“I will pledge to never purchase a CD contaning any form of Digital Rights Management (DRM), but only if 500 people around the world will too.”

— Elizabeth Stark and Fred Benenson, Freeculture.org

I signed up on this plegde to boycott DRM the moment I saw it (which was a couple of days ago, but it seems I’m a bit slow with the blog updates here). They reached the 500 signature mark shortly after that, but the deadline isn’t until February 6th, so it’s still open for anyone who wants to join in.

Why? I feel that all that is achieved with that kind of technology is to cause inconvinience (or, as in the case of the Sony DRM debacle, possible damage) for the customers, while not doing anything to effectively hinder music piracy. I don’t that will be achieved even if they come up with a DRM software that makes it impossible to make an unauthorized copy directly off the CD, even for a power user (or “hacker”).

All it takes is a good CD-player hooked up to some studio grade recording equipment, and you’ll have a copy that’s perfect to everyone but the most discerning audiophile. And that kind of equipment is probably easily accessible to the kind of people who, for example, also can access movie reels long enough to run them through a telecine machine to get a good copy to distribute.

So it will end up on the internet anyway, and all the DRM does is not only to annoy the consumers by not letting them play back the media the way they want, but also send a message that the producer considers their customers to be possible crooks.