Josh the Aspie’s Blog

I’ve previously defined what DRM is, but why does big business want DRM at all?

Big media makes its money off of media content when the consumer buys its products.

In the case of musical performers, and movie makers, this product is the content of the music or movie.

In the case of television and other media outlets, the channel and content mix is one of their products. They sell the content stream to cable and satellite outfits. Another of their products is the time in that mix which they sell for commercials. Companies buy this time for their commercial advertisements because people watch the stream. In order to get people to watch the stream, they either produce content, or pay other companies to produce content for them.

In both cases, the root source of the company’s revenue is the content which they provide. So what happens when people start getting that content without paying for it?

Well, that all depends. If people would have bought that media, assuming they couldn’t get it for free, the company looses revenue. If they wouldn’t have paid for it in the first place, the company looses nothing, and may actually wind up getting some free advertisement. Most big media companies assume that the first case is more common, or at least common enough that this problem represents substantial financial losses for their company.

So, of course, these companies seek ways to reduce the amount of lost revenue, and maximize profits. That is what businesses are generally for.

VHS and Audio cassette tapes have been around forever. However, with each copy the quality of these copies quickly degrades. With the advent of digital copying methods, this degradation is reduced. Many companies seem to be of the opinion that this degradation disappears entirely. Bunk. The degradation still exists, but in most cases is greatly reduced.

The architecture for sharing these copies is also quite different. Where as the cassette tapes required a physical medium with a definite cost, and must be physically moved from location to location, there were constraints put on copying, making it somewhat less attractive from a cost/logistics standpoint. With the advent of digital mediums such as mp3 and mepg files, the ability to rip and copy audio and video files with no set cost came to be, thus removing the constraint.

In addition, with widespread broadband and peer to peer file sharing programs, it has become incredibly easy to send files from place to place, and with no direct cost. The only cost involved in sending files over the internet is that by increasing the bandwidth of your service provider, your service provider much purchase more bandwidth from backbone companies, and then passes that cost on to you, and their other customers. This “free” sending of information operates on the same principle as spam being “free”. There is a cost. However, rather than the cost being paid by the person using the resource, it is spread among all those who pay for the general service that provides that resource.

So, it has become far more easy for people to get for free the media which big media wishes to get paid for providing. Big media owns the copyright for this content, and thus feels it is entitled to receive payment for all of the copies of their media, so it seeks a way to combat new technologies which it views as threatening the foundations of its business model.

These sentiments, and reactions, especially in the culture of entitlement which seems to be growing in the United States, is both natural and understandable. It is the steps they have taken, and the fact that they believe themselves to be entitled to take those steps which seem to be the problem.

As the holder of a copyright, big media seems to think that it is entitled to mandate how the content it sells is used even after the end user has purchased it. In the opinion of many, this makes about as much sense as a book publisher thinking it has the right to keep you from using their book as a door stop, or a magazine publisher thinking it has the right to keep you from using their magazine to line your bird cage. Buying a copy of something doesn’t give you the right to make copies and re-distribute that content, but it does give you the right to do whatever you want with your copy.

Big media named their technical efforts Digital Rights Management (DRM). Unfortunately, in attempts to secure what they believe to be their rights concerning their control over the product they produced, they often damage the very ability (and right) of the consumer to use their products as they wish.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Technology, Entertainment, Political, Current Events. 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.