February 3, 2004
You Have A Choice
Scoble added a response here, in part responding to me here. People can choose to follow Scoble’s lead, but I hope they reject his logic and see that buying DRMed music it a choice, and a more complex one than Scoble descibes.
Choosing to do as Scoble does is not a choice between illegal and legal sources of music, which is how he sets it up. You can get legal music in unencrypted formats, including CDs. Scoble then states that it must be online – how about eMusic? Or buying directly from artists? (I was very close to going with eMusic right before they changed their pricing scheme).
People will continue to weigh the costs and benefits of downloading illegaly, buying legally, buying open, etc. and end up right where Scoble is. But it is far more complex than saying, if it’s legal, it’s gotta be DRMed. Buying legally does not mean resigning yourself to DRMed music, and believing that music in the present and the future must be DRMed is plain incorrect. As Cory said, vote with your dollar for the future that you want.
If you still buy DRMed music, fine. But you don’t have to make that choice in order to buy legally – I hope Scoble and others get that.
One reason I see this as particularly important is that, when people resign themselves to DRM today, they tend to do so in relation to DRM as it stands in a DMCA world. Return to Scoble’s reasoning – if you want to buy legal and online, you must buy proprietary DRM; if you must buy proprietary DRM, you must be locked into the players licensed by the DRM maker. But that limitation relies on the DMCA. You cannot legally create the interoperable players because of the anti-circumvention provisions.
Following Scoble’s logic, we must simply accept that the DMCA is part of the landscape. Buying legally means buying DRM which means buying the DMCA.
Again, that reasoning is just a choice, and people have alternatives. They don’t have to buy into the DMCA world.
Filed by Derek Slater at 11:56 pm under General news
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