Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Thursday, February 01, 2007
2007, not the year of DRM
Just a note that I believe DRM (as in Digital Rights Management) will be even less successful in 2007, due to the issues with device portability and the general sense that you haven't bought anything to keep.
Maybe the last successful DRM-heavy service will be iTunes. At least as long as iTunes users continue being loyal to Apple also on the device side. Also, to compensate for this, I believe more services will be streamed, without possibility to save (and potentially illegally distribute) the content. Even music services with a monthly "all you can eat" subscription could be streamed as an option, but I think it will be primarily used for video services (how often do you watch the same movie?). Of course in such a case you wouldn't be able to transfer content to a portable player, so there are still some "wrinkles" to iron out.
Sony was charged to pay each user suffering from its rootkit DRM scheme $150 and purchased CDs can be returned and replaced for free. Luckily Sony didn't use DRM across the board, but only on CDs that people with good taste wouldn't buy anyway (just kidding :) ).
Maybe the last successful DRM-heavy service will be iTunes. At least as long as iTunes users continue being loyal to Apple also on the device side. Also, to compensate for this, I believe more services will be streamed, without possibility to save (and potentially illegally distribute) the content. Even music services with a monthly "all you can eat" subscription could be streamed as an option, but I think it will be primarily used for video services (how often do you watch the same movie?). Of course in such a case you wouldn't be able to transfer content to a portable player, so there are still some "wrinkles" to iron out.
Sony was charged to pay each user suffering from its rootkit DRM scheme $150 and purchased CDs can be returned and replaced for free. Luckily Sony didn't use DRM across the board, but only on CDs that people with good taste wouldn't buy anyway (just kidding :) ).
