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Sunday, June 8, 2008

Digital Rights Management Stinks

I'm a little older and right of center then many techies that I know. That probably explains why it takes me a few more years to become annoyed about certain issues.

However, I now really agree with them: Digital Rights Management stinks.

It stinks to have to evaluate XenoCode Postbuild at home instead of at work because their program expects to phone home and my corporate firewall says hell no.

It stinks to have to use InstallShield offline activation because of the same reason. Of course, let's not even talk about highly secure environments where the xml fragment that initiates the offline activation is never allowed to leave the room.

It stinks to pretty much have any dependency that assumes communications ability with an external vendor that may or may not exist one day.

It would also really suck if Acresso went out of business and I wouldn't even be able to use the software that I purchased. You know... it could happen. I know that I've seen enough to never again recommend someone purchase an InstallShield maintenance agreement. They really are pointless if they can take away functionality from you in an upgrade or worse they go out of business.

DRM on software just screws the people who are legal, not the people who don't care. After all,
IS2009 has been out for what, 2 days now and it's already been hacked and posted on the torrent sites. Go figure, you'd think that coming from Macrovision it would be a little harder then that. Then again, I've seen how easy it is to download and transform the stand alone build so I'm not sure why I would be surprised.

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