When You're Competing Against Free, 'Usability Problems' Won't Help
from the why-buy-the-cow dept
The boys over at BitTorrent have been forced into the role of adept politicans of late, as they try to cuddle up to the entertainment industry and prep for the launch of a legit video store. To shake off the piracy stigma, they've spent the year conducting an image makeover in the press, offering interviews to pretty much everybody. The legitimization effort has included such terminology tweaks as ditching the term "p2p" (they now call it "peer assisted" or "peer distributed"). That's why it's interesting to see BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen slamming DRM in an interview just ahead of the launch of a DRM-laden video store. "We're very concerned about the usability problems DRM introduces," insists Cohen, "and are educating our content partners about the lost commercial opportunity." In the same interview, Cohen admits a big chunk of the videos that will be offered at first will be Windows Media DRM protected. Investors should be thrilled: they've just doled out $20 million for a video store that plans to offer content with "usability problems", that only works on Windows, in a market where that same content is already available for free via their own software. On top of that, a growing number of ISPs have been throttling BitTorrent. Cohen's suggestion has been for ISPs to cache content on their networks instead of throttling traffic, but with so many ISPs also in the video business, it's unlikely they'll be motivated to cooperate.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: ban Anonymous Coward
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
a man
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Give a man anonymity and a text box, and you get complete idiocy in return.
Get Lives?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
WT?
Two ... um .. "A man" ... Why not post some actual content? Now you just look stupid!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
A little off
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Peers Needed
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]