Screwed, Either Way
Today’s xkcd comic boils down the Digital Restrictions Management dilemma to its core:
The latest Wal-Mart example–switching off their DRM servers (in spite of their later decision not to do it after all)–has shown that companies are not willing to stand by their self-imposed duties of providing a DRM framework for many decades to come. Instead, they are taking away the technical possibility to play your files at their sole discretion, leaving you as a customer with no choice other than throw away your media collection–or violate the law.
This is why DRM is so bad: While it is understandable that companies want to protect their income sources, by demanding payment for the media they produced, DRM is making promises the companies do not want to hold, or in some cases (read: bankrupcy) can’t hold. This is why I prefer, at least at the moment, Amazon MP3 over the DRMed part of iTunes any day of the week.
And while Wal-Mart does not exactly have a great reputation as a whole, there’s one thing they’ve thoroughly understood: The concept of capitalism. So it comes to no surprise that they (along with Amazon, for example) exert pressure on the music industry to be able to sell DRM-free music. The market demands DRM-free digital media that can be owned like a record or a CD and slowly, very slowly, content providers are forced to acknowledge that.
I can’t help but wonder, though, is this development going to include digital video as well, any time?
No, of course not, where would be the fun of that? Every industry has to make the same mistakes, it’s corporate law or something.
As soon as e-book readers are widespread enough, the print industry will make the same mistakes. Eventually, after loosing a large pecentage of the market to p2p, amazon will start selling PDFs.
They may go for unprotected PDFs at some point — but of course, not before they start suing everybody and their brother first, then managing to get even more ridiculous copyright laws in place by using their lobbyists to convince blind politicians of the need to “protect” the very creators of the mess.
The problem here is that as media (and eventually, other things) becomes digitized, and others think they can sell it at the same price for huge profit margins. People are somewhat intelligent and notice this. Even more, they go against the idea of paying such high prices, and counter with pirating, saying that if a large group of people pirate, and a small amount pays, they’ll have the same profit margins as before digitalization. Then they’ll try DRM, and it will fail. Then they learn to live with less profits.