DRM and the hazards of research
I am deeply indebted to Tom Lehrer for the immortal observation, "Let no one else's work evade your eyes, Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, So don't shade your eyes, But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize - Only be sure always to call it please 'research'."
More recently, and less pithily, marketing professors Dinah Vernik of Rice and Devavrat Purohit and Preyas Desai of Duke used analytical modelling to examine how piracy is influenced by the presence or absence of DRM restrictions, which prevent unauthorized copies of digital data, such as music, from being made. They found that while these restrictions make piracy more costly and difficult, the restrictions also have a negative impact on legal users who have no intention of doing anything illegal. gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=135288
Should we conclude that DRM is evil, or is it that the academe have a downer if they don't have unfettered access to anything and everything?
Well, I guess it all depends on what you are selling, and to whom.
The marketing professors appear to have concentrated on the music industry and comparisons with CD copying. And I suppose that since it is a large industry it is valid to make statements about it, but perhaps unsound to generalise from a highly specific format to the copyright industry in large.
It would be rather like saying that there should be no copyright in the Coca Cola brand or the Levis’ trademark (or go talk to the motor industry and they will lay the wisdom on you!).
Copyright and Intellectual Property Rights (and its protection using DRM) is the exercise of an economic right granted by law. Some industries (pharmaceutics, for instance) consider it to be seriously important. Indeed, they need DRM to prevent leakage. There is no desire to see their research available to Messrs. Lehrer, Vernik et al for any reason at all. And it would be both brave and foolish to suggest that the desire of people wanting to listen to music tracks (paid for or not) should have any influence.
There are whole areas of publishing where DRM is the enabler of the service and not the thing preventing it. Product training courses is a good example.
Universities like to say that education should be free (well, maybe after you have paid the tuition fees you would think that the books should be free?), but of course they are not the only ones in the business. Huge numbers of companies have training courses in using their products, and they are not about to give them away for free. They could stick to the classroom approach, or, with DRM, go to much lower cost faster to deliver methods. It's not quite the same as the music industry saying to authors they can recover the piracy losses by live performances (duh).
There are many other types of documents that need serious DRM if they are to go digital. Information exchanged between parties in litigation (discovery, for the more jurist inclined), bids for contracts, minutes of board meetings, documents provided during mergers, acquisitions or company sales: the list is very long indeed. And not to be sacrificed on the altar of the claimed justification of a right to make copies because for a short period of time, with the cassette recorder, you could.
Rights to use Copyright works enshrined in the Berne Convention (Geneva must have had an off day?) include access for personal study and for the right to parody.
Now I don't know if any directors of public companies ever thought that visiting Professors or MBA students had the right to study the minutes of board meetings as a matter of personal research. (Truth be told I fancy there's more than a handful of Revenue Services who would mortgage serious body parts for that right?)
And there's the rub (Shakespeare). To get greener, eliminate the paperwork, stop shipping rainforests around the world and so on, we need to go digital. But for serious industries that absolutely does not mean giving up control. Quite the reverse. Unless and until there are adequate control safeguards (DRM by any another name would smell as sweet) there is every incentive to ignore digital editions in favour of due diligence.
Now this may not chime with game players or music mixers. But vox populi is not always vox Dei. (The voice of the people is the voice of God, to save you doing an Internet search.) There will always be claims that unfettered access to information is essential for the most rapid development of society. I would not want to try that one on my government, or yours for that matter. And they are the people most led by vox populi – the elections.
So beware the siren call of the anti-DRM brigade. Just because it seems to be good for music sales does not mean it is good for everything else. One size does not fit all.
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