DRM: (Not) A Necessary Evil
This post—from Macmillan’s Michael Bhaskar—about DRM has rekindled the great DRM debate that everyone in publishing is familiar with. DRM is not evil, Bhaskar proclaims, but it is necessary.
I’m not sure the current emphasis on “free” online is sustainable, especially where newspapers are concerned ($4.95/month seems to me perfectly reasonable for access to the NY Times Online), but DRM, as the comments on the post so convincingly show, is not the answer.
Bhaskar suggests that even paper books have a form of DRM in that they can’t be shared with more than one other person at a time, making mass dissemination impossible. That’s true, but DRM won’t stop mass dissemination anyway—it can be hacked, and the more reason you give people to hack it (i.e. the more you frustrate and anger your readers), the more they will.
Comparing DRM to paper books reminds me a little of the Classics App reader for the iPhone. Designers took the time to recreate the physical experience of reading as much as possible (including the action of page turning and an animated bookshelf) on the iPhone. But why? You can watch as many animated page-turns as you want, and you still won’t experience the feel of a book in your hand. The Classics App creators use “Reading Redefined” as their slogan, which to me is a little ironic—their app doesn’t redefine reading; it just tries to recreate the old model of reading on a new device.
I think Bhaskar and the Classics App both miss the point: it’s time to reconsider all our notions of reading, the publishing industry, and our place in the content creation-distribution process. Andrew Savikas’s excellent “Content is a Service” post this week is an absolute must-read. Our whole paradigm is changing, and DRM just doesn’t make sense.
