Some Other Hassle: Digital Rights Management

Some Other Hassle will return to maligning your favorite games next week.  Something far more annoying came up this week.

As Technology continues to improve, grow, change and permeate our lives, capitalist pig-dogs continue to do everything they can to squeeze every cent out of it. Seriously, though. Most of my gaming over the past three years has been spent doing so without any physical media of the games I’ve been playing. And it’s scary to think that I don’t actually own those games at all. It’s not just games, either. I never really minded DRM, realizing that it’s a necessary evil, until this week, when I came up against some serious barriers to using content because of DRM.

I have a subscription to Netflix, one that I greatly enjoy, because I don’t have cable television. When I went into this geek thing, I went full-bore. I game or spend my time on the internet, rather than watching TV. However, there are still some great things that I enjoy watching from time to time. Netflix is a great solution to that.

My wife and I have been enjoying watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus over Netflix for the past couple of weeks, streaming to our Xbox 360. Well, the Xbox 360 is a wholly unreliable piece of hardware, and I like to tinker, so I decided to replace it as our Netflix player with a Home Theater PC (and because I’m on my forth Xbox 360).

Forging together the awesome powers of Ubuntu and Boxee, I was very happy to see Hulu, running full frame upscaled to 1080p in less than two hours. Then I tried Netflix.

Netflix doesn’t run on Linux because Neflix doesn’t want Linux users to be able to use their service without the DRM that the Windows and Mac players are laden with. So, because I want to use the biggest feature of a service that I pay about $18/month for, I have to use Windows or Mac. Well, that’s an inconvenience to say the least. I’m not going to pirate anything. I just want my British Comedy!

Also this week, I bought an iPod Touch. This purchase will surely destroy me. It’s truly awesome to see all of these great applications and games available for so cheaply. The Wifi scanner app I bought for $2.99 alone was enough to justify the purchase for me. Sadly, at the end of the year, when I want to upgrade to an iPhone, I’ll lose all of my purchases, because they are tied to a single device.

I’m just starting to get a little sour on paying for things in this “Digital Age” without any sort of show of good faith from these large corporations. If I have trouble with a game on a disc, I can return it and get face-to-face customer service. If I have trouble with a game I bought from Microsoft, Apple, Sony or Nintendo, I get a call-center in India. Hell, Sony’s downloadable games all have End-User License Agreements that must be agreed to that claim that at any moment, without notice or reason, and with no refund, your purchases can be invalidated. As they say in the Cayman Isles, I have spent mad bank on XBLA, and I have no illusions that my vast Xbox purchases will be playable on future systems.

I just want to play games and watch TV without cluttering up my house and know that I won’t be stymied by Digital Rights Management. I have no problem with companies combating piracy, but it’s becoming clear that in their eyes, everybody is a pirate. They should really be concerned about ninjas.