Will Microsoft ever learn?
As reported by Mary Jo Foley and repeated in Mashable, it’s among the members of the new Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem mentioned in the TeleBlog earlier.
Um, isn’t Microsoft the same company whose recently renamed PlaysForSure scheme doesn’t play with Apple products?
And isn’t Apple refusing to join DECE? And then there’s the pesky little matter of the MSN Music debacle.
Between the two extremes
I find myself stuck between the two extremes—both DECE’s and the Mashable’s. On on hand, yes, as Mashble says, DRM schemes tend to get broken. And what about DRM’s other major built-in negatives, such as the inability to keep up with changing technology? I’m still waiting for the Apple iPod Touch to be able to read DRMed Mobipocket books, even though Mobi software is said to be on the way for it.
Beyond that, how do we know that the Ecosystem will be eternal? Like individual companies, organizations are not necessarily eternal, especially with all those conflicting commercial interests to reconcile. What if a DECE member comes up with new technology and decides to break way from the crowd?
Looking beyond traditional DRM
Just the same, I’m also against the idea that anything put online will or should end up free. Whether it’s watermarking or social DRM, there are plenty of possibilities for companies to experiment with. Even libraries, bastions of tradition DRM because of the expiration factor, can try alternatives such as as Web-browsable books for people not wanting to deal with DRM’s hassles.
Meanwhile keep in mind that in the end, business models may count as much as technology. I continue to see libraries as one way to help writers and publishers get paid for books, and for readers to be able to read them for free. The same concept could apply to an extent to other media. In the grand scheme of things—the cost of telecommunications and all that—the financial value of content is pretty small. As Andrew Odlyzk has observed, "The annual movie theater ticket sales in the U.S. are well under $10 billion. The telephone industry collects that much money every two weeks!"
