Sony drm fiasco good for digital music

Derek Slater has been adding his two cents worth to the fall out from the Sony drm problems.

"DRM proponents often argue that DRM's limitations will never be unacceptably invasive or strict, because consumer desires will never allow it. If one music supplier uses DRM in a way that is too restrictive, another supplier will exploit that opportunity, offering music with less restrictions and drawing consumers away. In sum, the competitive market solves all.

And what do you need to get a competitive, efficient market? Full information. Perfect information and perfectly competitive markets don't exist outside of textbooks, but we'd like to get as close as possible to those goals.

If consumers come away from the Sony debacle deciding to never buy another DRMed CD again, that's the market at work. To the extent this provokes consumers to be more critical when buying any DRMed product, and they reject DRMed products on that basis, that's the market at work...

Sony CD DRM certainly is an extreme example of the harm DRM can do as well as a situation in which people buying DRMed content without fully understanding the restrictions. However, all the major online music services are misleading in the way they advertise their services, obscuring how restrictive their DRM actually is. We should hope that consumers come away from this scandal more critical about DRM in general; if they decide to purchase music from the online music services, they should do so knowing what they're buying.