2008-01-04
Has music DRM run it's course?
Back in early 2005, in a blog post headlined "Microsoft in decline", I mentioned that DRM, digital rights management, is a myth and was likely to be a big flop.
It looks like the music industry is finally figuring out what the PC software industry realized back in the mid-'80s. That is if your product is encumbered with copy protection that gets in your legitimate customer's way, then your product won't get purchased and the copy protection will get removed, routinely.
DRM Officially Dead: Last Major Label Sony BMG Plans to Finally Drop DRM:
Prediction: The next major wave will be the movie studios dropping DRM, but I think that will take another two to five years. The detrimental effects can be seen in problems like this one where an HD Monitor Causes DRM Issues with Netflix, which I recently read about on Slashdot.
One of the big outstanding questions in my mind is what will happen with poor old Microsoft, as they have committed heavily to DRM by making it a fundamental "feature" of Vista called Trusted Computing. If Windows Vista gets in the way, will consumers install the free Ubuntu to get around the annoying DRM?
It looks like the music industry is finally figuring out what the PC software industry realized back in the mid-'80s. That is if your product is encumbered with copy protection that gets in your legitimate customer's way, then your product won't get purchased and the copy protection will get removed, routinely.
DRM Officially Dead: Last Major Label Sony BMG Plans to Finally Drop DRM:
Prediction: The next major wave will be the movie studios dropping DRM, but I think that will take another two to five years. The detrimental effects can be seen in problems like this one where an HD Monitor Causes DRM Issues with Netflix, which I recently read about on Slashdot.
One of the big outstanding questions in my mind is what will happen with poor old Microsoft, as they have committed heavily to DRM by making it a fundamental "feature" of Vista called Trusted Computing. If Windows Vista gets in the way, will consumers install the free Ubuntu to get around the annoying DRM?
Copyright by Tom Sayles.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License.
