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on his DVD: DRM only works if your record player becomes the
property of whomever’s records you’re playing.
3. DRM systems are bad for biz
This is the worst of all the ideas embodied by DRM: that people
who make record players should be able to spec whose records
you can listen to, and that people who make records should have
a veto over the design of record players.
We’ve never had this principle: in fact, we’ve always had just
the reverse. Think about all the things that can be plugged into
a parallel or serial interface that were never envisioned by their
inventors. Our strong economy and rapid innovation are byprod-
ucts of the ability of anyone to make anything that plugs into
anything else: from the Flowbee electric razor that snaps onto
the end of your vacuum-hose to the octopus spilling out of your
car’s dashboard lighter socket, standard interfaces that anyone
can build for are what makes billionaires out of nerds.
The courts affirm this again and again. It used to be illegal to
plug anything that didn’t come from AT&T into your phone-jack.
They claimed that this was for the safety of the network, but
really it was about propping up this little penny-ante racket that
AT&T had in charging you a rental fee for your phone until you’d
paid for it a thousand times over.
When that ban was struck down, it created the market for
third-party phone equipment, from talking novelty phones to
answering machines to cordless handsets to headsets — billions
of dollars of economic activity that had been suppressed by the
closed interface. Note that AT&T was one of the big beneficiaries
of this: they
also
got into the business of making phone-kit.
DRM is the software equivalent of these closed hardware inter-
faces. Robert Scoble is a Softie who has an excellent blog, where
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