I could not DISAGREE more with this.
DRM is a form of control AFTER the sell. What other products to producers still control AFTER they sell it to you? Does FORD limit where I can drive my car? No! Then why should a movie studio limit which laptop or PMP I watch a movie on (after I paid for it). DRM is an artificial control placed on digital media and I'm happy to see it go.
This doesn't spell trouble, it spells flexibility. But it does it spells the end of high profits from selling low cost copies of music and movies. Ford would love to spend millions designing a new car, but mass produce copies of the car for $500 while selling them for 20 thousand dollars each. The days of selling a CD or DVD for over $20 when it only costs 50 cents to make are over. Movies were invented when the only way to make money from them was from the box office, now they make more money on DVD sales. But have the prices at the box office gone down any? I dont' think they will go out of business if the insanely high DVD profit goes away.
The idea that it is OK to make 4000% profit on selling a plastic disk is dead. Movies will have to make their money in the movie theater, singers and performers will have to make their money at the concert hall. They will still make some profit off of DVD and CD sells (or whatever medium replaces them including downloads) but the cost of these will be much closer to the actual cost to make the discs than it is now. And this is a GOOD THING, not trouble.
DRM-Free Music Spells Trouble: Digitization - Columns by PC Magazine
http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/entry/4663/drm-free_music_spells
Thursday, January 24, 2008
DRM-Free Music Spells Trouble
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Original Article
DRM-Free Music Spells Trouble
by Lance Ulanoff
The digitization of everything changed all that. Now we're acutely aware that we really do not own any of the content we consume. We access or play an instance of it, but ownership lies really with the creators or, if they signed the rights away, to the media conglomerate that sold the right to consume it—on a limited basis—to you. Thanks to digitization and the Internet, replication on a massive scale became super-easy. This led to file sharing, Napster, lawsuits, the demise of Napster, its rebirth, the introduction of DRM, and now DRM's slow demise.
The music industry's moves have been terrified reactions to staunch the bleeding of millions of dollars in revenue down the drain. For maybe a year, music companies thought they had the situation under control, but then album sales tumbled. Retailers, musicians, and some music-industry execs thought DRM was the culprit, and they soon joined the chorus of consumers calling for its head. Now consumers are getting their wish, and the music industry will continue to crumble.
Giving up control of content and giving it away free are not rational ideas in a market economy, yet everyone's cheering. Has the world gone mad?
Not that the other solutions are any better. I love how intelligent people think subscription-based music services are the way to go. All you can eat for $15 a month. Talk about devaluing your product. People can download enough songs to fill 100 albums and pay under $20. How does anyone make money this way?
Worse yet, if you sign up for a subscription, you're saying that it's okay for the music service to wipe out your music collection if you cancel. Imagine walking into your living room as all your books disappear because you changed libraries, or your DVD collection disappears because you switched from Blockbuster to Netflix.
Both giving away content free of charge and taking everything away from consumers if they cancel fly in the face of everything we know about a functioning economy. People will become dissatisfied. Artists will stop making content because they're not getting paid. When there is no content, people will stop buying gadgets to consume that content. In short order, one part of our digital economy will collapse, and it could be followed by countless others.
I don't have the answer, but I welcome your suggestions.
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