Digital rights management: desirable, inevitable, and almost irrelevant

The title of this presentation is a slight modification of that of an earlier lecture on a closely related topic [5]. It reflects a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one, of the general thesis that Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies will continue to play only a modest role in the future of ecommerce. DRM is attractive for several related reasons. Content providers feel they can get more control over their wares. Such control is comforting in general, and could enable new methods of charging, which might provide greater revenues. More generally, the Internet is enabling sellers to find out much more about buyers’ ability and willingness to pay, and also (through DRM and other techniques) is providing sellers with tools to control usage (and thus prevent arbitrage), leading to unprecedented opportunities and incentives for price discrimination [8, 9]. Thus it should not be surprising that extensive efforts have gone into research, development, and deployment of DRM. Yet the record of DRM so far is not too inspiring. And it has been uninspiring from the very beginning. It has been argued that the concentration on a pervasive form of DRM was one of the main flaws that hindered Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu, the first hypertext system. And a rising chorus of voices (including Steve Jobs of Apple) is urging the content industry to give up or at least relax its insistence on DRM. The lecture summarized here will review the arguments of DRM skeptics. This abstract provides a very brief overview of some of the main points. References are given to my papers, where those points are explained in more detail, and citations are provided to the extensive literature on the subject.