DRM only hurts your honest customers like myself. Example: If I wanted to view the training vids on my iPod - I can't. Too bad. But those people pirating CR videos can do whatever they want. They can burn it to DVD, they can rip the audio to Mp3, they can view the videos on their portable media player. But your paying customers can't.

Please stop with the DRM.

Hi Devilboy -
We realize that our Digital Rights Management (DRM) software is an imperfect attempt to strike the balance between protecting our intellectual property and your enjoyment of our videos. However, we believe that it's the best answer for most people at this time (until a better answer arrives in the future, which we would happily adopt). You might think of it as analogous to a padlock on a backyard shed. Such a lock won't keep out a determined thief with a hacksaw and a sledge hammer, but it prevents "opportunistic" or "casual" theft. Similarly, the DRM prevents causal theft [1] of our videos.

Please note also that you can use DRM videos away from your computer for 14 days at a time, so they really are mobile to some degree.

Finally, as regards your iPod, most of our material really wouldn't be appropriate for such a format anyway - the cards and chip stacks would be virtually illegible. However, we are planning to make some material specifically targeted for iPods and similar media players; obviously such material would not be DRM'd.

Again, we don't consider DRM to be a perfect solution, but it's the best compromise we can find now to give our customers reasonable access to our material while preventing casual theft our intellectual property. We will certainly continue to look for better solutions.

We appreciate your taking the time to write us, and we really appreciate your being a CardRunners member.

Best regards,
Lee Jones

COO, CardRunners LLC
leej@cardrunners.com

[1] I use the word "theft" purposely. It is nothing less and those who "pirate" videos from any "pay for play" site are thieves.

Yes DC has no DRM protection. They also have a 1 week free trial in which you can download as many non-DRM videos as you'd like. This is because they are crazy. DRM is a small to non-existent inconvenience for the customers which adds a big layer of protection to the business. In a perfect world the honest subscribers wouldn't have to deal with it, but the finger gets pointed at the dishonest people out there, not the websites who are using a perfectly reasonable tool to protect themselves.

I'm not a DC subscriber but I think this is working out OK for them? Is there more piracy of their videos compared to CR videos? I can't seem to find any evidence to show this.

Not correct either. Bypassing any DRM is trivial - it only takes some time and effort and anyone inclined to do so can do it with free tools readily available on the internet.

I know I'm probably not going to change CR's policy, I just wanted to voice my disapproval.

A big part of the reason piracy exists is because of the convenience. Bypassing DRM isn't very trivial, and quite time/effort consuming, imo.

I doubt DC has been a victim of piracy on a large scale (specifically talking about torrent sites) simply because it's not that big yet. However, I would be surprised if there aren't a lot of people that are taking advantage of their current system.

You're forgetting one thing: It only needs to be done once. It only takes one person to strip the DRM (and it IS easy - 2 mins on Google) and upload it to bittorrent and that's it. Everyone can download the DRM free version with zero effort.

Again: The pirates get the freedom to do what they want with the content while legit clients are restricted: I'm restricted because once I'm not a member anymore I can't watch my old videos anymore. I can't move the videos to other playback devices. And years from now when Cardrunners gets bought out or goes under or whatever - once they stop running their DRM servers all that content is useless on my PC. But the pirates are fine.

As for the casual piracy argument: Those 'casual' pirates are highly unlikely to be potential clients anyway. If they go through the effort of pirating these videos just to save $30 per month then you're never getting any money out of them anyway.

This wasn't the case for me.

They've said it themselves that DRM has cut down on people pirating their videos.

Soooooo wronggg.

Are you saying that if they didn't use DRM, you'd be pirating all their videos?

If they were easily available to pirate when I joined CR, I wouldn't have joined.

But they are easily available. Not sure when you joined though.