Passing Thoughts

The Passing of DRM?

Digital Rights Management is the last stand of an industry that relies on physical distribution, and accounting methods based around that distribution, to try and extend their old business model into a new digital world where all the rules are changed. As many intelligent people have been pointing out though - consumers are not going to be buying devices that cost more and do less with their content than they can already do. Everyone wants to be able to timeshift and move content from their pocket media player (psp or ipod or whatever) to their laptop to their TV. They don't want to have to buy the same thing several times over. I sounds a little like the media industries are beginning to wake up to this - this article, while still not mainstream, sums up things I have been hearing more and more of late. When we see stuff like this appearing in news papers the writing really will be on the wall. The big media players still have time to turn things around and embrace the new digital online media world (the one most of their customers have been hooked into for a while now...) and learn new ways of making money. What is going to be interesting though is how Vista fairs: it is widely assumed that the delays have been because of the DRM technology baked deep into the OS - technology that is going to cause a lot of problems. Of course the attitude is - the DRM only kicks in if you play DRM'd content - BUT anyone that has done any work with windows drivers will tell you that the DRM is adding layers of complexity to the weakest part of your computer system. Almost every-time you get a blue screen or system lock up in Windows - that is almost certainly down to drivers. Vista has made the hardware more complex, the software more complex and added new modes where downgrading of quality or stopping working are expected behavior. If DRM dies a death - all that extra complexity (and the attendant support development costs ) will be pointless and Vista is going to look like some great lumbering dinosaur.