Some DRM Disasters

DRM, or digital rights management, can cause far more problems than what it was meant to solve. And it doesn't even solve the problem it was designed to do. In this episode, we look at several cases where DRM caused problems for legitimate customers.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and how the tech are you so? Earlier this year,
I did an episode titled the DRM Episode, and it

(00:26):
was fittingly enough about the history and evolution of DRM
that published back in January. D r M is digital
rights management, and simply but digital rights management is all
about finding ways to restrict access to digital material to
only those who have permission to access it. Now, we

(00:48):
mostly think about it as a way of preventing theft
and piracy, though it does not do those things very
well at all. DRM has also introduced a legal puzz
old here in the United States. See it has long
been held that it is totally legal for someone to
make a copy of media they have purchased for the

(01:10):
purposes of having a backup. So, while it would be
copyright infringement, if I were to go out and say,
buy a compact disc, and then come back home and
use my computer to copy that compact disc onto blank
compact discs, and then I go out on the street
and start selling those to passers by for a huge
markdown that would be illegal. It is, however, totally legal

(01:35):
if I were to go out and buy that same CD,
come home, copy it with my computer, put it on
a second CD, and use that as a backup for
my own personal use. That's Toad's fine, completely acceptable. Well,
then we come to copy protection, and there are lots
of different kinds of copy protection, and it is against

(01:57):
the law to circumvent or to make or even own
tools intended to circumvent copy protection. So it would be
legal for me to produce a copy for my own use,
but it's illegal to get around the copy protection. Though
I should add there's some disagreement on that point. Some
say technically it is legal to bypass DRM in order

(02:21):
to make a copy of something if it's just for
your own personal use. However, it's still illegal to own
the software that makes it possible to bypass dr M
in the first place. So again you still run into
this circular argument. Yes, you can make a copy, but
it's illegal for you to get around the thing that
prevents you from making a copy. And if you can't

(02:42):
get around copy protection, then there's no way for you
to make a copy. So it might be legal for
you to create a copy. It's just illegal to get
around the thing that prevents you from doing that. Because
laws are fun, right, and there are a ton of consequences.
Uh in how DRM was defined in the Digital Millennium

(03:03):
Copyright Act and section twelve oh one in particular, which
is the bit that says it's illegal to try and
get around copy protection or DRM. So companies have used
that passage for the justification of all sorts of shenanigans,
including denying the right to repair or to restrict who

(03:23):
can actually make software for their products. There's a lot
of anticompetitive behavior that has been fueled by this frankly
poorly worded piece of legislation. So there are a lot
of ways where the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or d
m c A has really hurt consumers and companies. So

(03:45):
today I wanted to talk about a different, unintended consequence,
one that is particularly infuriating. So the whole point of
the d m c A was to create rules that
would stop people from stealing dit dull stuff right to
stop piracy. However, people are still doing that. There are

(04:06):
still plenty of people stealing digital content. In fact, the
folks who are doing the stealing are the ones who
are breaking dr M and they're getting unfettered access to
the stuff they stole. So in the process of stealing
whatever it is they're going after, they're stripping the d
r M from that thing. That means they get to

(04:27):
experience that thing without any DRM. Meanwhile, law abiding folk
like you and me, I assume we are stuck with
the busted products that have dr M all up on them.
So in other words, the people what are doing the
stealing have a superior product as the scarlet which once said,

(04:49):
that doesn't seem fair. So in today's episode, we're going
to look at some examples of how dr M had
a negative impact on legitimate customers. And I was really
inspired to do this because of something going on at
Microsoft and its Xbox Online service. So, as the name suggests,

(05:10):
Xbox Online is an online component for the Xbox line
of consoles. Microsoft has servers running and Xbox consoles will
check in with those servers. Now, it was almost a
decade ago when Microsoft announced how the Xbox One console
was supposed to work, And when that announcement went out,

(05:31):
it was that the Xbox one was going to be
online all the time. It would have a persistent online connection.
In fact, it would require a persistent online connection, and
that this would end up having big benefits for players.
There'll be a lot of features that would be enabled
because of this connection. However, a lot of people got

(05:53):
really concerned about some elements, like would that prevent you
from being able to purchase used games, something that a
lot of people really depend upon. They can't necessarily afford
to buy a game at full price, so they wait,
they go out, and they buy it used once the
price comes down, and they play their games that way.

(06:13):
But would this online component kind of act like a
type of DRM. Would it check in with that copy
of the game with the server look to see if
that copy of the game had been registered with some
other console, and would it then prevent you from playing
the game. This was a real concern because it is
a possibility. In fact, a lot of people are arguing

(06:34):
that this could have just been a scheme to sell
more copies of games, eliminate the secondary market entirely, and
hurt the consumer. Ultimately, Microsoft would walk back the announcement
and changed its plans and no longer required the Xbox
One to have this persistent internet connection, which totally change

(06:55):
things up. That was a weird E three, But there's
still an online component it for Xbox, and there still
is DRM sitting on top of that online component, and
it's active for lots of games. And on Friday May six,
two thousand twenty two, the servers running this DRM started
to have some problems, which meant that Xbox owners found

(07:17):
themselves unable to purchase new games, or to start online
gaming sessions, or even launch some of their games that
they already have purchased and downloaded to their machine because
server side DRM runs a quick check to make sure
that the copy of a game that is being initiated

(07:39):
is a legitimate copy of the game, meaning that the
person who's running it actually bought it. So this is
kind of like a parent calling in to check on
their kid a lot, and if the answers aren't satisfactory,
that kid is grounded. So with these servers being down,
it meant that this check in could not happen. The

(07:59):
copy of the game not be able to get the
go ahead from the server to allow the game to load,
so without that verified check in, the games would not launch.
It's now May nine, and some Xbox users report they
are still experiencing this problem. So people who went through
all the right steps, they bought their games legitimately, they

(08:21):
have a connection to the internet, they are finding themselves
unable to play certain titles. They are being punished for
playing properly. Meanwhile, people who might have a pirated copy
of the game with the DRM stripped from it where
it's not doing this online check in, they could potentially
still be playing those games. DRM critics have argued that

(08:46):
Microsoft should really change it's DRM policy so that games
that are meant to be played offline can be played
offline even if the Microsoft servers are down. So, in
other words, these are games that are not online dependent.
There's no competitive or cooperative play. It's meant to be

(09:06):
played on your native Xbox in your home and that's it.
And you know, you have to also remember some folks
live in places where they might not even have a
good Internet connection. It seems reasonable to expect that you
should be able to play an offline single player game

(09:26):
because you know there's no online component. But here we are.
There are people who are being affected by this, and
in fact, we've had so many examples of games doing
this specific thing. In particular I am reminded of the
hit Man series because I've certainly encountered this. Anyone who
has played hit Man three has likely run into the

(09:49):
message that the hit Man servers are offline, or you
might end up in the middle of a gaming session
get a temporary disconnection and you can't play anymore, or
it'll let you play, but it's like nothing's really counting anymore.
In fact, some players would get into situations where server
disconnects happened so frequently that the game would become unplayable.

(10:12):
And you would think that shouldn't be an issue because
hit Man is a game that runs natively on your computer.
But there are just enough connected features in hit Man
three that it's required to have these check ins. One
to verify that the copy you're playing is legit, and
too to keep track of things like how you're doing

(10:32):
versus say, your friends who also play hit Man three.
So there are some value added features in there. I
don't know how many people really use those that much
compared to just playing the game, but they do exist. Now.
When hit Man three became available on Good Old Games
or go o G, things got ugly because generally g

(10:56):
o G has this policy of offering up DRM free games,
specifically because DRM can hinder a legit players experiences. But
hit Man three has this requirement of checking in with
a server, and the inclusion of server based DRM prompted
many g o G customers to review Bomb hit Man three,
giving it very low ratings due to the server requirement.

(11:19):
Go O G contacted hit Man three customers and gave
them the option to refund their purchase. When we come back,
i'll talk a little bit more about d r M
and video games, and then we're gonna go beyond that
to look at d r M in other areas of tech.
But first let's listen to these messages, all right. One

(11:47):
of the big companies that specializes in video game DRM
and also anti cheat technology is called Deneuveau d E
n U v O. Now, anti cheat is really understandable,
right because, at least for competitive online games, it's kind
of a necessity. It is incredibly frustrating to hop online

(12:10):
to play a game only to get shut down immediately
because someone else is using cheat software that gives them
an unfair advantage. So a strong anti cheat strategy is
really useful in those respects. And and I certainly like that.
But the d r M side is another matter. So
critics say that Deneuvos software over taxes your you know,

(12:33):
the players computers and their CPUs, as well as rights
to players storage a lot, which can decrease the lifespan
of storage, like if it's a solid state drive, it
can start to really affect the longevity of that drive.
These are charges that the company has denied, but several

(12:54):
journalists have performed tests of games both running with Deneuvo's
software being active of and running with Deneuvo's software disabled,
and the tests seem to support the accusation that the
software has a measurable negative impact on computer performance. And
that's assuming that the software is working. Like the Hitman

(13:15):
three example, there have been cases in which games using
Deneuvo solutions became unplayable because of server issues. But let's
move away from video games. We could spend all day
talking about how DRM has had a negative impact on
video games. We could even talk about the earliest times
where you had computer companies or game companies saying that

(13:39):
there would be a requirement for an online persistent connection
even for single player games, and how players reacted to that.
But there are a lot of other examples of DRM
going wrong outside of the video game world, so we'll
look at a few more. So, let's talk about printers
and toner. Several printer manufacturers have implemented DRM in an

(14:01):
effort to funnel customers into purchasing official toner cartridges from
those companies. You know, it's a long standing joke that
buying a new printer is super cheap. It's the toner
that'll that will really set you back. That's thoroughly a joke.
I mean, it's it's the idea of printer companies selling
you a printer because it will lock you into their

(14:24):
ecosystem where they can continuously sell you the toner for
much more money, and they keep making cash off of
a single customer. Right because you're going to run out
of towner, you're gonna have to buy new ones. So
obviously these companies are going to take steps to restrict
what kind of toner you can use so that you
have to buy it from them. That's how they're gonna

(14:45):
make all their money. They can do all they could
be a loss leader on printers and make it up
with the toner they sell. HP for example, started doing
this in the HP printer would scan the toner cartridges,
and if the cartridge proved to not be an official
HP cartridge, the printer would then give the user a

(15:06):
message reading quote the following ink cartridges appeared to be
undetected or damaged. Replaced the ink cartridges to continue printing
end quote. The printer wouldn't let you print even if
the third party cartridges were otherwise perfectly compatible, So even
if for any other reason it should work, the printer

(15:28):
would say, Nope, these are bad, these are defective, get
rid of them. Cannon actually went a step further. The
Pixma MG six three twenty model is like a lot
of printers, and that it has a built in scanner
so that you can scan documents and get a digital
version of your document. But the Cannon, once it would

(15:49):
run out of toner, would disable all functions, including the scanner. Now,
scanners don't use any toner at all. They literally just
scan a document and create a digital copy, so not
one dot of toner has to be used to do that.
So users complained that Cannon was purposefully deactivating its printers

(16:09):
functions to force folks into buying more expensive Cannon toner
then we got the chip shortage, which caused way more
headaches for both Cannon and its customers. See, the way
that Canon was implementing DRM in its toner cartridges was
to include a very small microchip that identified the toner

(16:32):
as being a Cannon branded cartridge. But then we get
into the pandemic, and then not long after that, we
started hitting that massive semiconductor shortage that we are still
into this day. Among the many technologies affected by this
shortage where Cannon toner cartridges. But this created an awkward problem.

(16:53):
The new Cannon cartridges didn't have the DRM chips because
of the semiconductor shortage. That meant that Cannon printers were
looking for DRM confirmation and couldn't find it even with
official Cannon cartridges. So even if you went through the
trouble and expense of buying an actual Cannon toner cartridge,

(17:15):
your Cannon printer wouldn't recognize them, and Cannon's own d
r M would prevent you from using your printer. So
Cannon had to send out information to customers on how
to bypass the DRM, which means, of course, that you
could have tried that same method without using Cannon cartridges

(17:37):
at all, so Cannon actually had to tell its customers
how to get around the gate keeping it had put
into place in order to restrict what kind of ink
you could use. Now, in some cases a company may
have had no choice but to develop and deploy DRM.
So let's talk about Apple's fair Play DRMS solution, which

(18:01):
hasn't been a thing for many years, so this is
not a current issue. But back in the day, here's
how you would listen to digital music on a personal
device like an MP three players. Specifically, we're gonna be
talking about iPods, So you would go and you would
buy your brand new iPod. Uh, So you would get

(18:22):
some sort of music management software. In this case, we
have to talk about iTunes, the Apple version of that.
So this is how you organize music, how you get music,
and you would put music on that management software iTunes
in a couple of different ways. So in the very
earliest days, the only way was really to purchase a

(18:45):
music c D, put it into your computer that has
your music management software on it, your iTunes, and use
iTunes to then rip the music off the CD. Not literally,
the music would still be on the CD. You're just
really copying the music files. Um and converting them into
a format that is easier to store, and this would

(19:07):
go into your iTunes software. It would be in a
database and it would be something you could easily get to,
and you would have a digital copy of those songs,
and there'll be no DRM on that music. You would
have ripped it from the c D and it would
be DRM free music files. And in the very earliest
days of iTunes, this was the only way you could

(19:29):
get music the iTunes system, as in the management system
for music that existed before the iTunes Music Store did,
so you would use it to really just organize your
music collection and then transfer that music collection to your iPod.
But once the iTunes Music Store opened up, well, then

(19:51):
you had another option. You could buy music, either entire
albums or often individual tracks off the digital store. Now,
in either case, if you wanted to put digital music
onto your iPod, you had to connect your iPod to
your computer using an actual physical cable and you would

(20:12):
synchronize the iPods library to that of your computer's library.
So with Apple is pretty easy assuming you were working
with all Apple products. Uh, if you had a Mac
and an iPod, it was pretty easy. If you had
a PC and you were running iTunes on it, it
was more of a headache. So you could rip music

(20:36):
from your CD s where you could buy new music
tracks which would get added into your iTunes management software,
and then Apple would just automatically add those tunes to
your iPod the next time you connected it to your
computer to synchronize with your iTunes database. But the big
music publishers were wary of digital music. They had already

(20:58):
weathered the storm of recy in the napster days, and
so the music labels, which pretty much had the leverage,
demanded that Apple create and used DRM to protect music files.
And so Apple did because if it didn't, it wouldn't
have access to these massive companies music libraries, and the

(21:19):
iTunes music store would have gone nowhere. You wouldn't have
had anything to sell on it. So Apple thus created
fair play. Now, one of the things Apple did was
that it would not allow any other d r M
music onto an iPod. It had to be fair play,
DRM or nothing, which meant if you bought a track

(21:40):
from a different digital store, you would be out of
luck when it came to putting that track on your
iPod because these other digital stores also had to comply
with the music labels and include DRM on their tracks,
and Apple would not allow any DRM other than fair
Play in its ghos system, and Apple wouldn't license fair

(22:03):
play to any other company. So it essentially was either
you rip music from CDs or you have to go
through the iTunes music store. Those are the only two
options you have. You can't buy music from other digital stores,
so companies like real Player or real Play began to
reverse engineer Apple's fair play in order to develop similar

(22:26):
DRM that would fool Apple's ecosystem into thinking it was
fair play. That way, you could purchase music from these
other stores and get that music on your iPod. That
would give you operate options to buy music that's not
on Apple's store, or you can buy it for less money.
Like you know, real Plays tracks were sometimes half as

(22:47):
much as what Apple was charging. So Apple then accused
the real Player company of essentially acting like a hacker,
and Apple updated its fair play systems, and subsequently, once
the update went out, when you synchronized your iPod with
your computer, you would find that any tracks you had
bought from those other digital stores like the Harmony store

(23:09):
would go bye bye. They'd get deleted. And there was
a whole class action lawsuit brought against Apple for this
because people wanted the freedom to buy music wherever they
liked and then put it on their iPods. Apple actually
ended up winning that lawsuit, however, and ultimately it all
became a moot point because a few years later, Apple
discontinued fair play entirely, and at that point it was

(23:30):
Apple that had the leverage over the music companies. Steve
Jobs himself actually argued that DRM really only hurt legitimate
customers and so it was just a terrible business idea
to use it. Okay, We've got a couple more examples
I want to give before we end this episode, but
first let's take another quick break. Earlier in the episode,

(23:58):
I mentioned that you could music on an iPod by
ripping the music from a compact disc, and that is true,
but compact discs could also have their own DRM copy
of protection on them, and this brings us to one
of the most famous DRM catastrophes, that of Sony b
mg s copy protection strategy in two thousand five. So

(24:21):
Sony b MG decides that it wants to really control
how customers can listen or rip music from Sony b
MG albums, and to do that they leaned on some
software XCP, which was a copy protection software, and another
best called Media Max c D three. Now, this pair

(24:41):
of software programs were included on something like fifty different
albums within Sony b mg s library, and there were
thousands and thousands of copies of these fifty albums. So
if you were to purchase one of those c d s,
and then you were to put that c D in
or a computer, you would be presented with an end

(25:03):
User License Agreement or you LA e u l A.
Now we all know that hardly anyone reads those things. However,
it turns out that even if you had read it,
you wouldn't have known about what would happen next because
there was no mention of it within the u LA,
And what would happen was ridiculous. Whether you clicked on

(25:27):
accepting the ULA or not, the CD would surreptitiously install
that DRM software on your computer. Those two programs. Now,
if you had a Mac, there was some good news
because the software would be secretly installed on your computer,
but you would get a message from the Mac operating
system once the software tried to change the operating system

(25:50):
and it would ask are you cool with this, and
you could say no, I'm totally not cool with that. However,
for Windows machines, Windows of machine owners didn't get any
warning at all. It just happened. So the software would
alter the operating system, essentially behaving the same way a
root kit would from malware. So a root kit is

(26:13):
software that gives someone root access to your machine. Essentially,
this is the worst case scenario where a hacker gets
total control over your computer. They might lock you out,
they might secretly use it without you knowing. They could
do all sorts of things. While the software that Sony

(26:34):
b MG but on its CDs didn't do this explicitly.
It did not actually act like a root kit, it
behaved in a way similar to it. Like from the outside,
it would look like it was behaving like a root kit,
which meant that anti virus software would likely identify it
as a root kit installed on that computer. Plus, it

(26:55):
actually did create security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers,
and that did happen once hackers figured it out. So
just by putting the CD into a Windows PC, you
would make that PC more vulnerable to attack, and it
gets worse, there was no way to uninstall the software,
and meanwhile, the software was always running in the background,

(27:18):
so it was also consuming processing power and impacting computer performance.
So not only was there no way to get rid
of it, not only did it make your computer more vulnerable,
it also made everything run worse on your machine. And
to say that Sony b MG faced a backlash would
be putting it lightly. The company scrambled to address the problem,

(27:39):
h its first solution actually ended up creating new security
vulnerabilities while it was supposedly deactivating the initial software. Uh
so that was not great, right when your solution is
at least as bad as the original problem, and also
a point of irony. Later on, researchers would accused Sony

(28:00):
b m G S DRM of containing code from various
open source programs in violation of those programs individual licensing agreements.
So in other words, Sony b MG was making use
of code without proper permission to use that code, which
meant Sony b m G, S d r M was

(28:22):
in itself a sort of copyright violation, which is kind
of poetic. Sony would issue a recall of all unsold
CDs that were harboring this DRM uh and a couple
of class action lawsuits followed, and it ended up being
a highly publicized and extremely expensive PR disaster for the company,

(28:44):
and yet DRM persisted. Now, there are lots of other examples.
We could talk about. Curig, for instance, instituted DRM with
its Curig two point oh machine moving forward, and that
would mean that these Curig machine, which are coffee machines.
If you're not familiar, you put a little pod of
coffee into the machine and you push a button and

(29:05):
it brews a cup of coffee for you. Well, the
DRM meant that these machines would only operate with Curig
branded coffee pods or k cups as they called them,
Kurig printed special ink. There's like a sticker on the
tops of the pods that the Curig two point o
machine and later would scan for. So the machine would

(29:26):
scan to look for the presence of this stuff on
the pod, and if there were no ink found, while
the machine would not work. It would not it wouldn't
allow you to brew that cup of coffee. So if
you bought it from a third party and it lacked
that sticker or that ink, no dice even if it
was a Curig branded pod from before they started doing

(29:48):
this practice. It wouldn't work because the earlier Curig pods
didn't have this this ink on them, and what followed
was a massive backlash from customers. Kurig saw an influx
of negative reviews and a drop in sales as well.
Third party companies began to produce pods that would fool
the Curig into thinking that it was a Curig branded

(30:10):
pod when it wasn't. Customers were upset that Kurig was
essentially deciding which coffees they should be allowed to drink.
It was really messy. Kurig weathered the storm mostly but
eventually settled a lawsuit accusing the company of using anti
competitive practices to prevent anyone else from producing pods that
were compatible with Curig brewing machines. The company also brought

(30:34):
back a device that they had discontinued called the my
K Cup, which is actually a reusable coffee filter slash
cup that allows customers to put their own coffee into
the cup and use that within a Curig machine. So
that's one way of stepping around it where you're not
having to buy the coffee straight from Curig. But yeah,

(30:58):
we've seen this sort of stuff a lot. In fact,
we've seen it a ton, I'd say, like the last
decade or so, maybe the last fifteen years. Really, we
started seeing companies looking for ways to create new revenue streams.
And the main way a lot of companies focused on
was how can we get customers locked into like a
subscription based model or a model where they must continue

(31:22):
to purchase things from us so that the thing that
they initially bought continues to work. That that has been
like a massive strategy that customers in general hate, are
typically hate UM And it's one of the reasons why
DRM is necessary because without DRM, then the customer has
the freedom to go wherever they want to get the

(31:44):
stuff what makes the device continue to work. And that
might be a different source, right Like for my my printer,
I might find a compatible cartridge that costs, you know,
a third of what it would cost me to buy
the official brand. I'm obviously going to be tempted to
go with that one, assuming that my printer will actually

(32:08):
let me use it. Um. Yeah, it's a it's a mess.
And like I said, DRM plays an important part in that.
And uh, I guess the alternative would be these companies
would eventually phase out dr M, but it would likely
mean that we would see much higher price tags on

(32:30):
some of these devices because the company would want to
make up that revenue elsewhere. And it might mean that, oh, well,
we're gonna have to sell this at a higher cost
because previously we were selling it low since we knew
we would make it up in the subscriptions or additional products.
So there there is a tradeoff here that even if

(32:50):
we get rid of d r M, it may mean
that the things we have been purchasing will get more expensive. Uh,
the individual stuff that we use on those machines might
not get more expensive, but the machines themselves could, and
I don't think people are super keen on that either.
We would like the best of both worlds, like no
DRM and still low prices, but you can't get at

(33:12):
all anyway. That wraps up this episode. I know it's
a quick one, but we've got a special episode tomorrow,
so I just wanted to do a fast episode for today,
and I definitely wanted to talk about it because of
the Xbox Online issue that I saw earlier today. If
you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future
episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The

(33:32):
best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle
for the show is text Stuff hs W and I'll
talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an
I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio,
visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

(33:55):
you listen to your favorite shows. Zero