February 6th, 2007

Are DRM requirements in America's best interest?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 2:04 pm

Categories: Apple, General, business models, management, marketing, publishing, resellers

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This week the U.S. Senate is debating whether to debate Iraq. For me the debate over the debate is more intriguing than the actual debate might be. It's extemporaneous, sometimes heated, and often relevant to the question at hand.

Steve Jobs has opened up a similar debate about the debate over Digital Rights Management. I would like to take the opportunity to briefly get to the heart of that debate, because if Jobs' quest to end DRM succeeds it would be a big win for open source.

Here, in his conclusion, is how Jobs couches his stand against DRM in terms of American patriotism:

For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard.  The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company.  EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. 

He might have added that Sony itself is Japanese.

Political support for the technology demands of content providers has been based on the idea that we are protecting American interests. In one paragraph Jobs has ripped that argument to shreds.

Despite the ample lobbying of proprietary interests, it is open source, and the rapid technology change it makes possible, that best represents the self-interest of American business.

Many of those who comment on this blog seem to think that open source mainly benefits India, or China, or our other trading rivals. But it's in the U.S. where the open source movement was born, it is in the U.S. where it is nurtured financially, and it is in the U.S. where profits from open source have flowed most freely.

Jobs has just offered to give up a near-monopoly of online music sales in order to make this point.

It's a point our political leaders ought to listen to more closely, and take him up on.

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