DRM
Dear Gary:
Very glad to see the quite articulate Amir join your publication. However, he glosses over some of the dangers of DRM. One example may suffice.
Microsoft®’s ill-fated foray into DRM for music was recently canned. Here’s the deal, after 2008 the music you bought and paid for and own will no longer be playable because Microsoft is no longer going to refresh the DRM keys. Imagine how you’d feel if your books suddenly went blank because the bookshop you bought them at decided to get into a different business?
Content providers should be paid. And consumers should not be saddled with “digitally restricted media,” aka “digital rights management” or DRM.
Nathan Wolfson
Contributing Editor Amir Majidimehr Comments:
Thank you for the kind words regarding my articles. As to your point, as someone who has bought hundreds of dollars of MSN music content, I genuinely share the pain that the immature state of rights management brings to consumers. Unfortunately, the problems are rather complex and more than meet the eye. The reason music services like MSN have come and gone is that the precedence set for $0.99 music tracks does not leave enough margin to create a profitable business transacting them (unless you treat them as lost leaders to sell something else, which makes money, such as portable music players, books, etc.). Of course, the fact that DRM content attaches itself to the PC is also at fault and something that architecturally needs to be eliminated. I talked about this at length in the article and consider it one of the key implementation issues to be resolved for the system to work. Had this not been the case, MSN would not have had to take any action here, and content would have continued to play, regardless of whether the service was still in business or not.
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