[Leaplist] Cory Doctorow, to Microsoft, on "Why DRM is bad"

[Damien McKenna]

On Nov 1, 2007, at 11:13 PM, patrick wrote:
> "Rainbow", a band, released an album on the Internet, on the Honor
> system.  They had not renewed any contract with the "Record Lables".

Do you mean the band Radiohead with their album In Rainbows?  :-)   
They sold the album online and you could enter *any* value as the  
purchase price.  A large portion entered 0.00, many did a portion of  
the price of a new CD, many more did the full CD price or more.  The  
official numbers have not been released yet, but they will be very  
interesting to see.

Interestingly while they have the downloads and a fancy vinyl/CD pack  
available too, they are still looking for a new label to get the CD  
out to the masses.

> ebooks could do as well.

They don't, the last 10 years of a failed market has shown that.   
There are some rare exceptions, most recently the web development firm  
37 Signals did quite well last year with their simply fantastic  
Getting Real book (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/).  It's a book  
about project development that's focused on web dev but really most of  
it is general enough to be useful with all projects.  It cost $20 as a  
PDF and they sold *thousands* of copies very quickly - I've bought it  
and it was worth every penny & then some.  After several months they  
offered a printed version of the book through an on-demand publisher  
and made a static HTML version available for free from the website,  
with the $20 PDF still available.

> But, did you read the entire lecture?  The focus was upon how much
> technology blossoms when the DRM is non-existent or eliminated.

Yes, but the content owners don't believe that, despite the decades of  
evidence to the contrary, they're just 100% focused on the next  
quarter's results and so will always be looking for a way to /dev/null  
over their customer.

> Example was the large laser disk DRM that was over-turned by Courts  
> and
> Congress, for the sake of society in their use of Video recorders to
> time shift.
> That became an industry that generated hundreds of Billions over 30
> years for innovators.


I think the key factor that most people miss with DRM is that it  
limits content longevity.  All copies of the first American vampire  
movie, London After Midnight (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_After_Midnight_%28film%29 
), have been destroyed, the last in a fire at MGM in 1965.  How many  
unique treasures have been lost to the ravages of time due to  
accidental mishaps (fires, etc)?  How many more are stored in systems  
*designed* to be made obsolete within a few years?  How many millions  
of songs have people bought in MSFT's various WMA DRM schemes that  
repeatedly get dumped and replaced every few years - while people  
don't like Apple's iTunes DRM at least they've never changed it in the  
five-or-whatever years it has been on the market.

-- 
Damien McKenna - Husband, father, geek.
damien at mc-kenna.com - http://www.mc-kenna.com/
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