DRM Doesn’t Work for Audiobooks, Either
A truly interesting development, reported by MacRumors:
The New York Times reports on a growing trend for book publishers to move away from content protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM). Instead, Random House and Penguin Group, the two largest U.S. publishers, will begin offering audio book content in unprotected MP3 formats.
The recent move by the recording industry towards DRM-free content was part of the motivation behind the move.
Publishers had traditionally looked to DRM to help combat illegal copying of their content, however, a recent experiment by Random House disproves this notion that DRM necessarily prevents widespread piracy. In a trial run, Random House released watermarked DRM-free audio books on eMusic and monitored file sharing networks. They found that the pirated copies of their audiobooks primarily came from Audio CDs or DRM-decoded sources, and not from the DRM-free sources.
As a result, Random House’s Madeline McIntosh said, “Our feeling is that D.R.M. is not actually doing anything to prevent piracy.”
The recording industry — whether we’re talking music or books — just keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.
It’s almost as if, now that anybody can make copies cheaply and easily, the folks who used to earn money by making copies of stuff, have to get a new job now or something.
But where does that leave writers and musicians?
In college — when we all had virtually unlimited time to debate intellectual matters — I was always on the strict or “conservative” side of discussions about the importance of copyrights and patents.
There’s no doubt since, however, that the industries protected by copyrights are changing — big-time.
I wonder what my perspective will be ten years from now.
And I wish I could remember all those arguments against intellectual property rights, and what they advocated instead, because it looks like the producers of intellectual content will be needing a new paradigm before much longer.
Kevin Kelly has some thoughts on how intellectual creators could make money in a post-IP world:
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php
I am much like you - as a younger man I was always quite strict and convervative about copyright.
More and more, however, I am seeing it as an impediment, and wondering if it really has a sound philosophic basis.
I haven’t yet found anything that has fully illuminated the issue for me (and haven’t spent much time thinking about it on my own), but Peter Saint-Andre has written intelligently (as is his fashion) on the topic:
http://www.saint-andre.com/thoughts/publicdomain.html
There are also some good resources at the bottom of that page for further reading.