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Arnold Kling has a Ph.D. in economics from MIT; founded homefair.com, one of the very first commercial websites, in 1994; separated from Homefair in January 2000 after it was sold to Homestore; is author of Under the Radar: Starting Your Internet Business without Venture Capital, and is an essayist. Send comments to us at econ@corante.com

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February 05, 2004

DRM

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Posted by Arnold

Doc Searls passes along a question from Phil Windley.


Suppose you'd been asked to address the CTO organization of a major (over 125,000 employees) company on digital rights management. What would you tell them?

I'd tell them that with every iteration of Moore's Law it gets easier to make money by sharing information and harder to make money by hiding information. That makes DRM a loser.

In my book for entrepreneurs, I talk about the importance of the 30 mile-an-hour wind. In baseball, if the wind were that strong toward right field, you are much better off trying to hit with the wind than going to left. Trying to use DRM to control content is like trying to hit against a 30 mile-an-hour wind. It's not impossible, but it's very unpromising.

Comments (1) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: intellectual property


COMMENTS

1. Stratus on February 6, 2004 10:57 PM writes...

You obviously haven't been the victim of $100 million in losses in a single incident due to the premature leakage of a product roadmap to a competitor...

Yes, a determined leaker can still give away secrets in an empty parking garage in the dead of night, but DRM makes leaking complex technical details a lot harder, and makes tracking down the "last known authorized person" a lot easier.

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