ChangeMedia

DRM In Action

Today I had my first real run-in with Digital Rights Management. I've written here on this subject a few times before, and I've been following it fairly closely, but never before had I had an opportunity to get my hands dirty, so to speak.

You see, I just started business school, and being 2004 almost all class materials are distributed online. A handy site called Study.net is providing the service to my school, and they have all of the "course reader" material as Adobe eBooks. How incredibly handy to have all this material online, especially for me since I live an hour commute from campus. But, then comes the dark side....

Smart ass comments from the gallery aside, my incoming classmates are a pretty bright, reasonably tech savvy crowd. Yet, there were plenty of problems just viewing the materials, let alone using them -- and all of those problems (or, at least, most of them) can be directly attributed to the DRM embedded in the content.

First came the basics of downloading. Rather than just downloading a file with the content you want, what you download is a little program used by Adobe Reader to go get the content. To do this, you need to first "activate" your Adobe Reader with Adobe -- this went reasonably smoothly for most folks, but some had difficulty. Then, while attempting to download the content lots of folks ran into a number of obscure error messages, most related to problems with "vouchers" -- in other words, various network and application problems related to verification of the rights of people to just download the content in the first place.

Since people were having problems, those who had successfully downloaded the content started sending out copies of the files. But, of course, that didn't work -- you guessed it, because of the DRM.

Even when things were working more or less as expected there were quirks that caused me to spend lots of extra time (for instance, for some reason certain documents wouldn't download unless I quit Adobe Reader and restarted it).

Then, here you are finally reading the damn thing and you can't copy and paste chunks of text -- makes note taking much more difficult because you can't excerpt short passages. I'm not talking about making whole copies, I'm talking about taking 2 sentences and doing "copy and paste" -- a characteristic of text-based computing that goes back to the very earliest GUIs. Plus, you can't save any of the "Commenting" (a feature built into the Adobe Reader with nice things like highlighting of text and inline comments).

I understand all the rationales for embedding the DRM in these materials, but the bottom line is that pissing off end-users isn't generally a good approach to building a customer base. If we weren't a captive audience to this content (Which, by the way, makes us much less likely to pirate it) I guarantee that most of the class would have just walked away.