DRM removes consumer choice and replaces it with copyright holder choice. You may have the best service or product in the world, but without licensing, which today means DRM, you won’t have any content. When services like this fail, the blame is laid at DRM’s feet. This doesn’t explain the success of some DRM schemes like DVDs, Rhapsody, iTunes, etc. The problem is not that DRM sucks, but that the copyright holders usually can’t pick a service that consumers want. The choice has been secretly moved from the consumer to the copyright holder. Though the consumer still has free will(yes/no to a purchasing decision) it is limited by the copyright holder.
This really isn’t new. If authors or publisher only release hard cover, tape, LP, etc. formats and not alternatives like paperback, CD, tape then that’s just the way it is. Technology and related services are a little more different, because the competing “format” (service & products) involve much more than size and shape. They go to use. Can you play a song on your mp3 player at the gym, can you keep your music library when you get a new computer, can you play that movie download on any TV in your house, etc. If something isn’t useful consumers won’t buy it or won’t buy much of it.
DRM is more equivalent to releasing a hard cover version of a book that evaporates in 3 years or disappears when you leave the living room and go into the bedroom. As a society we would never accept this, because we’ve grown accustomed to buying a book, reading it anywhere, reselling it, writing in it, and more. DRM gets away with this, because of technology. Right now people don’t really understand it.
By people I mean the publisher and the consumer. The publisher hears, “This will keep them from stealing from you”. The consumer hears, “Buy or don’t that’s just they way it is.” The Technologist understands that a 100% fool proof DRM is possible. But he’s got to make a living too and if someone will pay for it. So he tells each the opposite. To the publisher, “They’re stealing more, pay us to fix it”. To the consumer, “Here’s how to steal, click here to Donate”.
The only resolution is one that fairly balances the capabilities that consumers are familiar with to restrictions that satisfy copyright holders. It’s unreasonable to say your music library vanishes when you buy a new computer. Or that you have to move a computer between each TV in the house to watch a movie download when there are perfectly adequate solutions (DVD) available. Laptops cost $500+. DVD players cost $50.