DRM DRM DRM

Just a little whiff of brimstone here......remember, the Catholics have it right, there are multiple levels of hell.

Electronic content vs. Books. I won't go there. Each has it's advantages. I would prefer for book publishers to make both available, and indeed, that is what some publishers have done.

My gut reaction is that DRM is a bad thing (more on that later) but we may be stuck with it for a while. Bear with me here.

Perhaps DRM is not necessarily bad, but we are working from an extreme position right now. I have focused a lot on digital media (video, audio, software) DRM, because this is the area in which it most likely to be commonplace.

As an example, if we had a video/audio DRM that allowed people to make copies, but didn't let them edit, would that be acceptable? For advertising supported video and audio content -- I would say absolutely. It would not break a business model where content is advertising supported, but would also not prevent users from doing what they are able to do now with older technology, which is record a show onto VHS tape, and share it with their friends. If you want the version without commercials, you could buy that as well.

Now -- let's think what this would mean for advertisers. P2P would suddenly be much better than regular broadcast. Advertisers would like it, because more potential viewers would see their ads, although certainly you could skip through them. Perhaps do what europeans have done, which is put ads at the beginning and end of a program, interspersed with brief cartoons to keep viewer's interest.

However, companies don't often see it that way. Let's enter the strange world of the Sony PSP for a moment.

This is a very powerful consumer media playback device and game system that is sold at a reasonable cost, perhaps for right around what it costs Sony to make it. This is because Sony will make it's money on software that runs on the device.

But......it has a memory card slot, so it could be that developers could write their own software to run on this device. So, Sony has to add software to prevent that from happening. Which is promptly broken by an active developer community. Which is then fixed by Sony. Which is then broken again.

So -- we have a device that someone purchases, but if they use it in a way that the manufacturer doesn't want to them to use it, they may be in violation of their end user agreement. Hunh? Yes........it may be that when you break the seal on your Sony PSP, and turn it on, that you are greeted with a request to agree to not to use software to circumvent copy protection software on the device, and unauthorized software execution may constitute a violation of that agreement. Will anyone get prosecuted for this? Of course not.

But, it does mean that we have entered an era where something that we buy may not entirely be ours to do whatever we want with it. If this sounds far-fetched, it is not. Someone has indeed been prosecuted for selling hardware that circumvented the DRM on Microsoft's Xbox in Australia. They were not necessarily advocating piracy (although there are plenty of cases where people where justifiably prosecuted for doing just that).

The irony for Sony is that they make it easy for consumers to put other types of content on their PSP -- pictures, MP3's, even movies. They even shipped a new firmware update (the PSP has 802.11b, and can be upgraded over the network) which fixed holes in their copy protection, but also gave users a nice web browser, and support for better video codecs (h264 mpeg-4, to be exact). It is almost as if one hand doesn't know what the other is doing.

We are upset about DRM because it takes away abilities that we previously had. The textbook example is easy to get upset about, because we have had books for hundreds of years. For a long time knowledge access was a class thing (are you wealthy enough to own books), but the public library changed that, the printing press changed that. Now the internet has turned publishing upside down, as the very business/distribution model is challenged by one that has much fewer impediments.

So we live in strange times right now. Pushing back against extreme DRM positions by not buying, seeking out solutions that are more reasonable is a good start. To some extent, the marketplace will decide. There were music download services before Apple, but Apple took a more moderate approach to DRM than anyone else, and tied it to a great user experience. It is my feeling that book publishers have not done that yet.