Intuit learns that copy protection doesn’t work
by Kevin Dangoor
A few months back, there was an uproar over Intuit’s copy protection (now called DRM or “product activation”) scheme for TurboTax. Intuit has just decided to drop the copy protection.
“Intuit has a long heritage of doing right by customers, and some of our customers didn’t have the great experience they expect from Intuit,” [Intuit CEO Steve] Bennett added. “In addition, we didn’t get the revenue and profit growth we expected. Therefore, we’ve decided to discontinue product activation next season.”
In the late ’80s, many software companies toyed with copy protection, and discovered exactly what Bennett says above: customers hate it and it doesn’t really do anything for your business. Just because it’s now got a new name doesn’t make it any better than what existed more than a decade ago.
DRM in music is probably even less likely to go over well with music customers. Why? Because people listen to music on all sorts of devices in all sorts of places… Almost by definition, DRM is trying to tie you to one device. If they can’t make this work with something like Turbo Tax, which you’ll only likely use on one computer for a short period of time, then trying to get this to work for music seems hopeless.
L4n you i3t. Why don’t you r2d S6t l2e e6e e2e? You c2l
y6f a p8r you son of b3h? Y2r s2t is 3 d2s old,
and it s4s.
The real reason people hated it was because TurboTax installed a piece of spyware that registered itself as a windows service and ran in the background, never shutting down. It was also a pain to disable. Every time I would run TurboTax this year, I would have to go through my system and remove the automatic startup settings for the damn C_DILLA service afterwards.
Music and software are fundamentally different.
Software is primarily bought for functionality. Thus, if you find using one piece of software becomes too much of a hassle, you look around for one with the functionality you require, but with fewer hassles.
Music is primarily bought for aesthetics. If I don’t buy Blur’s Think Tank because it’s copy-protected, there’s really no alternative “Blur-alike” that I can get instead.
Also, sales of established software like TurboTax are a lot more predictable than CD sales. If an album doesn’t sell well, there are a billion possible reasons.
Thus, it’s a lot harder to demonstrate to DRM-using companies that they’re losing sales to their competitors, or just sales in general, because there are too many factors involved.
a2n: You’re too l33t for me. I guess I’ll just take my “3 d2 o1d s2t” and crawl away
Colin: You’re right that Intuit’s copy protection was particularly heinous. But, have you seen any that’s not? Copy protection companies are constantly struggling to make software “copy proof”, which is probably impossible. One alternative would be to make something slightly difficult to copy to deter “casual copying” without causing too much pain… the only problem is that it still tends to be the good customers that suffer.
Charles: You’re right, certainly, that music is a different beast and it would be very hard to prove to the music business that they’re losing sales because of DRM. Maybe it will work out that they’ll see that the least restrictive broad music services are the most successful. iTunes music store is doing well for a variety of reasons, and MusicNet and PressPlay will likely follow with less-restrictive, pay as you go services as well. eMusic would probably have been wildly successful if they hard a larger selection of music.
By the way, I do read Slashdot:
http://tinyurl.com/c3yp
but I like to link things from my own blog, like thousands of other people.
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