Cory Doctorow's MS DRM Talk

In his talk Cory Doctorow suggests that DRM not only doesn't work but is also bad for society. He says that any DRM technique can and has been bypassed, therefore the only people who are affected by it are the most technically unsavvy as well as the most honest people. I believe he is correct, but at the same time DRM exists because we live in a capitalistic society. It would be extremely difficult to change something that's based on such a fundamental part of how business works.

As Cory Doctorow states you need not be a techie to circumvent DRM. One only needs the ability to access the Internet and use a search engine to find a crack made by someone who is technically savvy and has posted that information. So the only people who cannot perform this task are those who are "technophobic". There are certain people who are just honest enough to elect not to bypass DRM technology but of course those people would abide whether or not there was any barriers to cross in order to bypass DRM.

What is the alternative? DRM exists because companies are always competing with each other, and at the same time battling the public to ensure that they get payed for their product. If these companies weren't getting money the quality of available products would diminish drastically.

So what needs to happen to change this? It almost seems as though this issue is a proxy for the struggle between the ideals of capitalism and communism. If all the tech companies cooperated with each other there wouldn't be competing media formats that you'd have to make a gamble on which one would take off. One example of this would be blue-ray discs versus HD-DVD. But at the same time if they all cooperated with each other they would essentially have a monopoly and be able to stick the consumer with whatever price and conditions they wanted. This why we have anti-trust laws.

I believe that even though much of this DRM technology is amazingly frustrating, it's the struggle between various companies and consumers/digital pirates that drives the creation of new technology.