Posted on Monday 20 March 2006
The BBC has an article about DRM. Money quote:
Yet, there seems to be a belief that rigorous enforcement of technological restrictions, backed up by the ruthless application of draconian laws that allow the replacement of copyright with contract law and criminalise activities which used to be considered legal – or acceptable even when not clearly legal – will enhance the market, keep customers coming back for more and ensure the future success of the “content industries”.
Somehow, I doubt that this will be the outcome.
Here’s just some of my random thoughts on DRM. (1) Is it really fair that people can get sued for 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars for downloading songs? Is grabbing something off Bittorrent really a reason to put someone in financial ruin? (2) As long as you tell people here’s a template of how we expect you to use our software, someone is always going to find a way to hack around it. (3) The more DRM you add, the less usable your product becomes. (4) The less usable your product becomes, the more people will find alternative methods of getting more usable (read non-DRM’d) products. (5) In 20 years, do these companies really thing DRM will preserve their antiquated economic system or that, like text publishers, successful content distributors will have found a new business model?
Tags: BBC, Business, copyright, DRM, Science and Technology