DRM locks in consumers

I followed a story today that was on Slashdot about DRM (Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management). Ian Rogers posted some really good insight into DRM:

As you know, we’ve been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now. Our position is simple: DRM doesn’t add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day via the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform.

We’ve also been saying that DRM has a cost. It’s very expensive for companies like Yahoo! to implement. We’d much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc, instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway! And on the consumer end there is certainly some discount built into that $0.99 download for the fact that you can burn a limited number of times, can’t play it on your Squeezebox, can’t DJ it with your DJ software, and can’t make a movie out of it with iMovie? I certainly hope so. Un-DRM’d content is implicitly more valuable to a consumer.

I think the same is true for using proprietary protocols versus standard protocols – the proprietary protocols lock consumers into a particular platform or product. It’s too bad that MP3 players aren’t known as OGG Vorbis players. Another good reason to use BACnet.