When I am at the office, DRM is of course the way to go: whether we talk about large SIM cards, trusted mobile phones, or any other kind of secure mobile device, DRM is the killer applications. It will allow content to be distributed safely, and everybody will be happy.
When I am at home, DRM is evil: I listen to a lot of music, and I also buy a lot of music. I use daily a home stereo, a car stereo, two mobile MP3 players (no iPod), a smart phone, a personal PC (now in Windows, soon in Linux), and two office PCs. Since I like to listen to the music I buy on any device that I own, i basically despise DRM. I have not been using iTunes and other Web stores, because I believe that the DRM they use is unfair.
Of course, this situation is highly uncomfortable, since I don’t like much to promote professionally things I don’t practice personnally. There are many reasons to that: I fell dishonest, and also I feel that it is a recipe for failure. It reminds me too much of the WAP hype in the late 90’s. All smart card marketers were convinced that it was the coming killer app, but they did not want to use it (although they often were right in the eye of the target population). WAP failed miserably; I don’t mean that DRM will go the same way, but success is not yet completely guaranteed.
The next step is for me to reconcile my personal feelings with my professional views is to identify how DRM can be good. Well, there is one thing: what I am doing today is legal in France (or almost), since we pay a “private copy” tax on any sorage device on which music can be copied, and that allows us to do some amount of private copying (although most likely a bit less than what I do). However, the legality of the thing is not quite guaranteed. And in addition, it does not allow me to legally allow a friend to lilsten to a song I like; I have to let that friend copy the song from me, which is almost surely illegal.
So, what DRM could offer me is the ability to actually listen to my music on all my devices. This isn’t basic DRM, of course, but most of what I need is already included in the DRM schemes. There is a possibility to allow a limited number of copies, and also to let the system know that a version of the song was deleted, etc. We are still far from what exists today, but technology may not be the most important hurdle. Business seems to be the problem, as majors are not sure about the way to make money from flexibility.
In addition, there are some good news there. This entire scheme only works if the level of security provided by all devices is sufficient to guarantee that this private copy scheme won’t turn into a giant copy machine. And this means that there is a lot of work for me and all my friends in the mobile security business. I can sleep again.
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