Rupert Effin’ Murdoch

Tonight we rant about Closed Content, and the dangers of DRM. Again. I think I’ve done this before. Hell, I think all bloggers have done this before. It just seems that no matter how loud we yell, the content providers don’t seem to get the picture. What picture, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you…

Closed Content refers to something that is controlled by the creator, down to every detail, including how the end user is allowed to use it. This can be explained perfectly with our large corporate fruit. This company runs a web store for music that does slightly more than 25% of the entire music sales in the United States. Our large fruity friend uses DRM (Closed Content with a law stuck on it) to attempt to curb piracy. What this means is they “lock” the music file, so only the buyer (and three of his chums) can play it.

Now, say we have a buyer that owns six computers (you call it rare, I call it my father). He wants to download his favorite Miles Davis song, and be able to play it on all of his computers. This seems fair, correct? After all, he just bought the song. Shouldn’t it be up to him to control the usage? Afraid not, my dear fellows. Our large fruity friend dictates that controlled music is better only at the prodding of the content providers, and this doesn’t seem to be planning on changing any time soon.

In our happy little clusterfuck we call America, there’s a very rich man. His name is Rupert Murdoch, and he has a lot more toys than you or I could ever hope to afford. He owns the content sources for the majority of news sites, and has a lock on the majority of printed news. This rich little bastard also has no idea at all how the modern generation would like their content, as shown by his plans for online media distribution.

Murdoch has announced that a pay-wall will be erected around all of his content: That’s FOX, The Washington Post, and so on. A lot of fairly big names in news and content distribution, all accessible only if you pay for it. Now, I can understand his idea in doing this. He’d like to increase his profit margins, and that means finding a new way of extracting money from the readers. However, our generation has shown time and time again that they will not pay for inferior content in a manner that they can’t control it.

Take movies as an example. You can buy a large selection of movies from our fruity friend, and they’ll all be fairly low quality. You won’t be able to play it on any machine in your house. Or, you could pay nothing at all, and have it in perfect High Resolution, all while getting it faster than our fruity friend can deliver. See the problem? Murdoch is still stuck on what’s been killing the music industry in America: Control. As long as they try to control their product, the customers turn away. This won’t change with news.

If he seriously expects us to pay for something we’ve gotten used to having free, he better start writing an anti-piracy speech for when his system is broken (5 minutes after the pay-wall).