Mobility in a DRM Free World

I often wonder what the consequences of abolishing all forms of Digital Rights Management, allowing people to truly have access to all of their media all the time, on any device. Yet, I am always stopped short, knowing that media companies have seen what happened to the music industry and its intellectual property with the proliferation of the Mp3, and that it will take some pretty good convincing to abolish DRM.

I think DRM and its existence essentially has two faces. On one face, I can see the need for DRM to protect intellectual property and ensure that people are motivated to continue to create meaningful content (not 2 minute you tube clips) which might help properly compensate artists. On the other face, DRM hurts the consumer by limiting the uses of media for which they paid good money. Here in lies our dilemma.

Today, Steve Job's posted an article on his thoughts on DRM and the role its playing and should play in the future of music and related medias. Some interesting statistics were mentioned in the article, one of which were that "only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats." This statistic shocked me. Considering all the grumbling you hear about DRM and how terrible it is, it doesn't really seem to be effecting that large of a percentage of the music we are listening to. Which brings me to the other thing Steve said. He mentioned that "DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy." If DRM only exists to halt music piracy, which it isn't even doing, then why do we even have it?

The record companies are weary of doing this because it would most likely take a huge chunk out of their lucrative CD sales. But I believe that people are listening to more music than ever before, and if they could more readily use and access without the barriers DRM poses to their music, it would continue to rise. Why not focus on capitalizing on the fact that because of things like the walkman, iPod, cell phones, and iTunes, music has become more a part of our daily lives than almost other media. Consumers will always pirate music, DRM is not stopping them from doing that now, but why not give honest people the benefit of the doubt and trust them to embrace DRM free music by paying for it.

Without DRM it makes the mobility of music and other media almost endless. We could eventually see people being able to access their content anywhere, anyhow, anytime. I think the record industry could make some money in that model.