David Emery Online

DRM Apocalypse

22 August 2007

The hot topic of the moment seems to again rolled back around to being DRM. The most current talk is revolving around both Universal’s new DRM-less experiment and also Wall-Mart’s selling of MP3s. Wall-Mart’s move (read more on it here) is – to be honest – not massively interesting; it’s simply a signpost of the state of the industry at the moment.

Universal jumping on board the DRM-free train is no less surprising; it’s become pretty obvious that DRM isn’t having any positive impact (and lots of negative PR) and now that EMI have blazed a path Universal can follow suit without having the risk of the first to jump. What is interesting is Universal’s slightly desperate attempts to undermine iTunes, by not extending their DRM-free trial to iTunes and by promoting a new competitor (Gbox).

It’s quite a unique situation where Universal – the biggest record label – can try and deliberately sabotage and compete with the biggest online music retailer (also the 3rd biggest music retailer in the US across all formats). I can’t imagine them setting up physical shops to try and compete with HMV (although in the current physical retail environment that’s probably a good idea).

However, the wheeling and dealing of the majors is not the most interesting DRM story at the moment. That accolade goes to Google, with their shutting down of Google Video. Shutting down Google Video was inevitable the second Google bought YouTube, but now it’s finally coming to pass it’s brought about the first DRM apocalypse.

I may be over-egging the terminology, but it’s still fairly accurate – any video purchased from Google Video (with DRM) will stop working in 6 months. Poof! Your videos are gone – hope you didn’t like watching them. Luckily – after a small ruckus – Google are refunding all purchases but, other then the PR storm that would have ensued, they didn’t have to – they’re just being nice.

This is pretty much the hole in the whole DRM concept: if you can’t trust someone like Google to stick around and keep your DRM’d files working, who can you trust? If, for example, your DRM store goes bust, as opposed to shutting down like Google Video is, you’re hardly likely to get a refund.

That’s it. All your files just stop working.

Of course, they were never really yours to start with.