I was going to say, the purpose of DRM is to get you to pay for multiple licenses. It's the same reason why a lot of paid download software is now on a SAAS model. If you can buy 1 copy of something for $20 and use it on whatever devices you want, then the company has made $20. If you DRM that to be for just one device, and you have 5 devices, they make $100. If you are a SAAS operator, you are effectively doing the same thing.
Somehow people are more okay with paying an ongoing fee for software or some perceived notion of services, but that same does't yet apply to content in a larger way. The closest equivalent is probably the cable companies and they are taking their huge sums of money and are buying the media companies, so maybe eventually there will be just a flat $100/month fee for experiencing a company's content on whatever device/experience it's available on. Maybe even movie theaters.
It also prevents loaning, resale, inheritance, and any other kind of transfer. Which is particularly worrying when it comes to ebook collections.
In the next 10-20 years, as physical media grows less and less common, we will surely see legislation and/or judicial rulings that treat digital property as actual property. There's room for actual services like Spotify or Netflix, but being able to have your own copy of something is so important.
Maybe those rulings or laws won't happen in the US, but in some major markets of the planet those rulings will happen – partially this discussion has already happened in the EU.
Yes, to me the real problem is indeed owning your stuff... The ability for right holders to revoke your licenses at any moment without a warning and with no control on your side is unsettling. I have worked on a VOD website where we sold so called "forever" access to a video for a specific price, today the website is down, people do not have access to their "property".
> Somehow people are more okay with paying an ongoing fee for software or some perceived notion of services, but that same does't yet apply to content in a larger way.
I think it's pretty simple to see why this is: Once created (digital) content is inert and doesn't really require any ongoing maintenance as such. Software always requires some sort of ongoing maintenance.
Digital software and content requires maintenance and upkeep or the copies and backups will be lost. Burned CDs are rated to last 10 years. Floppy disks less so. Pressed CDs and various backup mediums maybe 100 years. Hard drives have a finite life span too. Please help maintain historical data.
Some of the most amazing digital content is transformative, and supported by an ongoing community of people producing and transforming it. Any one individual work is "inert", but the value is in the body of work as a whole.
Oh, yes, remixing is a huge deal which DRM threatens to cripple. Still, given the analog hole and high-quality recording equipment I don't think that it'll necessarily die, it'll just be driven underground (even more than it already is).
The inert-ness you're referring doesn't really apply in a world where all this digital content is streamed from servers in the cloud. The infrastructure to provide that steaming content must be maintained.
The distribution costs have nothing to do with maintaining the content itself, and given that pirates apparently manage to distribute content for free, the necessity of those costs becomes highly questionable.
Indeed, these costs are artificially imposed by the streaming model which is used, despite its inefficiency, to control consumption.
> given that pirates apparently manage to distribute content for free
Well, that's a strange statement. The computers and internet connections (and time) used for piracy are not free. And the costs of pirating/torrenting/peering this content are offset by the savings of the pirates/peers not paying for the content itself....
>The computers and internet connections (and time) used for piracy are not free.
Yes, but you still have to pay for those if you stream the content. It seems rather dubious to suggest the streaming infrastructure is "necessary", when apparently pirates can distribute fine without it.
Time used to be a factor, but with things like Popcorn Time starting to appear, piracy is approaching the usability of legal streaming services.
However, IMO it's still not good enough: Netflix is simple and very accessible, but not enough (recent) content. Because content providers are abusing DRM and it's purpose.
Somehow people are more okay with paying an ongoing fee for software or some perceived notion of services, but that same does't yet apply to content in a larger way. The closest equivalent is probably the cable companies and they are taking their huge sums of money and are buying the media companies, so maybe eventually there will be just a flat $100/month fee for experiencing a company's content on whatever device/experience it's available on. Maybe even movie theaters.