One of my favourite groups is The Corrs. They are from Dubland, Ireland. Currently the band members (all brothers and sisters) have gone on a hiatus, while they raise families. One of the members Andrea Corr has gone out on a solo career. I was interested in her website, and started looking around. She had a section of her latest songs and videos and I attempted to select it. The website came up with a message saying:
“Thanks for trying to access the digitalInsert for Ten Feet High – Andrea Corr. Unfortunately due to contractual restrictions, access to this promotion is not available to residents of Canada.”.
So they have a GeoIP database of some kind and my IP being registered in Canada is blocked. I’ve been seeing more and more of this lately. Not difficult to get around. Select a proxy in a permissible country and download the site, use one of the VPNs I have access to and exit out in the UK, a little annoying but easy to bypass. What about people that are not technical however? Well fortunately that is easy, a quick search on YouTube and poof all the videos available for viewing there that were on the website, no restrictions. So I ask why bother?
Do the people that do this not remember the Commodore Vic-20 and 64 days? They would put copy protection on the software, someone would create a program to allow you to bypass the copy protection and get a copy of the software. Then they tried the dongles. You put a electronic device that came with the software in the joystick port. If that was not present, the software would cease to work. These were bypassed as well. Eventually they gave up.
DOS based systems for the longest time didn’t bother with copy protection, it was just considered a dis-honest and illegal thing to do. Windows software tried the special serial numbers you have to enter and they still do this to this day. Of course, it is easy to get hold of them, and there are key generators for all the different software. Microsoft latest trick is to use windows update to verify the authenticity of your software. Of course you can get around this as well.
DVD’s now use ACSS encryption to attempt to stop copying. It has not been broken, but there are workarounds. The latest DVDs are freely available on the Internet as soon as they are released. It has stopped nothing. There are countless other examples.
Does anyone see a pattern here? Does anyone pay attention to history? This doesn’t work. It has never worked. Why do they keep trying and trying to do this? It’s a waste of money. The business models they have don’t work on the Internet or with digital media. Give it up. Change your business models.
