Cory Doctorow and Chris Anderson are having an exchange of opinions at their respective blogs about DRM, Cory essentially saying that DRM is unacceptable, and Chris taking the “middle ground” position saying that it’s okay.
One of Cory’s points is that the argument about keeping honest users honest is as absurd as saying you’re keeping tall users tall. That honesty is a an integral attribute, and either you have it or you don’t.
But I’ve also just finished reading The Tipping Point, and on page 160 Gladwell talks about the “Fundamental Attribution Error—that humans tend to think of other humans as either honest or not honest. But in actual experiments, it turns out that honesty, as well as many other character traits, depends a lot on the circumstances. People, for example, are much less likely to help another person in need, if they’re told “You’re late” immediately before. In other words, keeping honest users honest makes more sense than Cory would lead you to believe.
I think that circumstances is a major factor in selling music online as well, although perhaps not the way Chris suggests. I have personally downloaded music without paying for it, especially when it wasn’t available to be bought anywhere (such as the fantastic “Why me God” by Durwood Douche, first heard on Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code). I have also purchased more music on iTunes since it became available to me, than I bought CD music before iTunes. In other words, I would I would personally be kept more honest if there was a path for me to get the music in an honest way. But all too often there isn’t.
I’m actually torn on how to deal with the current DRM/online music situation. Like both Cory and Chris, I wish things were different, that we didn’t have the restrictions that we do today. I have run into the 5-computer limit that Apple enforces (2 desktops, 4 laptops at work and home), and ever time you get a new laptop and sell off your old one, you have to remember to deauthorize it before wiping it, otherwise it will permanently use up one of those 5 slots. That happened to me, too. (Apple was kind enough to reset my count, not sure about the details.)
On ther other hand, iTunes is a major improvement over what was there before, which was essentially nothing. I can actually legally buy and immediately listen to music I want, insofar as it’s available, without breaking any laws. I love that.
So I find myself on the one hand wanting to support the iTunes Music Store project with my money, signaling that “we” are willing to pay for music online, and on the other hand wanting to signal that “we” won’t put up with the DRM that rights holders (which of course includes Steve Jobs) try to shovel down our throats.
What I end up doing, most of the time, is buying a song on iTunes, then downloading it on P2P, just so I can simultaneously feel good about supporting music online, and be unencumbered by DRM. Feels a bit awkward, though, doesn’t it?
Cory, what’s your practical advice to us mere mortals? What should we do to get our music?
http://ipodlinuxinstl.sourceforge.net/
I now have my iPod running Linux, thanks to the gracious help from Jeffrey Nelson.
Not terribly useful, apart from the recorder which I definitely have to play some more with, but definitely has the cool factor :)
Btw, the problem I had was that I’d bought my iPod back when I was still a Windoze user, so I had to reformat it in Mac format, then installation went smoothly.
December 22, 2004 · 1 comment
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/21/patents_dropped/
Makes you really appreciate the extension of the EU. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Update: Found out about and signed the Thank Poland Letter. You should do the same.
http://www.macrabbit.com/cssedit/
Just bought a copy of CSSEdit from MacRabbit, and I like it. Makes it really easy to organize and edit the
CSS. And I’m still pretty amazed, after my recent switch to the Mac, at how productive it is – I can edit the
CSS file directly from where it is, under subversion control, and being served by the web server, so it’s just save and reload in the browser and
svn ci when i’m happy with the result. Nice. Only downside: I feel bad for these MacRabbit guys, seeling software in US dollars, but living in Belgium, having costs in Euros, while the dollar is falling like a rock. But oh, well, I’m a happy camper – makes it cheaper for me.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/15/dell_server_selloff/
What happened this week was that Dell had an incredible offer for a dicontinued server, but within a few hours they got more orders than they had boxes, and then – oops – failed to communicate that to the folks who had already gotten an order confirmation over the web and were expecting their boxes to arrive.
It’s an old story, really, with Dell. Their web ordering system is completely separate from their back-end sales and production management system. My local Dell sales rep has actually told me that when you enter your order over the web, he actually has to read the order off the web system, and enter it into the “real” system. (To be sure, place the order, then call your sales rep and make sure he enters your order in the real system immediately—yes, I’ve been instructed by my sales rep to do this.) It’s what we call sneakerware.
This, I think, is a major part of the reason for their disastrous customer service during the order fulfillment process. Here’s what I reason happens:
- The web system doesn’t really know how many of these 1600 SC units were sold, because that’s the internal system that keeps track of that, and the two don’t talk.
- When you order something, it takes several days before you get an order confirmation saying they heard you correctly, that your credit card went through, and when you can expect to get your box.
- You don’t get email notifications when your order ships.
- You can’t see your order status or your order history online, and there’s no place to keep your shipping and payment details.
- When a part is back-ordered, you’re not really told anything, except that yor box won’t ship in two months – you have to call in to find out what the problem is and how you can route around it.
This is part of Dell’s legacy. They started as a mail-order company, and they had sales people be the customer’s interface to their internal system. Along comes the web, and they build this completely separate system, but the internal system stays the same, so the real interface between the two are the sales agents.
It is also obviously a less than desirable way for Dell to run their business – it is costing them loss of customers and money to pay sales agents. Yet Dell has been in this situation for almost a decade, and they haven’t managed to fix it. Why? That’s what puzzles me.
Perhaps they figure that the cost and risk of reimplementing their internal software applications is just too high, and that sticking with what they have and routing around the pain helps them focus on beating their competition instead of slaying internal dragons. You could excuse them for thinking that way.
But if we ignore Dell as an isolated case for a minute, and think of the industry as a whole, isn’t it a sad admission of defeat in our industry, that one (two) of the largest IT companies can’t get their internal IT systems to work right? Isn’t it tragic that it has to cost $400 million in revenue, and still not work. I know that these are really big companies, but I have a feeling that the solutions that we have today—like SAP, Oracle Apps, Windows, Office, and all that—are just too big, they’re doing too much, most of which isn’t necessary, or they do it in really bad ways. I mean, something’s gotta be wrong.
That’s why I like the mantra of “Less Software”. Once you get into the mode, you realize that you can do a lot more with less. There’s a tendency, both in the individual programmer and in the software companies, to pile on more code to solve the problem. The programmer, because it’s easier to write code than to read it, and because we hate throwing code away. The companies, because the more stuff there is, supposedly, the more they can charge.
Programming in Ruby on Rails helps me write less software. I find that because it requires so few lines of code to get things done (no repetition, and a really tight, flexible language) and things follow the principle of least surprise, it’s much easier to read, refactor, write, and even throw away code—because you know that if you really need it, it would be a small effort to write it again, or dig it out of the source control system.
I was listening to Kent Beck while jogging last night, and he was relating a description of the Microsoft ship process: Software is like jelly, and you keep testing and fixing bugs, and the jelly shakes and moves, but then all of a sudden it stops shaking for a minute, and that’s when you ship!
There’s got to be a better way, and I think some of the keywords are Less Software and Agile Software Development. It could be a fun project, rewriting Dell’s order system …
