DRM Doesn't Scale (continued)

I wrote my original post on this topic last August.  It wasn’t a great post.  It was a combination of geek speak and technology overload.  All it really said was I had too many toys and couldn’t get digital music to work right on any of them.

My two favorite comments to that post were:

From Giordano – ah… the problems of the very rich.Good that I´m broke, so I don´t have to worry about this kind of things :)¨

From Jackson – I’m sure you’ll work it out. Gee, this new media makes everything so
easy, it’s right at your fingertips huh? 🙂 Excuse me, I’ve got to go
flip the record over…..

Thanks guys for putting me in my place.  I deserved it.

But reading Tom Watson’s post today on the same topic took me right back to the point that I failed to make clearly and concisely last August. 

Here is my attempt to make that point clearly and concisely:

DRM, as it is currently implemented, is not about protecting content owners from theft, it is a way to lock in consumers to proprietary hardware solutions and marketplaces and force consumers to pay multiple times for the same piece of content they already own if they want to play it on multiple devices.  Until DRM fixes these issues (which I predict they never will), it is consumer unfriendly and will be rejected and lead to more, not less, copyright theft.

UPDATE: For a less heated and more rational explanation of all of this see my friend John’s post on the same subject from earlier this year.

#VC & Technology