March 23, 2004
An intro to DRM
Public Knowledge’s Mike Godwin wrote an interesting citizen’s guide to DRM. The most interesting bit for me was the semi-technical explanations of different techniques, how they work, why they might be infeasible, etc. Overall, it’s a good intro to the various issues involved with DRM.
One criticism: take a close look at his concluding section and suggestions – they didn’t make much sense to me. He discusses how content holders could release more content into the public domain, or sell public domain content without DRM restrictions, so that “consumers become educated that it’s not [in his example]e-books or digital-media formats that are inherently limited – it’s that the limitations have been insisted upon by particular publishers or artists.” Do consumers not get that? What evidence does he have that this is a core problem? Doesn’t the high traffic over P2P and usage of MP3 players suggest that consumers know fully well that digital-media formats are not “inherently limited”? Don’t consumers already prefer less restricted content, and isn’t that already obvious from iTunes doing well and from survey data? His particular example deals with e-books, and he suggests that market isn’t succeeding because of DRM restrictions – but isn’t it a bigger problem that consumers still are not accustomed to digital reading devices (and that such devices are not yet of a high enough quality)?
What does he mean that this will lead to a more “rational market”? He suggests that this will lead to “humane DRM” but he never really defines what this would be. He says that this will lead to less restrictive and thus more humane DRM, but not what would be optimal.
And given all the time Godwin spends discussing why DRM won’t prevent infringement, I’m left wondering why DRM is a good idea at all. What does he mean by “The question before us, then, is how to harness both the technical ingenuity behind DRM and the human drive to share the works that we enjoy in a way that leverages the best from both”? Might a better solution simply be no DRM at all?
Filed by Derek Slater at 9:55 pm under General news
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