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cory doctorow
he wrote an essay about the best way to protect your investment
in the digital music you buy. Should you buy Apple iTunes music
or Microsoft DRM music? Scoble argued that Microsoft’s music
was a sounder investment, because Microsoft would have more
downstream licensees for its proprietary format and therefore
you’d have a richer ecosystem of devices to choose from when you
were shopping for gizmos to play your virtual records on.
What a weird idea: that we should evaluate our record pur-
chases on the basis of which recording company will allow the
greatest diversity of record players to play its discs! That’s like
telling someone to buy the Betamax instead of the Edison Kineto-
scope because Thomas Edison is a crank about licensing his pat-
ents; all the while ignoring the world’s relentless march to the
more open VHS format.
It’s a bad business. DVD is a format where the guy who makes
the records gets to design the record players. Ask yourself: How
much innovation has there been over the past decade of DVD
players? They’ve gotten cheaper and smaller, but where are the
weird and amazing new markets for DVD that were opened up
by the VCR? There’s a company that’s manufacturing the world’s
first HDD-based DVD jukebox, a thing that holds 100 movies,
and they’re charging
$27,000
for this thing. We’re talking about a
few thousand dollars’ worth of components — all that other cost
is the cost of anticompetition.
4. DRM systems are bad for artists
But what of the artist? The hardworking filmmaker, the ink-
stained scribbler, the heroin-cured leathery rock-star? We poor
slobs of the creative class are everyone’s favorite poster-children
here: the RIAA and MPAA hold us up and say, “Won’t someone
please think of the children?” File-sharers say, “Yeah, we’re think-
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