How DRM has Failed...

The assignment here is to write about where DRM has failed, and to use personal experience if possible. Even though I'm sure DRM has failed me on many occasions, I didn't have a specific recollection that I felt significant enough to write about. I went searching on the Internet to read about the experience and complaints of others and found an abundant amount of information. After reading about five different accounts in the form of blogs, papers, and consumer rants I came upon a paper written by Corey Doctorow that was composed for a Microsoft Research DRM talk given on June 17,2004 to the Microsoft Research Group.

The full paper can be found at http://www.craphound.com/msftdrm.txt and is a very interesting and entertaining read. He illustrates some excellent points about the shortcomings of DRM very effectively. I have included a couple excerpts below that I felt particularly compelled to comment about, though I encourage you to check out the whole paper. The following paragraphs lend themselves to the idea that DRM has failed by not embracing the capabilities that digital media has to offer and fight them instead. In doing so they are fighting the one thing that keeps them a-float... the consumer.

“There's one thing that every new art business-model had in
common: it embraced the medium it lived in.

This is the overweening characteristic of every single successful
new medium: it is true to itself. The Luther Bible didn't
succeed on the axes that made a hand-copied monk Bible valuable:
they were ugly, they weren't in Church Latin, they weren't read
aloud by someone who could interpret it for his lay audience,
they didn't represent years of devoted-with-a-capital-D labor by
someone who had given his life over to God. The thing that made
the Luther Bible a success was its scalability: it was more
popular because it was more proliferate: all success factors for
a new medium pale beside its profligacy. The most successful
organisms on earth are those that reproduce the most: bugs and
bacteria, nematodes and virii. Reproduction is the best of all
survival strategies.”


“Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we've changed
copyright. Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a
utilitarian one. There's nothing *moral* about paying a composer
tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there's nothing *immoral*
about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off
your TV. They're just the best way of balancing out so that
people's physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs
are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling
carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings.

Technology that disrupts copyright does so because it simplifies
and cheapens creation, reproduction and distribution. The
existing copyright businesses exploit inefficiencies in the old
production, reproduction and distribution system, and they'll be
weakened by the new technology. But new technology always gives
us more art with a wider reach: that's what tech is *for*.”

These arguments rang true to me and got me thinking more about the business models that are being produced around digital media and the limitations that are coming with them.

The best indication we have of future behavior, whether it is of an individual or an industry, is to look at past behaviors. The success of past media forms has largely been aided not only by the industries acceptance of that media and its capabilities, but also by embracing it. To use the advantages, not fight them, because ultimately they will prevail. Whether or not a business model does, in my opinion, depends upon to what degree you use the advantages in front of you.