Microsoft and
DRM
About
two weeks ago I received a letter, a very long letter, from Steve
Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, titled “Rights Management: Enabling
New Opportunities for Customers.”
Now, I actually know Steve, having met him on a number of
business occasions, but this wasn’t a personal letter; I gather it
went out to millions of Microsoft’s best friends.
There’s
nothing wrong with needing or buying DRM (digital rights management)
software, under the right circumstances.
For example, I have used it on a publishing web site to
control my copyright in distributing expensive (hundreds of dollars
per copy) white papers. Corporation
may want to use it to prevent the unauthorized use of their
materials, whether to protect their privacy or their intellectual
property value.
Ballmer
makes the useful argument that by including some DRM features in the
next release of Office, business users will be able to secure their
documents and insure that only authorized users have access.
One wonders if these will become part of the 5-15% of Office
features that each user decides to take advantage of, or part of the
feature set that most users never see.
One of the problems of very rich products is that it’s hard
for most users to know very much about them.
There
should also be no problem buying a product that uses DRM to protect
it, so long as it tells the buyer in advance what the rules are. If it’s going to only let me have a single printed copy –
or only let me read it on-line – or whatever, that might affect
whether I want to buy something or how much I’d be willing to pay.
On
the other hand, I would not choose to buy a product that entitled
the buyer to come checking to see if I was still illicitly using it.
My system is my own and I don’t think I’ve given up my
rights to that by buying something and taking it inside and closing
the door, so to speak. So
I would not like to see my system decide to offer DRM owners rights
that I didn’t control.
Of
course, there is a strong discussion going on the industry now about
whether there should be an Open Source equivalent for other kinds of
intellectual property besides software – music and written
material, for example. This
would allow those who want to (entirely voluntarily) to place their
intellectual property into the public (common) domain.
If you’d like to follow those discussions, I commend you to
the Creative
Commons project, founded by Professor Lawrence Lessig, where
these ideas are discussed in some detail.
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