Despite all attempts, the media industry has failed to provide itself with secure methods of making sales. Piracy is at an all time high and the spread of ultra-high-speed internet means that more and more people are able to get anything they want, anytime they want, be it movies, songs, or shows. Media is even available in live streams on many websites such as dailymotion and youtube. A few days ago, the CEO and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, came out and denounced DRM.
DRM is digital rights management code. What it attempts to do is prevent you or me from copying songs without paying money for their permission. The only problem here is that every DRM code released so far be it napster, apple, or windows has been cracked. If you factor this in with the big 5 record companies still selling 90% of their merchandise through CDs which are not DRM encoded, the incentives to pay for research and implementation of a broken system online are not apparent to many, and apparently are no longer apparent to Mr. Jobs. Here you can find his original speech and rationale. It makes little sense for these companies to try and hassle us from stealing online music when we can steal music from CDs anyway. Music is inelastic in its demand, people will buy it whether it is protected or not and people will steal it whether it is protected or not. Abandoning DRM will save money for these companies in impressive quantity and will allow loyal customers the ease of being able to take their music with them and not have to switch between services and devices in order to find a working match.
Is DRM worth it to these companies? What do you think would happen if it was finally thrown out?
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