Wirestorm

Interesting article on Wired about the Sony We-Hate-Our-Customers fiasco:

http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,69601,00.html

This makes me think (read: hope) that the future of DRM is a rather gloomy affair, based around mutual distrust between the consumers and the distributers, with the content creators cast to the sidelines.

Why cant they just embrace the inevitable and use it to their advantage? Surely the first to ‘Get It’ will go on to be very successful? The major expense for the record companies is the packaging, distribution and marketing of the material, not its actual production.  The internet, and perhaps more specifically, p2p removes this expense, in fact people will give up their own time/bandwidth to distribute the material for you.

The problem is about reimbursing the content creators for their hard work, but surely this can operate independently from the distribution? Why not adopt a model similar to TV or radio advertising where viewer/listener figures, and thus the revenue to be generated by the ads, is determined by statistically analyzing focus groups and sample households. This obviously isnt perfect, but another thing that the p2p networks gives us for free is statistics on searches and downloads (until they become darknets that is).

Just ask everyone to pay £50/year, or something, like a tv license, and this gets divided up between the agents representing the artists. Most will pay, but those that don’t are still giving something in their free distribution, archiving and ripping of material.

Ok, so its not perfect, but its better than installing spyware on your customers’ computers