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In this the digital age the protection of intellectual property is on everyone’s mind.  Every artist, writer, producer, recorder, film-maker, and videographer, of anything that is or can become some kind of digital media wants to protect their property.  Protect their sales.  Protect their profits.  And the insurance they use is copy-protection.  But I’m not going to talk about that aspect of the situation.  Protecting their profits is their problem.  I want to concentrate on why they have the problem in the first place and what they are not doing about it.

What if you’re not one of those things?  What if you are simply an end-user? 

A consumer? 

A customer?

Aye, there’s the rub…all these people producing this stuff have forgotten who they want to sell it to.  Customers.

It’s bad enough that today it seems like every product you buy you have to take it home and then try to put it together.  And the instructions…well you’re lucky if you can decipher them.  That is assuming they are in English, or assuming there are words at all and not just pictures.

Now we have all kinds of digital products, and a variety of ways to get them.  We can go into a store and purchase them on disk, we can download them, and we can get them streamed.

It’s a new market, new world, and the companies that produce this are stuck in the past.  A past that says they get to determine how we use or enjoy their product.  Want to play something on your mp3 player?  You need their software so it will work.  Want a copy to play on your computer?  They think that means you should buy another copy just for your computer.  Want a copy to play in the car?  Worse yet, want to make a mixed disk or mp3 lineup?  Sorry, no can do, you’ll need to buy a license for that.  If we offer it that way.  If we don’t, you shouldn’t want it like that.

If you want to use a product from the convenient location of your computer, you are required to install software that if you lucky will only interfere with a handful of other programs causing them to suddenly stop working.  Worst case scenario you might install software that crashes your computer to the point that you will need to re-install the operating system.  Or it might insidiously trash all the other DRM settings and licenses you have on your computer suddenly making you unable to use any of it.  Good luck in getting the companies you purchased them from to give you new ones.

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Or maybe you decide that you’ll go grey.  Purchase the products in a legal fashion and then use other software to convert it into something you can use the way you want.  Use something that strips the copyprotection from your purchase.

But they have to do something to prevent piracy? 

Do they? 

How about provide a product that people want, in a way people want, at a price the market will bear? 

Whatever happened to that old adage? 

An experiment conducted buy science fiction book publisher BAEN books yielded some interesting results.  Basically BAEN convinced several authors to place one or more of their already published works as ebooks for free download.  Now several authors responded with a resounding NO WAY!  They thought it was crazy.  Unsurprisingly most of the authors who felt this way were “old school” established writers.  However they managed to get several authors to agree and the BAEN free library was opened.

So what were the results?  To the surprise of no one a lot of people downloaded the free books.  To the surprise of many the authors noted a significant uptick in their catalog sales.  That means that they started selling a lot more copies of books they had previously written.  It was win/win.  The consumer got some free reading material, and the authors experienced renewed interest in their older works and royalties on books that had long since trailed off to pennies.

My point is, the new way of using the entertainment that is produced has to come with new ways of purchasing it, with a new fair price.  It is ridiculous to expect someone to pay a retail hard copy price for a download.

All that does is encourage theft.