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Tim Lee

Bill Gates Says DRM has “Huge Problems”

Bill Gates’s thoughts on DRM, courtesy of a rough summary by Michael Arrington:

Gates said that no one is satisfied with the current state of DRM, which “causes too much pain for legitmate buyers” while trying to distinguish between legal and illegal uses. He says no one has done it right, yet. There are “huge problems” with DRM, he says, and “we need more flexible models, such as the ability to “buy an artist out for life” (not sure what he means). He also criticized DRM schemes that try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific.

His short term advice: “People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then.”

Keep in mind that Gates heads a company that has an R&D budget in the billions, and they’ve been trying to do DRM right for close to a decade now. Yet he frankly admits that all the money has been for naught. A decade from now, people will look back at the DRM and e-voting fads of the ’00s and ask “what were we thinking?”

December 14, 2006 | Comments |

  • Gates is saying that DRM should be *improved* rather than jettisoned. The technologies and business models surrounding DRM are young, and they have to mature before they function optimally for both consumers and copyright holders. Personally, I think there should be more flexibility in DRM schemes.
  • Doug Lay
    The best way to get "DRM" to improve is to subject it to the full force of the marketplace and the technological state of the art, by removing ineffectual protectionist legislation like the DMCA anti-circumvention clause.

    Personally, I think "DRM" will always be around to some extent, but will increasingly be limited to high-end niche products (think of how software dongles are now mostly used in products costing thousands of dollars a seat). Other folks will of course have differing views on this. Let's let the market sort things out, by getting rid of dumb, failed regulation.
  • Charles
    Doug: I agree completely with you. Software is probably the best example of a digital product that's of comparable size to a music CD or DVD, and that has made (or is making) the switch from being distributed on physical media to being distributed electronically. There were no DRM protections in the law until the DMCA and, still, piracy has not killed the market.
  • By "buy an artist out for life" Gates means that we need mechanisms to enable an artist's audience to collect a lump sum to offer in exchange for the artist's copyright (lifetime 'rights') to their work.

    In other words, the audience buys the artist's art (instead of copies thereof).

    Such mechanisms are what I'm working on.
  • I wonder if there has been any effort by companies that leverage DRM to solicit feedback from customers on how to design optimal DRM systems that provide consumer experience more flexibility while preserving viable business models for the firm.
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