Tide Turning Against Copy Protection?

I've been pretty upfront lately about my distaste for copy protection and DRM. I have no problem paying for content; I just don't like having my options of how I choose to enjoy it being limited by the short-sighted greed of companies looking to lock me in to their proprietary products. People in general do complain about copy protection, but not very loudly. Mostly it's a question of interoperability -- why won't the songs I've bought from Napster play on my iPod? and so on. But more and more people are going to have a personal experience, like I did, that changes their mind about copy-protected content and illustrates what a pointless pain it is. And I'm seeing signs that's already beginning to happen, that more people are noticing -- and more people are simply getting pissed off about it.

It's easy to find vehement opponents of DRM and copy protection, like Boing Boing's inimitable Cory Doctorow. It's easy to marginalize their criticism by labeling them zealots or communists or nerds or whatever. But now, you're seeing that criticism go mainstream.

I point again to the Amazon comments on the CD that caused my moment of clarity; bands and labels having to backtrack in an attempt upset fans; a columnist from a big tech publication setting off on a campaign for "InDRMpendence" after he found out his $20,000 home stereo system couldn't play the 99-cent songs he'd bought from iTunes. Even The New York Times is telling people how to circumvent copy-protection in an article trying to explain the mess.

The ball is rolling, and people are starting to realize that yes, DRM and copy protection are pointless and stupid. The argument that they're necessary evils to persuade content providers to make content available digitally is hogwash; they're used as tools to lock people in to formats, products, brands and stores. As consumers, as these companies' customers, they're forced to listen to us, or at least to our money. If people choose not to buy their DRMed products, they'll have to change.

The challenge, then, isn't convincing people that copy protection is bad -- the content companies tend to do a good enough job of that themselves. It's simply just making people aware of the problem. It's easy not to care about DRM when you've got an iPod and you just want to listen to the songs you've bought from iTunes. That's why mobile is going to be ground zero -- the penetration of phones that play music and the waves of incompatibility that are going to come as people attempt to navigate different brands of hardware and different mobile and online download shops.

The problem isn't necessarily one for consumers, we can eliminate the problem just not by getting involved. But that highlights the problem for all the content providers and hardware manufacturers -- they're the ones that need to change, they're the ones with revenues at stake. At some point, the vast majority of people are going to get pissed off and decide to not play ball, and its companies using DRM that are going to pay for it. So they've got a choice: make the short-term revenue grab that copy protection might enable, or make the long-term choice to build solid revenue streams and business models that don't use DRM and aren't endangered.

Comments

[Scott Rafer]

There's another, less religious way to look at all this. I've been nagged by DRM fans at big media companies and startups since 1995 when I worked at Kodak Hollywood. My position on it is purely commercial -- DRM never makes money so why consider it? iTMS isn't even an exception. The ratio of iTunes on iPods to MP3s on iPods is far less than 1 to 100.

[Ian Wood]

Carlo,

I have to say that following the upgrade of my handset DRM has become an issue to me. Why do I have to "lose" all the content that I have already paid for?

Having agreed to extend my contract how come Orange have decided to "reward" me by asking that I repay for all the content I still wish to use on my old handset. Now I can understand that content providers need some protection from P-2-P; but can they develop a system that allows me to store the content on the network and access it from there as a back-up?

Just had an idea, perhaps I can claim that the content is lost, and then make a claim on the insurance policy for it to be replaced. Somehow I feel that customer service just will not see the logic.