Digital Rights Madness

On a slashdot there in a thread about HBO Exec Proposes DRM Name Change there are lots of insightful and amusing comments about the ham handed ways that media companies treat their customers.

Imidan has this comment on No-CD patches:

Yeah, what is the deal with that? Why do I have to have the CD in to play? Given the right software, which anyone can get, the CD is trivially easy to copy to my hard drive. Or I can download a no-CD crack off the Internet. Why do they make this little hoop for me to jump through? Look, I bought the game. I have the sales receipt and everything!

My theory is that the people who make DRM technologies are kind of like telephone sanitizers. We've just been paying them for so long that if we suddenly give up on this utterly wasteful technology, then we'll be stuck with a lot of out-of-work DRM people, and they'll be meddling in the kitchen cupboards, rearranging them so we can never find anything anymore.

Anonymous Coward hgives this comment on No-CD patches:

And I know this because I've often downloaded the "no-cd" patches for my legitimately-purchased and DRM-encumbered games in order to:
A) not have to dig out the CD every time I want to play,
B) not have to wait for the CD to spin up,
C) not have to worry about the DRM system becoming incompatible and breaking the game (e.g., for older games, the DRM is often incompatible with new OS versions before the game is, so stripping the DRM increases compatibility),
D) not have to worry about the CD getting scratched or otherwise damaged,
E) sometimes it improves the performance to remove certain (poorly-implemented) DRM
schemes, and
F) because I paid for the game and I'll play it any way I please, thank you very much.

Suv4x4 chimes in with the inability of new names to change old preceptions:

Those people will never get it. The name doesn't matter. What's so sinister about "Digital Rights Management"? It sounds pretty nice to me. The bad connotations aren't coming from the name, it's the essence of what DRM is.

People keep thinking that the order and choice of letters is all it takes to turn something bad into something great.

This has been happening also in the way people have called people with mental handicaps throughout the years, and the constant "reinvention" of the terms, to keep the names less insulting:

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Socially responsible guy: We shouldn't call them "idiots" anymore. That's insulting. We'll call it people with mental retardation: retards.
General public: Yea, that is a nice neutral name, no bad connotations.

One year later:

General public: My brother is a damn retard, I hate him.
Socially responsible guy: That's insulting. We shouldn't call them retards anymore. We'll call them people with "slow mental development". Slow people.
General public: Yea, that's neutral and nice. Cool.

One year later:

General public: My neighbour is "slow" or something. Huhuhu.
Socially responsible guy: We shouldn't call them "slow", that's insulting. Well call them "people with special education needs". Special people.

One year later:

General public: My new coworker is "special". Huhuu, get it? "Special". Hehehe.

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Basically you can change a name any times you want. Bad fame will come to haunt you never mind how hard you try.