I am glad that air is not yet a paid service. Imagine some future company cutting off the air provision because it doesn’t pay much…
Besides, some old words don’t seem to exist today: do you remember the word ‘rent’ ?
I guess that when a company starts playing with the big leagues it starts behaving as the rest of the players. The same as we, normal folks, they also want complete freedom. In this case, such freedom refers to doing with their customers anything that they want. This is like sudenly becoming something very different from the common companies. And it surely reflects to the ammount of profit that these companies are getting. They should classify themselves as the rich and the rest of the people should classify as the poor. Employees earning 100 times a standard wage. Does all these make any sense? Shouldn’t salaries be distributed in a different way before all these become something worse?
Alberto
This does go completely against Google’s stated “Don’t be evil policy”. Their approach is, since there are so few people that are using the service then the PR disaster won’t be too bad. They’re doing something blatantly wrong, simply because they know they can get away with it. If that is not to be put in the ‘evil’ category, I don’t know what is.
They are hardly short of cash and it surprises me that they don’t allow this media to play for another 1-3 years to show good will. Surely the cost would be insignificant compared to the value of avoiding going against what is supposed to be one of their guiding principles.