DRM doesn’t work
April 8, 2007
The following is a summary of a very good post by Mark Shuttleworth. To read the original follow this link.
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Of course, when DVD’s came along, content owners did not want people to buy the DVD in the USA, then ship that to Australia before the film was showing in cinemas there. Hence the brain damage that we call region encoding - the content owners designed DVD-CSS so that it was not only encrypted, but contained a region marker that is supposed to prevent it from being played anywhere other than the market for which it was released. If you live outside the US, and have ever tried to buy a small-run por^W documentary movie from the US you’ll know what I mean by brain damage: it doesn’t play outside the US, and the demand in your region is not sufficient to justify a print run in your region-coding, so sorry for you.
…The movie owners need to push hard for global digital distribution - that will let them get movies out on cinema globally on the same day (modulo translation), the same way that you and I can see everything on YouTube the day it is uploaded.
…Right now the content owners need to be thinking about how they turn this networked world to their advantage, not fight the tide, and also how to restructure the costs inherent in their own businesses to make them more in line with the sorts of revenues that are possible in a totally digital world.
…All you are doing is driving up the cost of your infrastructure - I wonder what the cost of all the crypto associated with HD DVD/BluRay is, when you factor in the complexity, the design, and the incremental cost of IP, hardware and software for every single HD-capable device out there.
…Today we see one of the digital satellite radio companies (Sirius or XM, I think) being sued by content owners for their support of a device which records their CD-quality broadcasts to MP3 players.
…Face it, people either want to pay you for your content, or they don’t, and your best strategy is to make it as easy as possible for people who want to comply with the law to do so.
…Someone will find a business model that doesn’t depend on the old way of thinking, and if it is not you, then they will eat you alive.
…Microsoft, Apple, SONY and others all developed DRM systems and pitched those to the music industry as a “sane ” approach to online music distribution.
…Of these contenders, SONY was clearly ruled out because they are a content owner and there’s no way the rest of the industry would pay a technology tax to a competitor (much as Nokia’s Symbian never gained much traction with the other biggies, because it was too tied to Nokia).
…One by one, some well known figures stood up and told horror stories about how they’d let the inmates run the asylum, and allowed twenty-something year olds to tell them how to spend their shareholder capital on dot-com projects. This was really interesting to me, as I’d spent the dot-com period telling big companies NOT to over-invest, and to focus on improving their relationships with existing customers and partners using the net, not taking over the world overnight.
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