DRM too shall pass

As the realization sinks in that you don't actually buy music from iTunes, you just rent it until your computer crashes, bloggers are making dire predictions about a world where DRM eliminates the possibility of owning digital content. While I agree that Apple's DRM is a vile scheme that delivers much less than users expect, I don't see this as an inevitable downward slide. I remember when software was copy-protected in the early Eighties. In those pre-CD days all software was delivered on inherently unreliable floppy disks. Users were forced to insert the original disk every time they wanted to start a program. To make matters worse, you could only run one program at a time in DOS or CP/M, so users were forced to swap floppies in and out as they moved between applications. Within a few years these "key disks" started to fail and users found themselves unable to run their programs or access their data. The backlash forced all but a small fraction of software companies to abandon this model and accept piracy as a fact of life. Did they do this out of sympathy for their beleaguered users? No, they were forced to make the change by competitors who found that they could make a lack of copy-protection into a competitive strategy. The other forces that killed copy-protection were corporations and the Department of Defense, which refused to be dependent on software that they couldn't back-up.

Apple's iTunes music store is now a little over two and a half years old, about the same length of time as the copy-protection phase for software, and once again users are beginning to recognize the evils of the present system. I'm not suggesting that music downloads will go back to being free, but it is clear that a competitve advantage is opening up for any music publisher that is willing to abandon the present DRM model. That will never happen with the greedy music industry you say? It is precisely because businesses are profit oriented that they end up obeying the demands of their users. They may end up kicking and screaming, but they will be dragged away from DRM.