DRM on the Cloud →
Nilay Patel:
A quick scan of the market reveals DRM is making a startling comeback as the media industry turns to new cloud-based distribution models. Scores of modernized DRM systems are behind some of the most successful media services on the market: Spotify, Rdio, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple all still use proprietary and incompatible DRM for music, movies, books, and apps, and the movie industry is pressing ahead with UltraViolet, the most ambitious and wide-ranging DRM system ever devised. DRM has become a foundational element of the consumer media experience, especially when it comes to streaming services; Apple’s success in removing it from sales of downloaded music appears to have blinded the industry to its continued and growing use nearly everywhere else.
But as DRM becomes more and more pervasive, it paradoxically becomes less and less restrictive: iTunes makes it trivially easy to share apps, books, and movies between devices registered with Home Sharing, Netflix will now happily authorize 50 devices per user account even as it wraps each movie stream in Microsoft PlayReady DRM, and Spotify and Rdio users likely never consider the layer of DRM managing the music files they’ve synced for offline playback. (Spotify is particularly ironic: it delivers music in the open-source Ogg Vorbis format, but then wraps synced files in proprietary DRM that expires after 30 days unless the user re-connects to Spotify.) In fact, DRM has become so invisible to the user that one wonders why it’s being used at all: as Jobs predicted, the use of DRM hasn’t made even the slightest dent in media piracy, and it seems a silly waste of time and money to continue building DRM systems so advanced they appear to not exist in the first place. Modern DRM is invisible to the user and ignored by the thief.
Some interesting observations from the Verge’s generally most interesting writer. I hadn’t really thought about streaming services as “the return of DRM,” precisely because—as Patel notes—the DRM never seems to get in your way as a user. (There are other rights issues that get in your way, when movies and TV shows disappear from Hulu or Netflix before you can watch them, but that’s a different problem.) Yet even as these present a good case that you can have DRM-encumbered media that isn’t annoying to use, Patel is right in that they don’t actually present a convincing case that they’re necessary.
