Don't Reproduce Me, Pt. I

Given the nature of today's CAT 125 lecture (as well as the readings preceding it), I thought I might shift gears this week and discuss a topic even nearer and dearer to my heart than net neutrality: copyright. Copyright law is my chosen profession (at least for the time being), and  I always intended to have this blog expand to digital rights issues beyond net neutrality. Today's lecture presented an opportunity to do just that. 

Last March, the video game developer/publisher Ubisoft released a PC version of its critically acclaimed title Assassin's Creed II.

Embedded in its code was one of the more invasive forms of DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection yet conceived: "Always-on DRM." Players were required, even in single player mode, to maintain a constant connection to Ubisoft's servers; if their internet connection was interrupted or even sufficiently slowed, players would be immediately booted from their legitimately purchased game. The company reasoned that this could prevent piracy by remotely authenticating each and every copy of the title.

Some argue that this technology—a radical departure from the simple cd-checks of the past—places too many restrictions on legitimate users. Rather than focus on this particular measure, however, I'd like to discuss the logic underlying DRM as a whole. What lead to its implementation?

In many ways, it's as easy to understand the rationale behind Ubisoft's desire to control its product as it is to understand the rationale behind the opposition to net neutrality. In several respects, these positions are very similar and very rational. Any content producer must be primarily interested in collecting revenue from its content. They can't be expected to work for free, and every pirated copy of a game is one less copy that could have been sold. Given the exponential increases in the cost of game development over the past ten years, it's understandable that publishers are growing more protective of their margins.

Perhaps the biggest problem with DRM is that it's a fantastic idea...in theory. Given the ubiquity of copying technology, a perfect technical measure that could prevent unauthorized reproductions of a work would likely incentivize the production of new content. It would inhibit what many content producers consider to be stealing. The caveat is that no such system is perfect. It has been argued by some that the externalities associated with these measures have proven worse than the problems they were intended to prevent, and I intend to go over some of those issues next week.