Today We're Selling Digital Rights Management, Tomorrow We're Making Water Run Uphill
or Why DRM is doomed to failure
By Mitch Wagner, Security Pipeline

It's rather appropriate that the logo for Disney is a mouse, because The Walt Disney Company this week announced its intention to throw money down a rathole. Disney became the latest company to license Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. DRM doesn't work and consumers don't want it, so of course it's very appealing to big business, who are also in a big rush to sell other, equally practical products, such as anchovy flavored ice cream and bicycles with square wheels.

We learned that DRM doesn't work in the late 80s, only back then it was applied to software and we called it "copy protection." Software companies tried to control how many copies of individual applications their customers could make. Even if copy protection had worked right, it would have prevented customers from making backup copies of applicatons, or moving applications between systems. But it didn't work - copy protection was buggy and caused even legitimate, licensed installations of software to fail. Given a choice between copy-protected and non-copy-protected products, consumers went for the non-copy-protected products. Eventually, the vendors gave up.

Now, the media companies are going to have to learn the same hard lessons. Customers just don't want unreliable, DRM-infested products. And, what's worse for the media companies, their attempts to enforce draconian copyright laws are creating a backlash among consumers - the harder media companies push to get people to believe filesharing is wrong, the more consumers seem to believe that filesharing is their right.

More

Media companies face a tough climate. Their existing business model is disappearing. The existing business model depended on reproduction and distribution of products being somewhat expensive. It cost a significant amount of money to print up a book or CD and get it to stores, or to ship movies nationwide and play them in a theater.

Now, that's changing. Reproduction and distributions costs are nearly free for music, the same thing is happening for movies and I expect it will happen for books. Media companies are reacting by trying to use laws and police to change public opinion, and DRM to shackle technology. They're trying to get water to run uphill.

As Cory Doctorow, a writer, blogger, and digital rights activist, is fond of saying, "No Windows user rolled out of bed this morning and said, 'I wish there was a way that I could get Microsoft to deliver me tools that allow me to do LESS with the music I buy.'"

If people are unwilling to buy something, technology and law won't make them buy it.

So what's the alternative? I don't know. Right now, digital media are available for free over pirate services over the Internet. How do you get people to be willing to pay for it? The technology and content already exist, what's waiting to materialize is the business model to harness digital media.

Media companies are going to have to compete with the pirates, they're going to have to figure out what service they can provide that's so good that people will pay for it rather than pirate stuff for free. I don't know for sure what the answer is, but I know where to start looking: look to the producers and editors. These are the people who scout out the best talent out of all the wannabe writers, musicians, actors and directors, find the best content these guys are producing, polish it up until it's reached its peak, and package it for the consumer. That's what the media companies have been selling all along, really, and they need to figure out a way to adapt that service to new, electronic distribution channels.

My company is a media company too, of course. We went through something like this in the mid-90s, when the web started booming. Newspapers and magazines at first resisted coming out with Internet editions, fearing they'd compete with their own print editions. And they were right to be afraid, because that's exactly what happened -- but the smart journalists realized the transition was inevitable, and adapted to the new condition. Smart journalists realized that the essential service we sell is timeliness, our articles lose value faster than bananas. Some of our articles have a shelf-life of months, some have a shelf-life of weeks or days, but most of them are pretty useless a day or two after they are published. That's how we beat out piracy - it's easier and faster to get the news and information from us than it is from anybody foolish enough to pirate our information.

posted by awiggins | 04:52 PM