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Soviet soldiers
Soviet soldiers: smiling faces masked the misery of Stalin's regime. Photograph: AP
Soviet soldiers: smiling faces masked the misery of Stalin's regime. Photograph: AP

Don't fall for the Potemkin scam

This article is more than 16 years old
Demos of digital rights management are always perfect - but in truth, it never succeeds, says Cory Doctorow

When Soviet bureaucrats wanted to impress foreign visitors with the success of the grand experiment, they would visit Potemkin villages - fake towns where actors pretended to be living a life of luxury amid bulging granaries and well-paved streets bustling with happy babushkas pushing prams.

It was a facade, a veneer, a sham. The actors lived in squalor, in crumbling tenements built with the typical Soviet love of concrete.

When entertainment executives are given tours of digital rights management technology, they are being fooled in just the same way. These Potemkin demonstrations depict a universe of happy devices, all seamlessly interoperating, tossing media back and forth to one another in a superbly orchestrated fashion. In this world the honest users are kept honest, are gently turned aside from overstepping their privileges, and are happy to pay a tiny sum for the right to do something new.

These demos almost never involve real hardware. It's so much easier to do interoperability when all it takes to make two devices communicate is to draw a dotted line between them on a slide. And when the demos do involve real hardware, it's usually all from one vendor, and only within a constrained universe of uses.

In reality, it's bloody hard to get any two technologies to talk to each other successfully. Remember how hard it was to get your new wireless card, printer or DVD recorder to work? Now, imagine that these technologies had been deliberately designed not to work with each other - except under the exactly correct circumstances.

Microsoft's PlaysForSure platform is typical of this. All such devices, "certified" to work with each other, barely ran on their own. And God help you if you tried to connect them to a competitor's device (even Microsoft's Zune won't handle PlaysForSure music).

Reithian values

The most recent victim of the Potemkin DRM scam is the BBC, whose iPlayer launched in July. Ostensibly, this is a "seven-day catch-up service" that allows you to download Beeb shows for up to a week after they air. You can then watch the shows up to 30 days later - but there's a seven-day lifespan as soon as you press play.

Every time anyone at the Beeb proposes something weird and woolly, there's always a commissar ready to shut down the discussion by pointing out that Auntie has to serve every single licence fee payer (right down to the centenarian shepherdess whose tall antenna stands atop her shearing shed so that she can get her Power of Nightmares or Dalziel and Pascoe fix).

But it's not clear to me where iPlayer fits in with the Reithian injunction for the BBC to "educate, inform and entertain". After all, 25% of licence-paying computer users don't even have the right operating system needed to use it. Most of these people aren't going to futz with their machines to get things working.

Most importantly, Britons have grown up with the VCR: a show you record on there is yours forever. You can loan it to a mate, your daughter can take it with her when it's her father's custody weekend, you can plan marathons. The iPlayer is the anti-VCR, a new technology with less flexibility than its predecessor.

There's no evidence that licence payers are crying out for this "business model". No one has been in Currys this week asking if they had a new gizmo that would do less with their video. Indeed, the whole premise of DRM - that audiences want to pay a few pence every time they try to use their media in a new way - is based on an a priori assumption that has precious little evidence to back it up.

The DRM infection

Of course, there's always an alternative: licence payers can just download the video for free from UKNova, the Pirate Bay and their ilk. After all, if you're going to bother becoming tech-literate, why waste the energy learning to use official crippleware that gives you less, when you can just teach yourself to download the videos that your more savvy neighbours have put on the net?

The DRM business model is the urinary tract infection of media experiences: all of the uses that used to come in an easy gush now come in a mingy, painful dribble - a few pennies out of your pocket every time you want to watch a show again, hit the pause button, or rewind.

If the next generation of British TV viewers doesn't understand why they should pay a license fee for video they get for free from the net, or why they should buy videos that won't play on their cheap, DRM-free Chinese devices, we'll know who to blame: the BBC, and the DRM vendors who suckered them with their Potemkin demo.

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