My post on Jennifer Urban’s presentation at Annenberg Center is up at DIY Media blog:
“DRM is broken,” Urban declared, at the beginning of her talk about “Bits will never get harder to copy: the limits of copyright online.” (Apparently, according to a separate report, Bill Gates agrees) The problem, as the graphic below illustrates, is that until DRM started building legal restrictions on the use of cultural products into the hardware used to access those products, the relationship between technological capabilities, laws, and social changes was flexible enough to allow copyright laws to evolve with the times.
Comments
@ 12:30
DRM is just the next iteration of the battle between the RIAA/MPAA and technology that allows the user to copy copyrighted material.
We saw the same struggle in the early 80s with Jack Valenti and his battle against the Betamax/VCR.
In the end, the VCR and subsequent rental and movie business became one of the main revenue sources for the movie industry.
We are attempting to solve this digital music DRM nightmare with a DRM-free solution that compensates users for contributing songs in a p2p environment.
For more information, check out:
http://www.grooveshark.com