Newseek ran an article this week on DRM and the growing anti DRM movement that our efforts have been instrumental in over the last few months.
Now, an increasingly vocal grassroots resistance to DRM is cropping up. An anti-DRM campaign called “Defective by Design,” which is organized by the Free Software Foundation, has 15,000 registered members; the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that DRM places limits on “your ability to make lawful use of the music you purchase.” Web sites like stopdrmnow.org and digitalfreedom.org have been launched “to protect individuals’ right to use new digital technologies” and urge boycotts on DRM-tagged content. David Berlind, executive editor of tech trade journal ZDNet, coined his own term for DRM: “Content Restriction, Annulment and Protection.” (Figure out the acronym).
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Music industry observers agree that once the public catches on to the limits of DRM, it will either be abandoned or a dominant technology will emerge across all players; this is what happened when VHS beat out Betamax. “Give consumers a file that will play in any device and consumers will be willing to pay for it,” says Steve Gordon, author of “The Future of the Music Business.” Until then, they’ll just have to settle for DRM-encoded music. No hazmat suit required.