Giana posted at 1:32PM Sat, 12 December 2015 - #4243884

i bought a three month subscription to the Platinum thingy over there back in Septembre, a thing i hadn't done since gosh, i guess the first year that DAZ dreamed it up, and i'm pretty much caught up on everything i could possibly want/need for the next decade or so, so i'm already planning to let that lapse, but, uh, colour me all sorts of ignorant, but what is DRM?

Exactly what Hornet said.

Remember back when Apple first started up iTunes and all of the music was encrypted in such a way that you couldn't use it on any portable music player other than an iPod (FairPlay)? Remember how everyone HATED it and did everything they could to strip it out of the files? It's like that. Apple eventually dropped the DRM model, but then they expected you to pay to acquire DRM-free copies of music that you had already paid for.

As I understand it, the current Daz model is that Connect-only content will only be usable in Daz Studio, which means they're alienating their Poser user base, although they already started doing that when they went over to the Genesis platform and stopped creating Poser-native content like everything through Gen4 was. Connect-only content will also require an active internet connection in order to verify via a user-specific key. They say this will only need to be done once. It also makes it so that you cannot create any directory structure for your files other than the one that they want you to use; trying to move things around will cause them to break within the program.

I think storage is also going to be cloud-based, so I'm not sure whether people will even be able to back up a copy of the installation file in the event that Daz goes belly up. Someone please feel free to clarify this, because it worries me.

Basically it's a horrible idea that is going to exclude a large number of people from using Daz's content, either because they use Poser, or because they have objections to not having full ownership of and control over their purchased content.

To tie it all back into the spirit of this thread, Daz's move to DRM is particularly problematic in light of Rendo's aggressive pushing of the Prime program that makes what was a reliable source of new, non-Genesis, Poser-native content much less accessible, since Prime itself isn't a great value and if you don't have it, you can forget about being able to participate in any decent sale events. It also makes buying new, G-series content that's not encumbered with Connect DRM much less accessible, for the same reasons -- decrease in value of Prime, and no good sales if you haven't bought in.