page43
microsoft research drm talK
21
utilitarian one. There’s nothing
moral
about paying a composer
tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there’s nothing
immoral
about
not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your
TV. They’re just the best way of balancing out so that people’s
physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are re-
spected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go
on making shows and music and books and paintings.
Technology that disrupts copyright does so because it simpli-
fies and cheapens creation, reproduction, and distribution. The
existing copyright businesses exploit inefficiencies in the old
production, reproduction, and distribution system, and they’ll
be weakened by the new technology. But new technology always
gives us more art with a wider reach: that’s what tech is
for.
Tech gives us bigger pies that more artists can get a bite out of.
That’s been tacitly acknowledged at every stage of the copyfight
since the piano roll. When copyright and technology collide, it’s
copyright that changes.
Which means that today’s copyright — the thing that DRM
nominally props up — didn’t come down off the mountain on two
stone tablets. It was created in living memory to accommodate
the technical reality created by the inventors of the previous gen-
eration. To abandon invention now robs tomorrow’s artists of the
new businesses and new reach and new audiences that the Inter-
net and the PC can give them.
5. DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT
When Sony brought out the VCR, it made a record player that
could play Hollywood’s records, even if Hollywood didn’t like
the idea. The industries that grew up on the back of the VCR
— movie rentals, home taping, camcorders, even Bar Mitzvah
videographers — made billions for Sony and its cohort.
Content 2nd gal final.indd 21
7/4/08 9:56:28 AM