Corporate attempts to fight piracy do more harm than good

I have an e-reader, a Barnes & Noble Nook, and I love it to death.

Last semester, I tried buying a digital copy of one of my textbooks online through Barnes & Noble's Nook Study program. The copy downloaded fine, but my Nook wouldn't read the file.

It's just a PDF, I thought. Is the file broken or something?

After doing some research, I found out that it was broken, and that Barnes & Noble intentionally broke it.

The file, as it turned out, was encrypted with DRM — digital rights management, an anti-piracy software — preventing the file from opening on anything but Barnes & Noble's Nook Study program, which is only available on Mac and PC platforms.

I had assumed that Nook Study files would have no problem being read on my trusty e-reader, but Barnes & Noble's copyright protection wizards apparently thought this was too much of a threat to their revenue and copyrights.

I had a device that I paid for that was unable to use content that I paid for, because even though I was a legitimate customer, Barnes & Noble thought I should use their products on their terms, not mine.

And that was the last time I ever bought a textbook from Barnes & Noble.

The Barnes & Noble incident belies a larger trend among media companies: To prevent piracy, they are restricting the ways their consumers can use their products. DRM, geographic restrictions and unnecessarily high pricing affect nearly every form of digital media, but these companies are shooting themselves in the feet by trying so desperately to maintain their business models.

The root of the problem is that media companies see piracy as an enemy but refuse to see it as competition. The threat of piracy has not inspired anyone to make their products better in any way.

DRM actually makes products harder to use. Amazon's e-books will only work on an Amazon Kindle, and the same is true for Barnes & Noble.

For a long time, music from the iTunes store wouldn't play on mp3 players that weren't made by Apple, though this has since been fixed. None of these actions have prevented piracy — they might even have encouraged it — but they have inconvenienced innumerable paying customers.

It almost goes without saying that no company will ever stop piracy, but nothing they can throw at the digital pirates can realistically slow them down.

Practically any DVD, CD or e-book, regardless of DRM, can be illegally downloaded with ease, and the copies are high-quality and easy to use. Rather than trying to make their own products cheaper and easier to encourage customers that legitimate purchasing is still the way to go, Warner Brothers, Barnes & Noble, Universal Music Group and others are trying to squash their competitor and tighten their grip on the market.

In addition, media companies are remarkably hesitant to offer things cheaply in the digital age. When the iTunes store started selling songs for 99 cents apiece, Universal tried to fight for $3.99 apieceinstead of trying to jump on the bandwagon and get a slice of the income.

Even when going digital, where copying, printing and distributing cost nothing but bandwidth, media companies seem to think that customers will pay the same amount of money for digital downloads that they would pay for a hard copy, despite the customers' unrelenting backlash. Sometimes, the digital copy price exceeds that of a physical copy, which absolutely baffles me.

There is a successful example in the midst of this self-defeating mess, and the example comes from the world of video games. Valve, the studio responsible for the Half-Life, Portal and Left 4 Dead series, has found enormous success distributing digital downloads of games through Steam, its online platform.

By using minimal or no DRM, allowing other developers and indie startups to use the Steam platform, Steam has become the go-to for digital distribution of video games.

Customers want products that are cheap and easy to use, and the digital age really should meet that demand. I barely even play video games, but I usually buy something from the seasonal Steam sales because it's just so easy, and my Nook is filled with books and collections that were inexpensive or free.

Why would I download some bestseller for $15 when I can download the entire Sherlock Holmes collection for $2? Why buy a $20 DVD from Walmart's new release section when there are gems waiting to be found in the $5 bin — or better yet, just get a Netflix subscription for even easier and cheaper access to more content.

Piracy creates problems for the media industry, no doubt, but their efforts to combat it create even more problems. By trying to benefit itself instead of its customers, the media industry is shooting itself in the foot.

Brian Hampel is a junior in architecture. Please send all comments to opinion@kstatecollegian.com.