> From: m...@sap.com (Martin Rex) > > DRM system are evil in any way you look at it. > > Originally, copyright was a conceived as a temporary (50yrs) monopoly. > The protection period has in recent years been prolonged in many years > to at least 70 years. > [...]
I read an analysis somewhere that pointed out that DRM is evil in considerably different ways than one naively thinks. You tend to think of DRM as a way of enforcing copyright. But the real power of DRM is in effectively eliminating the "right of first sale". Currently, once you've bought a copy of a copyrighted work, you have bought a physical object, the "copy", and that ownership gives you a bundle containing a considerable number of rights, including the right to sell the copy to someone else. The real economic purpose of DRM is to be able to subdivide the bundle of rights traditionally associated with the "copy" so that they can be sold and priced individually. Even better, since the "copy" may no longer be transferrable between customers, different customers can be charged different prices for the same thing. The net effect is that the work creators can get larger aggregate sales for the creation than before. Which may or may not be a good thing. Wikipedia has a long article, "Price discrimination", on this. Dale