Is DRM evil?

Chris Anderson
The Long Tail

December 29, 2004

[This is slightly off-topic, but since this is my only blog I'll be diving into other subjects of professional and personal interest from time to time. One of those, needless to say, is Wired. I don't want to make this a running editor's letter, at risk of losing focus on the Long Tail, but the two subjects quite often overlap: Wired is about how technology is changing our world, and the Long Tail is a prime example of that.]

EFF organizer, BoingBoinger and Wired contributor Cory Doctorow [ http://www.craphound.com/bio.html ], perhaps the best-informed person I know on the subject of Digital Rights Management, argues [ http://www.boingboing.net/2004/12/28/bittorrent_writeup_i.html ] that Wired should be taking a more activist stance against it:

Wired seems to be a little soft on DRM these days; the recent Wired spin-off, Wired Test, featured page on page of reviews of music players, media PCs, and PVRs with hardly a mention of the fact that all of these devices were fundamentally crippleware, and all controlled by entertainment companies who can and do arbitrarily remove functionality from them after they have entered the marketplace, so that the device that you've bought does less today than it did when you opened the box. If you're publishing a consumer-advice magazine, it seems like this is the kind of thing you should be noting for your readers: "If you buy this, your investment will be contingent on the ongoing goodwill of some paranoid Warners exec whose astrologer has told him that your pause button will put him out of business and must be disabled."

Hmmm, "soft". Well, in one sense he's right: we're not following the EFF's idealistic line on DRM. This isn't because of journalistic impartiality. We, too, are unashamedly activist on issues we believe in, and DRM [ http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.10/drm.html ] abuse is one of them. It's just that we take a more pragmatic stance to serve a more mainstream audience. (We are also a commercial magazine, not a pressure group.)

Like Larry Lessig and his Creative Commons [ http://creativecommons.org/ ] project, we believe in the value of protecting intellectual property rights, but we're opposed to overzealous extensions and implementations of those protections. Copyright good; infinite copyright bad. Piracy bad; treating everyone like a pirate worse.

But equally, we believe in putting the consumer first. Consumers want more content, easier-to-use technology, and cheaper prices. If some form of DRM encourages publishers, consumer electronics makers and retailers to release more, better and cheaper digital media and devices, that's not necessarily a bad thing. This is just being realistic: much as we might want it to be otherwise, content owners still call most of the shots. If a little protection allows them to throw their weight behind a lot of progress towards realizing the potential of digital media, consumers will see a net benefit.

The real question is this: how much DRM is too much? Clearly the marketplace thinks that the protections in the iPod and iTunes are acceptable, since they're selling like mad. Likewise, the marketplace thought that the protections in Sony's digital music players (until recently, they didn't support MP3s natively) were excessive and they rejected them. Indeed, we were one of the first to criticize Sony in a big way for getting that balance wrong [ http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/sony.html ]. And, for what it's worth, Test [ http://www.whatsnextnow.com/WIRED12_13TEST/ ] and the rest of our reviews do take points off for intrusive DRM when we encounter it.

At risk of opening myself up to anti-Microsoft flames, I'll personalize this by giving an example. I recently bought a Media Center 2005 PC to serve as a central tv/video/music/photo server for our house--essentially a DVR on steroids. So far I love it. It sits in the study, by all appearances a regular PC available for regular PC use, and streams content to thin set-top boxes called Extenders [ http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/evaluation/devices/default.mspx ] or the existing Xboxes at each TV. It has some DRM restrictions, including not streaming DVDs over the network and not supporting DivX, but nothing I care about that I can't work around in one way or another.

Some [ http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/29/1452230&from=rss ] will wonder why I didn't go for a DRM-free open-source media server, such as MythTV [ http://www.mythtv.org/ ], instead. And the answer is, I just can't be bothered. More importantly, my wife really can't be bothered. The Media Center works great, is easy to use, and given that we needed a new PC anyway is cheaper than the other DVR options (no monthly fees). Did I sell my soul to the Man? No, I just got a cool technology that makes our life a little better. In the real world, that counts as a win.