As Frank notes, this is a must read from Cory. Check out the original Scoble post and his follow-up.
What amazes me about Scoble’s follow-up comments is that he doesn’t address any of Cory’s criticisms. Though I haven’t read every blog that responded to Scoble (and obviously cannot read the emails he received), I’m willing to bet that Cory’s points are among the most meaningful and important about DRM – they certainly are to me. SethS said it in a slightly different way a few months ago: “Interoperability isn’t a popularity contest. It’s about the answer to this question: What does a prospective implementer have to do in order to make the implementation work? ‘Read the public specification’ is the right answer. Answers involving signing contracts and paying money are the wrong answer.” The closest Scoble comes to addressing these points is his repeating that if you want to buy music legitimately, you’re going to have to accept DRM, so get over it.
One response is simply to point back to Cory’s sentiment: do you mean we should get over a future where media products are by definition going to be less usable? Another layer to this is that people cannot simply get over this because it is a confusing mess. I’d say the average person finds the format wars incomprehensible – why a Napster song doesn’t work on an iPod and an iTunes song doesn’t work on a Dell player doesn’t make sense. Not only is it just plain difficult to understand, but people are already accustomed to an interoperable, MP3-saturated world.
So you say they will become accustomed over time. When? Why? How will consumers become accustomed to a world of fractured formats, where licensors control both the record and the record player? How will people become accustomed to a digital world in which you have to rebuy all of your software players and music catalog whenever a better format, player, or service comes out? Say, five years from now, Apple comes out with a better codec, hardware player, software player, all the WMA compatible products that Scoble relishes. You’re stuck with what you’ve got. If you’re gonna tell me that that’s Apple’s fault and not also MS’s, I think you’re dead wrong. Would MS be able to let people migrate to someone else’s players, so that people would become accustomed to them and probably their competing codec? Possibly – but we won’t know in advance. It’s up to MS and Apple.
And here’s another thing: what about those who are calling for an end to this format war? Those who speak of “open DRM” that is not used as a “competitive weapon.” It remains to be seen what “open” will mean, but theoretically anyone will be able to create compatible players. Why does Scoble not point to these as superior even to MS’s DRM? They seem like the least likely to lock someone in. So why isn’t that an improvement?
Filed by Derek Slater at 10:44 am under General news
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