I recommend this piece by Cory Doctorow ‘DRM Broke Its Promise‘. Although fighting against Digital Rights Management (the small programs that impeded content to be shared) has been a battle for Cory Doctorow for a long time, it is an enlightening piece about how what we have thought we had bought may disappear overnight when a service provider decides so.
The most important observation is that in a number of instances, we don’t own things anymore. We buy them from providers but in reality we pay to borrow them for a limited time. As real life examples, “Walmart announced that it was shutting off its DRM ebooks in 2008 (but stopped after a threat from the FTC). It’s not even the first time Microsoft has done this: in 2004, Microsoft created a line of music players tied to its music store that it called (I’m not making this up) “Plays for Sure.” In 2008, it shut the DRM servers down, and the Plays for Sure titles its customers had bought became Never Plays Ever Again titles.”
The amazing part of course is that in spite of digital, the price of stuff has not decreased much in particular when managed by publishers. In France Kindle versions go without discount compared to the digital version, and Cory Doctorow observes the same in the US for textbooks.
The conclusion from Cory Doctorow is a bit dire: “There’s a name for societies where a small elite own property and everyone else rents that property from them: it’s called feudalism. DRM never delivered a world of flexible consumer choice, but it was never supposed to. Instead, twenty years on, DRM is revealed to be exactly what we feared: an oligarchic gambit to end property ownership for the people, who become tenants in the fields of greedy, confiscatory tech and media companies, whose inventiveness is not devoted to marvelous new market propositions, but, rather, to new ways to coerce us into spending more for less.“
I am not as pessimistic, but then of course we need to be wary about those new devices and again, some regulation is surely needed to protect the consumers’ rights.
