Digital Rights Management has been a hot topic for quite awhile now. With record and movie companies going after users who download content without paying, people seem to immediately go to DRM as the culprit that record and movie companies use to control their customers and limit what they can do.
As of now that’s pretty close to how it has worked also. There are other models that are working and people don’t seem to mind or notice. Netflix currently DRMs all of it’s watch now content, you have to have an authorized Silverlight player in your browser or use a device that can handle your credentials to prove access.
Personally, I have no problem with DRM, I have a problem with the implementation of most DRM models. Imagine with me for a minute:
I currently pay well over $100 per month for Cable. Let’s take a huge number, say $75. Let’s say that I pay $75 per month to the Acme Media Company. For that $75 I get unlimited access via the internet to music, movies and television shows. I can watch as much as I want, and they support viewing their content on all of the devices that me and my family own.
I can watch on my TV, my Zune or iPod, my laptop or desktop computer or my phone. I register my family’s devices with this company and they allow any of their content to be played on my registered devices.
I no longer have to rent DVDs, buy CDs or deal with scheduling and recording television. Acme just handles that for me. I never own any of this content, it’s just like on-Demand cable for all of my media, except it comes over the internet and I can take it with me on my portable devices.
Does that sound good or bad? It sounds amazing to me. These models will never work without DRM. The current thinking says, they won’t pay, so lets fill it with advertising. I would rather pay a fair fee, get access to TV shows when they would normally be available on air, movies they day they release to DVD, and the entire music catalog. If it was open enough to give my wife and child access as well, I would already be on the phone cancelling Cable TV.
I already pay a service fee like this for ZunePass for music. For someone like me who buys two to four CDs a month usually, $14.99 a month for unlimited downloads for 3 devices and computers is a steal. I want that to cover my movies and TV too.
Thoughts?
Tweet
Hands-down, I prefer the scenario where I can rent (DRM’d) content, as opposed to having to buy non-DRM’d content.
I often hear people (iTunes users) complaining that they want to “own” their music. OK, great. For $10,000, you own the pink slip to all the songs on your iPod. And what is it you can do with that pink slip that I can’t? For $14.99/month I can have just as much fun playing a Zunefull of the exact same music. Oh, and if I decide that I don’t like Chris Brown anymore, I’m not throwing away my money when I delete his songs.
Bad DRM has scared consumers off from good (transparent) DRM. DRM is ultimately unavoidable, it’s just a matter of hiding the fact that it exists.
Great blog, thanx
I hate bad DRM, not the idea of DRM as a whole.
I also hate when I buy a DVD and it spends ages showing me those non-skippable screens going on about not copying it – I didn’t copy it – I bought it – but if you insist on nagging me, I might not buy the next one..!
Wow amazing info
thankx buddy
OK, so this entire “article” was pointless. It didn’t cite any specific situations that show the flaws in the entire concept of DRM. DRM is two things:
1) an economic tool to enforce vendor lock-in (which is a monopolistic tactic) as demonstrated by iTunes store. The real goal of the DRM scheme was to sell iPods, meaning it was there to achieve an early monopoly on the portable media player industry. Because it was integrated easily with iTunes, people didn’t have to think about how to get the music they bought onto their iPods. So, Apple was sneaky and put DRM on the music files to ensure that people would rationally not buy anything but an iPod.
2) A fight for control over your digital life. Apple and Microsoft are basically totalitarian dictatorships over your digital life. They trick you into giving up your freedom to choose how and what you do with your computers by quickly promising to ease your suffering on the computer with “user friendly” computing.