I am sure you will have read the article in efflux.com http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_Yahoo_Music_Dead_Another_Reason_To_Never_Buy_DRM_Protected_Tracks_21005.html warning of the death of the Microsoft music DRM by August 31, and Google by September 30 (2008).

Their conclusion?  “Digital rights management technologies are a failure commercially and technically. There are too many standards which are not interoperable, they restrict the customer's freedom to high degrees and they are an everyday nuisance to work with.”

Well wash my mouth out with soap (no I don’t mean SOAP which is another load of XML). 

Let’s look at that rather broad conclusion.

There are too many standards?  Excuse me?  I looked up DRM standards in ISO (International Standards Organization, the people who figure out what is the standard for electric cable so you don’t blow your hands off touching the stuff, the rails that trains run on so that they stay running on them, and serious computer standards – you know, stuff that matters), and drew a blank.  Now if someone had said manufacturer’s standards, I could buy into the argument.

An everyday nuisance to work with?  Well, you might get paid to listen to music tracks.  Or maybe they just mean you can’t readily copy tracks and give them away?  (I bet you can buy a license to do that, but its costly.)

But what most people have yet to understand is that the DRM industry is seriously new, and that there is precisely no desire by major players (tape, CD, DVD, PDF and so on) to provide interoperable standards, when we haven’t even agreed what standards are being looked for, and why, or how they should be implemented.

The current market is in what the economists call the ‘prime mover’ phase.  Literally, that means that the first into the market can do what they like, set any standards they feel like, and charge any price that suits them!  The market has been there since the late 1990s.  Not quite recently?  And mainly because it has not suited any major player to see International Standards emerge, it has not changed. 

Actually, rather than worry about the latest squabble about whose industrial standard should be dominant, we should be worrying about what sorts of DRM standards are going to emerge, and how to be able to influence them.  They are rather like taxation – you can never stop a government from taxing you.  That’s how they stay alive, by taking your money (and if the statistics are correct they get more money out of individuals than they get out of corporations, which ought to be rather worrying).

Despite what the pundits say, DRM is not going to go away.  The people who create and sell intellectual property (IPR) have to make their livings from doing that.  They are not going to give away their livelihoods any more than you or the pirates are going to.  The people you really need to fear are those who do not need a day job to pay their way, or where the day job is so badly supervised that they can afford to waste their employer’s time whilst they pursue illegal interests. 

And just as the Internet has moved from being a free information source (1995-2002) it is now increasingly a paid information source and what was previously free is no longer available unless you pay for it.  If you examine information sources now they consist of sources that have been paid for as a matter of public interest (the Gutenberg series that have made much of the Classical repertoire (Shakespeare, Plato and many other Classical greats such as Chaucer) accessible to any and all.  We applaud these measures.  Even if modern schooling fails to inculcate any appreciation for works other than Homer Simpson, we agree that works out of copyright should be available to all – but MUST be assured as being the actual words, and not some Bowdlerism (Thomas Bowdler (July 11, 1754 – February 24, 1825) was an English physician who published an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's work that he considered to be more appropriate for women and children than the original, and, according to some sources, actually made it more accessible!). 

Apparently political correctness is not a new disease?

Seekers after truth deserve some measured verity.  But you can’t deliver that without DRM.  Because DRM is, as the Germans say, “A sword with no handles.”  It does not merely control what a recipient can do with the information they receive, it verifies that the information they have gained possession of is truly coming from the claimed source – the publisher. 

There is nothing negative in this for the publisher.  Actually, for the publisher it is a comfort.  Because otherwise how else can a publisher ‘prove’ what it is they actually published, given the modern world where information theft and the misuse of information are commonplace?  The fact of DRM tools provides an abiding proof that they truly are the source of specific information, and that can help publishers obtain prosecution of unreasonable and irresponsible pirates on the one hand, and avoid prosecution for things they never did publish, on the other. 

So think carefully before trying to consign DRM to the dustbin of history.  It may be following closely behind such must have’s as death and taxes.