There’s a good article over at ArsTechnica which analyses the admission of an unnamed studio executive that the DRM iTunes uses is too lax for them, meaning they need even more control.

I’d like to add to this, but I’ve basically already did that in my last article on DRM, so I’ll just reiterate two key points:

- DRM is not about fighting piracy, it’s about greed. It is an action to raise income of the copyright owners, and to earn money from areas where it was previously not possible to do so. This corresponds well with ArsTechnica’s claim that “DRM’s sole purpose is to maximize revenues by minimizing your rights so that they can sell them back to you.”
I’ll just add that it’s not only about selling your rights back to you, it’s about selling every little piece of information that can be derived from the original information, be it a movie, a song, or a piece of software.

- In an attempt to sell the world the concept of DRM, the industry is trying to convince us that normal behaviour is legal. ArsTechnica says: “Who hasn’t lent a DVD to a friend or colleague? This is perfectly legal behavior, but you can see that Hollywood hopes to stop this kind of thing via DRM.” Here, I always like to reinforce this with a hyperbole: if they could, they would charge us to remember a movie, talk about a book, or whistle a tune.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 6:46 am and is filed under Web, Software, Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.