Posts tagged as: drm

WSJ to Sony: DRM Sucks

Well, maybe that headline is overstating this WSJ article's message a little bit, but the important thing, as Tim O'Reilly points out, is that a major business paper is acknowledging that DRM can be bad for business. In the case of Sony's new ebook, I believe that DRM is a product killer, and it looks like analysts are starting to agree:

Sony is generously allowing users to transfer books they download "to as many as six different devices, such as laptops, that they have registered with Sony." Here's a simple test: name a single electronic device that you own that has been in continual use for more than 10 years. Take away TVs and house phones, and name a computer based device that you are still using after 5 years. Sorry, but books are among my most valued possessions. I'm never going to buy a book that has such a short life.

Great DRM rant

Jasan Calacanis has linked to a video clip of a great rant he made against DRM at some conference.

It's spyware, not DRM

Cory Doctorow's Boing Boing post about iTunes reporting back to Apple when it is used to play music has ignited a fire-storm. Maybe if we call it spyware instead of DRM, people will get upset enough to turn against such practices. It certainly blew up in Sony's face. What needs to be done is to find the most repugnant aspects of DRM and keep pushing them in people's faces until they get upset enough to reject it. I do know that if the public clamors for an alternative, the marketplace will provide it.

David Berlind at Harvard

David Berlind's luncheon talk at Harvard's Berkman Center was interesting, but we have different approaches to predicting the future. David takes the traditional journalist's perspective of discovering who is doing what to effect change, while I try to figure out why people will adopt that change and whether they have ever made a similar decision in the past. For example, David recounted the various software, standards making, and political activities taking place in an effort to replace Microsoft Office with an open standard. While I, on the other hand, tried to find any sign of people looking for an alternative to Office. Of course Word is buggy and cumbersome, but I can't remember any time in the last few years when a real end-user has told me that they wish they could switch from Word to something else. Are they too dumb to realize they would be better off with a replacement for Word? No, I think they are too smart to waste their time looking for alternatives when they just want to get their work done. They aren't lazy, they're busy. If you want to beat Word's monopoly, you have to give people a powerful reason to switch, you can't just point out a better alternative. In marketing terms you can't just present a better mouse trap, you have to convince people that they have mice and that not getting rid of them will cause serious consequences. This isn't meant as a criticism of David. What he does serves a valuable purpose, and he certainly knows his stuff when it comes to the issue of alternatives to Microsoft. He also needs to incorporate a more market driven and historical perspective into his analysis.

I made my pitch to get David to use the term copy protection instead of DRM. He was sympathetic to the issue, but not too interested in making the change. He understands the issues of DRM so much better than I do, including the legal aspects, that he sees the problem of DRM as much greater than just not being able to move content to a new computer. He is right, but you aren't going to get people upset enough to demand change by providing more details. You need a simple hook. Maybe copy protection isn't scary enough. I'm not great at coming up with really compelling marketing terms, but I do know how to recognize them. When I find a way to describe DRM that makes people's eyes go wide, I'll know I've hit the target. If you have any suggestions for a really repulsive name for DRM, please let me know. I'll do my best to promote it.

I just signed up for Mashup Camp

I was thinking about going to O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference in March, but Mashup Camp in February looks much more interesting. The caliber of the people signed up already is great. The camp is being run by David Berlind and Doug Gold, and I'm also going to see David speak at Berkman today. Its being webcast, if you can't make it to Harvard. I'll be the one who keeps saying copy protection every time he says DRM.

Get your hands off my books, you damn dirty DRM

While waiting in my dentist's office this morning I started reading BusinessWeek and came across a story about Sony's new ebook reader. The hardware sounds nice, but there is no way copy-protected ebooks are going to succeed. As I keep telling my kids when it comes to music, if there is DRM you are renting not buying. A day will surely come when you switch hardware or the company switches DRM schemes and your music will go away. Personally, I don't care that much about music, but when DRM is applied to books I get a little crazy. For book buyers owning the book is at least as important as reading it. I'm not even going to talk about the way books smell or the way they feel in your hands. I accept that digital books may replace physical ones, but interfering with my ability to own a book, and even pass it on to my kids or future grandkids is not something I will tolerate. When people predicted the effects of computer technology on society 20 years ago, nobody imagined that software licenses would eventually spread to books and music. I'll predict now that ebooks will never become popular while DRM is in place.

A record label that isn't evil

As a followup to my recent post on DRM, Magnatune is a record label with a DRM-free music download site. They even make it easy to re-download music that you have already purchased. They understand what they are up against as a small label, but have a sense of humor about it. Their motto is "We are not evil." (via Techcrunch)

DRM too shall pass

As the realization sinks in that you don't actually buy music from iTunes, you just rent it until your computer crashes, bloggers are making dire predictions about a world where DRM eliminates the possibility of owning digital content. While I agree that Apple's DRM is a vile scheme that delivers much less than users expect, I don't see this as an inevitable downward slide. I remember when software was copy-protected in the early Eighties. In those pre-CD days all software was delivered on inherently unreliable floppy disks. Users were forced to insert the original disk every time they wanted to start a program. To make matters worse, you could only run one program at a time in DOS or CP/M, so users were forced to swap floppies in and out as they moved between applications. Within a few years these "key disks" started to fail and users found themselves unable to run their programs or access their data. The backlash forced all but a small fraction of software companies to abandon this model and accept piracy as a fact of life. Did they do this out of sympathy for their beleaguered users? No, they were forced to make the change by competitors who found that they could make a lack of copy-protection into a competitive strategy. The other forces that killed copy-protection were corporations and the Department of Defense, which refused to be dependent on software that they couldn't back-up.

Apple's iTunes music store is now a little over two and a half years old, about the same length of time as the copy-protection phase for software, and once again users are beginning to recognize the evils of the present system. I'm not suggesting that music downloads will go back to being free, but it is clear that a competitve advantage is opening up for any music publisher that is willing to abandon the present DRM model. That will never happen with the greedy music industry you say? It is precisely because businesses are profit oriented that they end up obeying the demands of their users. They may end up kicking and screaming, but they will be dragged away from DRM.