Digital Rights Management - Go, No Go, or just behind the curtain?

In the late 90's, the music industry fell victim to rampant P2P file sharing applications that made copying and sharing music a fairly common practice. One could consider this but the first shockwave of the digital era or perhaps it was simply an inevitable next step in a new not-so-obvious and not-so-welcome change in the fundamental business paradigm. No matter the view, the days of buying the Beatles Rubber Soul album are long gone and today we have at least two generations that have used PC's and widely available ripping software to copy and in some cases distribute music entertainment. It continues today though policing actions have been more effective. Nevertheless, today there are teens and young adults out there who have never purchased a CD or a DVD … and the music retailers continue to lament the digital age for lost CD sales and unchecked rights violations.

And so what is the future for video and for television? Video content providers have been zealots with respect to Digital Rights Management-DRM … especially after witnessing the woes of the music industry. But now we reckon with new announcements from Amazon about Unbox, a premium video downloading service … and from Apple, an iTunes Plus DRM-less audio content service at $1.29 per track. The music industry it seems may be moving down the DRM-less on demand pathway. Is this a shift in DRM philosophy or a changing business paradigm with DRM implication for music? And what of video and containing video downloads?

The truth of the matter is that video is subject to many of the same digital toolsets that allow a skilled user to make copies and share, albeit, with some generation loss in video quality. The difference is that when it comes to video, its more work for ripping video applications, with typically large file sizes, and the occasional user probably does not make for an immense problem (yet). Of course major violators will always be castigated when caught ripping major video titles such as first run movies etc.. But what of this move by the music industry to remove some of the DRM focus …. to make it easy for users to do what the music industry once fought …. and for an upfront fee? And what is the deal with emerging pay for video download services and how is DRM containment achieved? Are we witnessing a new video business flavor … or a seismic change? Last I checked, DVD titles and television DVD titles were a huge revenue source. Ahhh… just finished downloading an Amazon video title …. and yes I have the title …. took a while because of bandwidth … and yes I guess I can move the title to a portable viewing device …. but darn it, the proprietary player won't let me burn the title to DVD! Seems that Windows DRM got in the way. Curses!