Ian doesn’t ‘oversee HTML5 at the W3C’ he is no longer involved in HTML at the W3C. The HTML working group http://www.w3.org/html/wg/ oversees it.

Nor was I ignoring the reality that Cory or yourself and many other fine people make money giving away content. I was relegating that to the edge case. F2P/Freemium games, giving away books hoping the paper ones sell, etc. might work for some people, and it’s exciting that these new business models exist, but it doesn’t supplant or make completely obsolete the old business model. 

I am a games programmer. I, too, make my living from working on a game that is given away entirely for free.

I play a lot of other computer games. As a student with no money, many years ago, I pirated them. As someone with a job, I now buy them – I’ve even bought multiple copies of several, even single-player ones, because my wife wants to play at the same time.

The argument about consoles needing to be piracy-resistant falls flat in the face of the PC gaming industry: PCs can play pirated games *very* easily.

And yet the “PC games” segment is the largest and fastest-growing of the lot, at $20bn of the $67 bn projected gaming industry turnover for 2012. (The remaining $47Bn is spread between the categories “portable”, “online mobile”, “online PC”, “online console”, “Xbox 360″, “PlayStation 3″, “Nintendo Wii”, etc).
Ref: http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngaudiosi/2012/07/18/new-reports-forecasts-global-video-game-industry-will-reach-82-billion-by-2017/

As a consumer, I was resistant to DRM because it limited what I could do with my digital goods. However, when SNK went out of business(well the first time), there were two major reasons. 

First, in 1999/2000, the hardware was just so damned old and they couldn’t transition off of that. Which is really SNK’s fault.

Second, bootlegging was a HUGE problem on the NeoGeo platform. Figuring out if your supplier sold you genuine product or not was typically difficult. So much so, Neo-geo.com has a subforum dedicated to identifying boots. This isn’t SNK’s fault.

Shinya Morishita of SNK said in 2004,  ”Really we are affected on the arcade side, it’s one of the reasons we have kind of given up on arcade developments by ourselves; now we’re continuing to release arcade games, but not for our systems – now we’re making games for the Atomiswave from Sammy. We used to make games using our MVS System, but whenever we released a new game, just one week later, pirate copies would be coming onto the market.”

So my mind changed, little by little, on it in the intervening years.

The problem with digital goods is that you can easily copy bits but it’s extremely hard to just conjure up rent or food money. Although as everyone on the freedom side of the equation points out, stopping piracy is like trying to stop the tides. The problem with not trying SOMETHING is that when everyone can get your work for free or cheaper, why bother paying YOU for it?

So the point of DRM isn’t to restrict freedom. It’s to ensure that producers get paid for their work. I’ve heard a lot of stories about developers who’ve noticed more copies of their software running than paid for it.  When your work is in the hands of millions and beloved all over the world but no one’s throwing money your way to survive, what the hell do you do? Asking nicely to chip in isn’t a business plan.

I’m willing to bet for every success story about the kindness of strangers, you can find more examples of people just taking what they can and not giving two shits about the people producing. Right now the anime industry is in a LOT of pain because casual piracy has made it easy to consume with out paying for it. The way I view DRM is that it’s a necessary side effect of living in a culture that values money in such the way that it does. The consumer freedom eroding part of DRM isn’t by design, and that’s the most insidious thing here. As long as producing bits is someone’s work, then someone will try to protect that work.

Further more, for DRM to work it has to be extremely inconvenient to break, not be unbreakable. Look at the Wii U, 3DS, the PlayStation Vita and the PlayStation 3. None of these systems can play non-DRMed games easily(Despite Sony’s massive cryptofail, loading games onto a PS3 with newer firmware is a non-trivial task that hasn’t been solved yet, if ever). The DRM schemes are certainly breakable, but at what cost to break it?

They imagine everyone has enough coordination to use tapping, touchpad gestures, or scrollwheels, so they don’t need scrollbars. They require special patches to disable tapping for disabled users with certain theoretically Ubuntu-approved computers. They imagine everyone has enough coordination to type left-handed, so they rely on alt+tab for everything.

Granted my parents don’t like the hwole ‘what the hell is this black window with blinky cursor’ so eh.

Instead they shovel a bunch of command line stuff in their faces and wonder why so many go screaming back to Windows, etc.

DISCLAIMER: I use Linux, Win 7, Win 8 and OS X.

I find myself wondering why Microsoft and its ilk are even in the marketplace any more.

 Bribes…

http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=d000000115

And, in case anyone is wondering… they dwarf Apple…

http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000021754

Also, if you want to try a few out, get a thumbdrive and download Unetbootin – http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/, you can get a wide variety of distros and make bootable thumbdrives directly from there, most will be able to live boot so you can test out and see what you like.

Want an example? Watch netflix.

Yes, it’s possible to do in Ubuntu. Most users aren’t really going to know what a ppa is, though, nor are they going to know to look for one in order to get the software you need to perform this seemingly simple task.

For me, that’s no problem. But I’ve been a Linux systems engineer for years, and I’ve been doing things in linux for well over a decade. My mom and my sister have not, and they would be missing out on these capabilities without my help.

And really, it’s only been recently that you can install Ubuntu with even the ability to play things like mp3s at all. It use to be the case that you’d have to install some “weirdly” named packages to make it work.

I agree, Ubuntu is easy, overall. I work on Ubuntu and I play on Ubuntu. I only have a Windows install for a couple games I play that don’t work in wine properly, and I don’t use OSX on my macbook air. Because content providers can’t control things like Ubuntu, though, they will not support it as long as they have this strange belief that DRM will do anything useful.

1: insert USB
2: run Wubi
3: take your first step into the 21st century.

Not flip that around for the legal consumer, and suddenly the thing they thought they owned they don’t and now they have to buy things over and over whenever one market place dies, and another one takes over. Netflix goes down? Well tons and tons of movies that you used to be able to “play instantly” are poof gone.Now I will say that it has gotten WAY easier recently to get things that used to be hard or nigh impossible to find–so that is a good start–but they still charge way too much for things. If it costs me $8-10 to go to a movie theater then it should not cost me $40-50 to see a first-run movie in my own home. I would be okay with the same price, or maybe a 10-15% increase (8.80-11.50) but that would be pure profit for the movie houses directly.

Speaking for myself, I imagine – without evidence – that a system like Ubuntu will have a steep learning curve, that it’s designed for geeks, and my geek days were twenty years ago.  I would be so happy if I was wrong about that – if switching to an open OS is as easy as switching to Open Office was.  Because right now I can’t afford to be reading the manual for a week instead of working.

If open-source software was able to have a budget for marketing, maybe a tipping point would be reached, and people like me would bid farewell to Windows for good.  But right now we don’t know enough, and aren’t desperate enough to overcome inertia.  (Of course, MS is always trying to change that.)