Could DRM be made Illegal?

An interesting report on DRM has been published by the Institute of Public Policy Research arguing essentially that the way DRM impacts citizens is not for the music industry, but for government to define.

In short, the report notes that the current DRM laws criminalise huge numbers of people in the UK for doing things they have done for years - recording music they already own onto devices they already own. Report author Kay Withers also noted that a law universally not obeyed is very hard to enforce:

"The idea of all-rights reserved doesn't make sense for the digital era and it doesn't make sense to have a law that everyone breaks. To give the IP regime legitimacy it must command public respect."

In effect the IPPR is arguing that DRM is now out of kilter with the public good:

.....the emergence of the internet means that valuable information and content can swiftly be shared with a vast audience of users. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is used by companies to micro-regulate how information and content can be used, and has received blanket legislative protection in most developed countries. The once symbiotic relationship between IPRs and public domain has become increasingly oppositional as a result of these technological changes.

The argument is not new, with organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundationarguing similar points. What is interesting is that an organisation such as the IPPR is making this argument now, as both the UK and EU are re-looking at the issue over the next few months. There seems to be a rising sense in the EU that the DRM content lobby got in first, and now needs to be rolled back, and the first EC hearing this month showed the consumer pushback is far stronger than a few years ago.

In fact, the lessons so far for anyone trying to enforce DRM in the medium term makes for pretty pessimistic reading, so a bit of "realekonomik" re-thinking may be advantageous - especially for an early adopter play. Simply put, the Net Present Value (and thus price) of DRM content must by definition be worth less than clear owned content, and this will eventually come out.

In fact we have argued before that in future no DRM may even be better for sales, simply because the content is out there anyway, so the issue is how to encourage more people to pay for the content.