Digital Rights Management: For Better Or For Worse? - ' Business Model Matters ' (
Page 3 of 3 )
The record companies lack strong,
watertight DRM. But its not even clear that
such DRM would help all that much.
No matter how good the DRM technology,
The Beatles The White Album will never be DRM-ized---the
bits have escaped into the wild,
never to be domesticated again.
One potential
solution to this dilemma can be
summed up as "if you cant beat em, join em."
This concept has been championed by,
for example, Exploit
Systems. Exploit Systems does not try to eliminate
P2P file sharing. Instead, they attempt to gently
coerce users to pay a small fee in order to receive
a legal version of the content. The legal
content is distributed over the same
P2P network that distributes the pirated content.
In return for paying protection money,
a user has fewer hassles to deal with and
also obtains extras that are not (yet)
available with the free download.
However, the freebies still exist, and a
user with sufficient tolerance for hassles
can obtain his music for free.
Even a relatively weak form of DRM will suffice
in the Exploit Systems model. The content obviously
must be priced so that a significant fraction of
users will deem it worthwhile to pay, even
though free copies are available. Its doubtful
that this business model supports
$14.95 CDs. But assuming the price is right,
the DRM system only needs to be more of
a hassle to break than the hassle required to
find the content for free. This level of
DRM protection is clearly possible today.
To date, the record companies dont
see things this way. Apparently,
they would rather
dig in their heels and hope that they
can bludgeon the world into accepting
strong hardware-based DRM.
Via this technical fix, they might hope to
effectively roll back the clock to a pre-P2P
era. Personally, Ill believe this is possible when
I see the Titanic steaming across the Atlantic
carrying passengers willing to pay $50,000
for a ticket.
