Why DRM Is Your Enemy

Boing Boing: If your Xbox is defective, MSFT screws you again with DRM Boing Boing is out with a post about Travis, a guy whose DVD player on his XBox 360 went bad. Fair enough — these things happen. So Travis sent it back in to have it repaired and the DVD drive was replaced by Microsoft. Ok, still, so far so good.

But then when Travis gets his unit back, in order to play the games that he’d previously purchased online he has to go through some major hasslescud to make this happen:

“First, you have to create a new gamer profile and make it an Xbox Live “Silver” membership. It’s free to create that new profile since the “Silver” membership is free, but there is a heck of a lot of data entry for contact information, not to mention the fact you need to give it an email address and password so it can sign on – just like a real profile. The representatives on the phone will tell you it doesn’t matter what email address you give it, but from experience I know they send account notices and such to that email address, so it should probably be legitimate. Of course, that means if you don’t have your own domain and/or can’t figure out how to set up email address forwarding then you’ll need to create a new, dummy Hotmail account or something. Super convenient.

Once you have the dummy gamer profile set up, Microsoft will credit that account with enough credits to go in and re-purchase all of the games you previously had unlocked. Getting that credit to come through takes eight-to-ten business days.”

So it sucks to be Travis. Well probably not in real life, but it sucks to be him when dealing with his defective XBox 360.

A little while back I blogged about my own personal switch from Microsoft’s Outlook email software to Mozilla Thunderbird (which rocks by the way). Basically what happened was that I installed a beta version of Vista on my laptop and then things went wrong and my Outlook was killed and I couldn’t reinstall it. It’s not that I couldn’t reinstall it per se though, it’s that I couldn’t get Microsoft’s authentication to work. When I typed in that little key it just kind wouldn’t take. On my old laptop.

So even though I’ve been using Thunderbird happily I decided to try again the other day. That old laptop has now been trashed. It’s a sad story but numerous things killed a pretty kick ass ThinkPad. First my kids kept pulling all the keys off of the keyboard which kind of screwed that up. Then I accidentally crushed it a bit underneath a seat on an airplane. Then when I was shooting timed exposure shots in the middle of the street on Columbus Ave. in San Francisco and having to run and shoot quickly between the walk/don’t walk lights the laptop fell out of my backpack onto the pavement. And then the final straw was an entire oversized balloon glass filled to the very very top of cold chardonnay went crashing into my keyboard.

So now that laptop is dead. Very dead.

But when I bought my new Dell laptop (smartly, a sub $1,000 one this time), I bought it without Microsoft Office. I bought it without Microsoft Office because I already purchased a version of Microsoft Office for my dead ThinkPad. Certainly I own the software, I paid up for it. It’s dead on my ThinkPad. And I should be able to install it on my new Dell. Right? Nope. Authentication keys still don’t work. Even when read right off of the software discs that I own.

Now I could probably get this fixed. I know enough people inside Microsoft (and they really are great people) that I could probably figure out the right place to get this worked out. But that’s not the point. The point is that the DRM that in Microsoft Outlook prevented me, a legitimate user and rightful owner, from using my software without inconveniencing me. And the funny thing is, now that I’ve been using Thunderbird for the past few months, I don’t even care. Thunderbird was free for me to use and it rocks.

But what’s also really nice is that I know if my Thunderbird craps out that I can always go and reinstall it. And you know what, when I reinstall it I won’t be asked for an authentication key because it has no DRM.

Heh, interestingly enough I just spell checked this article on my copy of Microsoft Word (an old copy I’m sure) and the spell checker didn’t recognize the world Mozilla. Guess I’ll just need to be adding that one to my personal dictionary.