I'd have to disagree with Cory Doctrow's position on DRM

Michael Gartenberg | June 20, 2004, 01:37 PM

Scoble reports on Cory Doctrow's DRM speech to Microsoft. I like Cory's writing but have to strongly disagree with his point of view. DRM does work and it can be good for business and acceptable to consumers. While most folks might prefer no DRM, that's just not viable in today's world and most consumers will accept DRM solutions. That's not just my assertion, data driven research backs it up. That's a difference between opinion and analysis.

He cites Sony as an example of a company gone awry due to DRM:

"But then Sony acquired a relatively tiny entertainment company
and it started to massively screw up. When MP3 rolled around and
Sony's walkman customers were clamoring for a solid-state MP3
player, Sony let its music business-unit run its show: instead of
making a high-capacity MP3 walkman, Sony shipped its Music Clips,
low-capacity devices that played brain-damaged DRM formats like
Real and OpenMG. They spent good money engineering "features"
into these devices that kept their customers from freely moving
their music back and forth between their devices. Customers
stayed away in droves. Today, Sony is dead in the water when it comes to walkmen. The
market leaders are poky Singaporean outfits like Creative Labs --
the kind of company that Sony used to crush like a bug, back
before it got borged by its entertainment unit -- and PC
companies like Apple."

Nice analysis, but wrong and trying to create a cause and effect relationship due to DRM is off base. Sony isn't losing because it came out with the music clip. At the time, that was mainstream and Sony was actually ahead of others in storage capacity. Except for a few end hard disk based units that were unfit for the mass market, Sony was in the sweet spot. Sony erred by not moving to a hard drive based device when Apple brought out the iPod. As for Sony's DRM, he is correct, it's poor technology that makes it hard for users to legitimately use their music. BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN ALL DRM IS BAD. Point of fact, look how well the iTunes music store is doing. Our research shows clearly that DRM is only an issue to consumers when it's technology they keep bumping into. If the folks at Microsoft Research want to really understand this, give us a holler. We're happy to explain what the market will bear and what it won't and why DRM is a necessary technology that need not burden consumers, tech vendors or content providers.