Telepocalypse

DRM - enemy of telecom

Having recently read Cory Doctorow’s polemic to Microsoft on DRM, I’d like to offer a few more examples of why DRM is pissing in the drinking fountain of telecom.

First, The Register on CD copy protection:

In April last year Macrovision announced that it has taken a license for Microsoft’s Data Session Toolkit which meant that working with Macrovision’s content protection the Toolkit will allow copies of downloaded files to be made on slave, tethered devices but each one needs to be authenticated using the original PC that downloaded it.

Now, Microsoft may think this is a Good Thing, selling lots of MS locked-in DRM technology. But wait a minute. At some point they want everyone this side of Mars to upgrade to Longhorn. And your digital rights are tethered to your old PC. Which is probably a bit too underpowered for Longhorn. So you’ll need a new PC. Will you take the risk of upgrading and hoping all your licenses still work? Many won’t.

Same thinking for mobile phones. The carriers in the short term may dislike subsidies to shift handsets and would like longer replacement cycles. But in the longer term you need uptake of new handsets to take advantage of new data services. Will your digital rights locker offer seamless transition? Will consumers keep buying ringtones and music downloads if they find the have to dump their whole investment when they switch carriers? Have you just killed their interest in your business? Have you just zapped their trust in you just when you want to enter the mobile payments space and need to be seen as solid as a bank?

As consumers get savvy to DRM, they’ll start to see that the terms and conditions aren’t like the click-through licenses of most software. There’s real bite, and you’ll find yourself repaying to use the same content that you thought you had bought for life. That means DRM will increase the transaction costs for content. Will playing this track use up some of my allowance? Will I get an error message if I try to watch this video on my laptop after waiting 30 minutes for it to download? The same mental transaction costs problem exists for micropayments, as has been well documented by Clay Shirky.

Ultimately, telecom is about communications, not media. DRM inhibits communications. That’s the opposite of what you’re after. If we’d had DRM before the Internet became widely available, telcos would have sold a lot less dial-up and broadband, and the industry would have even more unlit fiber than it does today.

How many future broadband and FTTH sales will be lost because you can’t share a few moments of a good TV show with your granny over the Internet?