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?”
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