go away -- it's mine! mine! all mine!

[miriam_e]

Y'know there are some very odd things that come out of the frenzy to "protect" stuff from "unauthorised" viewers. Here are two examples of what I mean:

A little while back I visited the BMW website after a friend had shown me some wonderful short films BMW had commissioned. Some honestly brilliant person at BMW had had the inspiration of making advertisements so entertaining that people would go out of their way to see them. They paid some of the world's top directors god knows how much to make these pieces, then made them available on their website. However when I got to the website they had disabled the ability to download the films -- I could watch them if I had a pretty good connection to the net, streaming them to my machine in real-time, but I couldn't download them to watch them later at my leisure. If I wanted to watch them more than once then I had to transfer all that info over the net again. If I wanted to show someone else who either didn't have a net connection or had a lousy connection then too bad. If I paid per megabyte download then it cost me each time I wanted to watch. And every time I watched it would load their server down so that if too many people at once tried to watch... well bad luck.

It seemed to me a very strange thing to do: spend a hell of a lot of money making brilliant advertisements to promote your wares and then make it difficult for your audience to gain access to those adverts. I think it has something to do with control... some dimwit at the top of BMW fooling himself that they could have control over people seeing the ads. Weird!

The second example is another company that makes a superb computer product. Their website has a lot of documentation on how to use it, but they have built all manner of twisted devices into the pages to make it impossible for people to download the documentation. You can only access it online. The documentation is free and is a great way to promote the product to developers, but they won't let you browse it offline. Weird! It is made worse by the fact that it seems like they are going out of business so I expect that soon it will be impossible to access the documentation at all. A great pity for those of us who have been developing for their product. Another company shoots itself in the foot. It is a great argument in favor of open source.