Quote:
Originally Posted by markbot
As we've seen with the music industry, intellectual property in electronic form can be successful if it has DRM.....and is a disaster without DRM.
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I'm sorry, are you watching the same industry the rest of us have? For years digtal music was available at a reasonable price 100% DRM free. You can use the tracks in any device without restriction. You could make copies also. The RIAA didn't sue every person that had a walkman. The media was an amazing device called the CD.
Now, all of a sudden there is a way to take that digital music and put it on a hard drive. All of a sudden the music industry decides they have to "protect" their copyrights. iTunes comes out and allows you to buy songs for $.99 a piece. Certainly reasonable price and about the same price as a song on a CD... but, now the digital file was protected. You could only play it on your "authorized" PC and your "authorized" iPOd. You couldn't put the music on your Creative Zen, or the MP3 player in your car stero. Getting song files became much more difficult.
So, what happend, people started shareing files becuase it was hard to get them legitamately. People like Steve Balmer and the RIAA were calling anyone that owned an iPod a music thief.
The DRM on iTunes music wasn't "protecting" anyone, nor was it preventing piracy... it was just making it harder for people that bought music to use it on the device they wanted to listen to it on. The majority of music was still being bought in DRM free (CD) form.
Even Steve Jobs saw this was the case an lobbied the publishers to let him sell DRM free tracks. Once they were available there was a surge of music BUYING!!! Yes BUYING not piracy. The level of piracy didn't go down when there were DRMed tracks... and it didn't go up when there weren't. Universal is set to open a DRM free music store as is Yahoo I believe.
All DRM does is keep the honest people honest and frustrated and buying LESS. DRM free content is easier to deal with, so people buy more of it!!!
BOb