The US Federal Trade Commission recently held a ‘town hall’ meeting in order to listen to the arguments being put for and against DRM.

Naturally, the great and the good from all [California?] camps were represented and much was said about the music, film and computer games industries, and how DRM was evil and had failed and therefore should never ever be used, and, in fact, you should never try to protect any information (my own summary).

Gamers and music players said, “DRM only harms lawful owners and does nothing to prevent dedicated hackers, so there is no purpose in having it.”  

Well, I guess you might say that having speeding or DUI laws has no effect on criminals (actually, no amount of law has any effect on criminals if you think about it) so we should not have laws.  Maybe bank fraud is OK as well?

The nub of the argument goes that if I try it and like it then I might think about buying it.  But I have a full copy already, so there’s not actually any real pressure on me to do anything!  This is about the same as having access to every book in the world for free and then trying to make a case for having to buy one of them.

Freedom in artistic and literary expression comes from the ability to profit from it, not be condemned to starve for lack of income.  Great pamphleteers such as Thomas Paine didn’t give away their work – far from it.  He sold it.  He wrote the three top-selling literary works of the eighteenth century, which inspired the American Revolution, issued a historic battle cry for individual rights and challenged the corrupt power of government churches.  And the income helped him continue his work.  Perhaps the modern age would prefer he had never succeeded?

Aha! cry the modern Internet copiers.  But talent is what sells, not scarcity.

Well, if you are a music group and you get your real money out of gigs then
I can see where you are coming from.  But if you are a writer, then exactly what gigs do you present at?  And if you do electronic training courses precisely because you can’t be at all the gigs, then are you supposed to suffer because you have a different economic model?

The only economic model you ever have to consider is how sales get made and invoices get paid.  So if a folk band find that giving away tracks is good PR for getting ‘bums on seats’ at gigs then that’s fine.  But don’t go claiming that it’s the only possible and valid economic model.  

DRM is here to stay where the economic model dictates that scarcity is the most effective route to market.  Who would spend a lot of money for a financial analysis of a market if they can get it for nothing, or pay for a training course if they can get it for free.  The fact of the matter is that people don’t pay for what they get for free.  There is no economic model here.  

Even the people who first brought in Copyright law said that they hated the idea of it, but if you denied the author economic benefit from the use of their intellect (as opposed to their hands) then there was no incentive to create works.  And if you left it to ‘market forces’ (the rich, companies, governments) then you would usher in the most deadly of futures for the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

So forget the posturing of the music copying community.  They are busy re-inventing music concerts (gigs) as the way bands made their livings before records really got going.  Maybe they want to reinvent the public lecture tours when successful authors made a part of their living (now a circuit for retired politicians).  Check out your own economic model, and if you need scarcity to protect your intellectual capital, then you need DRM!