Digital rights

GrokLaw has an interesting article about Digital Rights Management (DRM) – the technologies that stop you copying and sharing music and movies that you have bought (and, potentially, anything else that you might buy). The fundamental problem, the article suggests, is that the content companies (record companies, movie companies, copyright controllers, in other words – which is not at all the same thing as the artists actually creating this content) want to treat a PC as simply a system for entertainment. A glorified CD player, if you will. In so doing, they fail to take account of the many other important things a PC might do (such as help you earn a living) and thus implement schemes to protect their content that harm your ability to use your PC for its real-world job. For, after all, no one buys a PC in order to play music or movies – we have stereos and TVs for that. We buy PCs to do word processing, play games, browse the internet, email friends and colleagues, create flyers, handle our digital photos and so forth. Many jobs a PC does can be (and have already been) harmed by these DRM schemes. Unless they change their way of thinking, the content companies will find themselves either driving customers away because we cannot trust what they are trying to sell us – or at the receiving end of some large lawsuits.

For an amusing example of how DRM has already turned and bitten Hollywood, read about how it has probably cost Spielberg his chance at a BAFTA. :-)