Web Extra: The Trouble with Digital Content Controls - ' Taking Sides on DRM '
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Taking Sides on DRM
What will some of the implications be, for both society and business?
Right now you've got sort of two poor extremes and a lot of people in the middle who are arguing about what rights management really should be. On the one hand, you have people—I think Hollywood probably exemplifies this best—who basically say they should be able to control the information. Or you have the owner of the intellectual property saying he or she ought to be able to control it and have the ability to prevent people from making copies for their own personal use. And if you want to make a copy or you want to have access, you are going to have to pay me.
On the other extreme, you've got people saying that information essentially ought to be free, and that you ought to have the capability to put it onto a network or a peer-to-peer system and share it freely. Those are polar opposite views, and we haven't yet come to any sort of reconciliation about what a really effective model is.
A lot of money is tied into questions like that. And we don't have a business model that works yet. I am not sure when this is all going to come out, but you've got billions of dollars hanging on essentially the development of whatever scheme we eventually work on. This is one of the top fundamental networking issues that we are going to have to address.
And further, this is not an issue that is just about technology. Often times when we talk about networks and electronic media we think in terms of what is the technology and how does technology fix the problem. This is an example where there are certainly technical issues and technical protocols involved, but it's also a social and a political issue as much as it is a technical issue. I emphasize that because I think problems like this are really more about IT and society than they are about technology, and shall become much more prominent.
DRM is at the cutting edge of this not just because there's a lot of money tied up in it and we haven't reached a resolution, but because I think it's maybe the first good example of a whole set of IT and society challenges that increasingly we are going to have to be dealing with as a country and as a society.
What I find fascinating about DRM is that there are very different social models being proposed of how information should be used or viewed, and we don't really have a very well established process for making choices between those different alternatives right now.
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