<< January 27, 2005 >>
raw chicken is an important link in nature's chain

this morning started with my phone ringing once, and then no voicemail. then, while brushing my teeth and reading the wordly news, i got a call from Unknown (which is often a customer so i have to answer them). the hung up before i could run to the bathroom and answer. no voicemail.

but then i got my dingus card for my sgi monitor, and iLife was finally delivered after a week of failed attempts and idiotry.

TiVo ToGo is terrible. i always knew tivo would follow in kozmo's footsteps, but the inevitable confronts me so drearily every night when i suffer through either non-HD TiVo, or non-TiVo HD. TiVo isn't powerful enough not to sell out to the media companies, but they are too powerful for the media companies to let them sell out.

TiVo ToGo is really slow, and the interface is just not as mature and featureful as, oh, any mac software. maybe the non-wireless adapter will help performance and transfer speeds, but the real annoying bits are that it's windows-only, and that i have to type the password every time i want to watch something.

the even bigger problem with the password is that it doesn't provide any benefit to me. passwords for remote scheduling, my wireless network, or my iTMS account i can understand. they protect something that is valuable to me. but the tivo files aren't valuable to me, they are valuable to someone else, which i understand. if it were like iTunes, where i occasionally have to type my password (which actually protects my credit card information) then it wouldn't be so bad. but having to type a password for something i don't even care about every time i want to watch anything makes me angry. do people not use the products they make and sell?

thinking about this today, in connection with robert's talk on the economics of rent control, made me realize how uncapitalistic DRM is, and how it has simlilarities to the prison system.

one of the functions of prisons in society is to act as a deterrent for people considering breaking the law. but, people who are determined to break the law will, for whatever reasons. DRM puts up a deterrent to casual users, but does nothing for people who are determined to break them, either for really fair-use cases, or for illegal purposes.

it seems to me that the main offenders - people who sign up for the free trial period of netflix-alike services, and just rip and burn everything they get - weren't going to pay for what they are stealing anyway. i don't think these should be counted as "lost" revenue; it wasn't there to begin with.

but since the media companies are using DRM to try to enforce inflated prices rather than combating piracy by letting the market have more of a say in determining price, people are going to continue to "steal" music and dvds. i have a hard time believing that $5 albums would not solve a lot of these problems. but then again, maybe i think too highly of people.

posted by jacob around January 27, 2005