DRM House of Sand Begins to Fall

I'm in Cedar Rapids taking care of mom. But do check out the coverage of record label EMI's decision to drop digital rights management (aka DRM, aka "copy protection," aka crippleware) from all songs it sells through the iTunes Music Store.

This comes after Apple CEO, Steve Jobs' open letter to the music industry urging them to drop DRM because it does little or nothing to hinder piracy but does a lot to alienate customers.

This story follows the typical technoculture shift cycle of: enabling technology -> market disintermediation -> erosion of traditional business models. The kicker is that since the introduction of the enabling technologies (digital music, compression, broadband Internet) the traditional companies have been fighting their disintermediation tooth and nail, trying to use legislation to turn back the clock. Hence the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which makes it illegal to attempt to copy or to even try to figure out how the company goes about preventing copying of music (or videos, or ebooks) that you have paid for.

It has been obvious to everyone except the recording, TV and movie industries that these courses of action were unsustainable. Now, at last we have the first crack in what has heretofore been a solid wall in the entertainment industry with EMI being the first major to cave in. The others will stand on the sidelines and wait and see. But I think that their line will not be able to hold and we will be able to mark this as the beginning of the end of the old entertainment industry. What will replace it will be a new kind of market where customers are trusted and ala carte content becomes a commodity.