Design DRM

There's been a significant hub-bub in the past few months regarding the DRM in a number of recent or upcoming PC games, specifically Electronic Art's Spore and Mass Effect, that resulted in a loosening of restrictions (See Slashdot Post), as well as some anger over Microsoft's decision to potentially lock some users out of legally purchased music after the Licensing server is retired (See Engadget summary). "DRM" for the small percentage of people who haven't had their lives made less enjoyable by it, stands for Digital Rights Management, and is nicely defined by the people at Defective by Design (an anti-DRM effort promoted by the Free Software Foundation ) as:

 Big Media describe DRM as Digital Rights Management. However, since its purpose is to restrict you the user, it is more accurate to describe DRM as Digital Restrictions Management. DRM Technology can restricts users’ access to movies, music, literature and software, indeed all forms of digital data. Unfree software implementing DRM technology is simply a prison in which users can be put to deprive them of the rights that the law would otherwise allow them.

One of the largest criticism of DRM is that because it only affects legal users of software and media, it places an undo burden on those who are actually legally using your product. If my mother, for some bizarre reason buys a media player that isn't an Ipod, then all her music purchased via Itunes becomes worthless unless she jumps through a bunch of "gray area" hoops. Someone who downloaded all the same music from a p2p site illegally faces no such problems. Same goes for software registration of Shareware, many times it's more difficult to register software than it is to download a cracked copy. Does this mean that it's ok to do so? No. But if you are creator of any type of Intellectual Property (IP)- be it media or software - it's important to be aware of other people's failures.

In the case of digital content creators, such as ourselves, we have options as how to you present your work, whether it be your portfolio, concepts or client work-in-progress. Some agencies choose to only present their work during face-to-face meetings on concept boards, and hoard developed software behind a multi-page NDA's. These agencies are guilty of causing the same issues that the developers of the aforementioned DRM schemes are: they are significantly impacting their paying customers to gain a slight protection of their IP. As a constrast, we generally present concepts online or via Email, where if a someone really wanted to they could rip us off and refuse to pay for our work. We present a demo of Webiva CMS to anyone who's interested - even though there a number of propriatery features that don't exist in other CMS's on the market. Does operating this way have the the possabiltiy of  coming back to harm our bottom line? Theoretically, of course it does. But in our experience with actual clients, giving them the greatest opportunity to take in our work and allow and open flow of ideas and reactions will bring about the highest quality end product the quickest.  

The bottom line is that even with whatever restrictions your put in place, much like a determined software pirate, if someone trully wants to use rip off your IP they will find a way to get at it. There's not that much you can do except document the issues, send a C&D and put it to the courts. Putting additional restrictions on the 99%* of your clients who have no intention of ripping you off will limit your ability to over-deliver and grow your business. 

* This advice, of course, only really applies to businesses like what we're doing at Cykod - Shareware software developers and PC game programmers are probably seeing greater than 50% of their user base using their product without paying for it (Now anyone who thinks those represent 100% lost sales probably works for the RIAA accounting department, but there is very real, significant lost revenue in software piracy), so by all means - protect your software in whatever way you can, hopefully minimizing the impact to the legal users.