New Architect: Developing user-friendly Digital Rights Management. [via RRE and Tomalak's Realm] This is hysterical. User-friendly DRM is a contradiction in terms; the entire point of DRM is that it puts the publishers’ interests ahead of the users. This is inherently user-unfriendly. (A few years back I saw an ad for a printer that boasted that it had “user-friendly dip switches”. Don’t think it’s related; just thought I’d mention it.) Of definite relation, however, is Clay Shirky’s insight into what people want to do on the Internet:
We already know what people using networks want: they want to do what they do now, only cheaper, or faster, or both. They want to do more interesting stuff than they do now, for the same amount of money. They strongly prefer open systems to closed ones. They strongly prefer open standards to proprietary ones. They will accept ads if thats what pays for interesting stuff. They want to play games, look at people in various states of undress, read the news, follow sports scores or the weather, and most of all they want to communicate with one another.
DRM runs counter to all of these desires and goals. Look at the music industry’s pathetic attempts MusicNet and PressPlay. They give people less than what they have now (infinitely copyable and playable music), for more money (gotta recoup the cost of all that expensive R&D somehow), in a less open format (that both spies on you and expires) that can’t be shared with others. No, no, no, this will all die a horrible, horrible death, and rightly so.
By the way, in case you think Clay is just reiterating the latest conventional wisdom, I should point out that he wrote those words in 1996.
