Over at The Digitalist, there are two posts by Michael Bhaskar — here and here — on DRM: Digital Rights Management. Bhaskar is in publishing, so his primary concern is with Amazon’s DRM model on its Kindle books, but he refers also to Apple’s restrictions on the music it sells through iTunes. The real interest here is in the comments, some of which come from people who have been banging this drum for a long time — Cory Doctorow, Clay Shirky — but they are really interesting nonetheless. The whole conversation gives a great image of the state of the current debate. Anyone interested in these matters should read it with care.
Text Patterns
July 16, 2009
I don't buy the stuff about how removing DRM-type protection would destroy the world of blockbuster movies, huge albums, etc. Movies are admittedly an interesting case, but it's already been proven that music artists can release their own music and find plenty of fans willing to pay good money for it, even if it's not DRM-ed. This would, of course, eliminate various middle men in a lot of cases–ie, the publishers/distributors/sellers/studios. But they're already dying in a lot of industries. The used book market is killing a lot of mainstream book sellers, and you're never going to be able to curb that.