Can I Write Like Robert X. Cringely?
Suddenly, the digital rights management debate has become clear to me. Not surprisingly, at its core is a knotted conflation of several ideas and concepts, and I don't think that conflation is accidental. Let me start by clarifying something. Artists, record companies, movie studios, and broadcasters actually play a number of roles in their effort to supply you with arts and entertainment, and those roles fall into three distinct categories: creation, manufacture, and distribution. Creation is writing and recording music or shooting a movie or television show; manufacture is pressing records, CDs, and DVDs and producing the attendant packaging; and distribution is shipping media to stores, showing movies in theaters, or broadcasting television shows.
Some of these functions are worth a great deal to most consumers. They would be happy to pay musicians for writing and recording music, to pay bandwidth providers for the digital distribution of entertainment to their homes, or to pay movie theaters for the provision of a large screen on which to watch movies. But many of these functions are worthless to a growing number of consumers. They would rather not pay for the manufacture of jewel cases and cellophane, the promotion of boy bands and summer blockbusters, or the broadcast infrastructure of commercial networks. Each consumer will have their own list of what they would pay for and what they would rather not pay for.
However, the entertainment conglomerates are engaged in the classic strategy of bundling. As a result, consumers are unable to buy, say, the right to listen to a recording and the bandwidth to have that recording delivered to their homes without also paying for the jewel case, cellophane, and promotion. That is, listeners can't pay three or four dollars for the right to hear an album whenever they want--they have to pay fifteen or twenty dollars for the CD, packaging, and travel and entertainment expenses for record company executives. This is a business model, and there's no reason that it shouldn't be allowed to compete against other business models in the marketplace. And that's exactly what would be happening if the record industry weren't a collusive oligopoly seeking to protect its business model with legislation rather than economic logic.
All of the arguments about fair use, encryption, etc. are a distraction from the entertainment congolomerates' attempt to subtly convince the public that their business model is the only way by which entertainment can legally be produced and distributed (for instance, that it's not legally possible to compensate creators without paying manufacturers and distributors). Their opponents who seek methods to circumvent the laws are only helping to reinforce that view of the world. Rather than ceding the realm within the law to the conglomerates (who really don't belong there), they should instead be focusing on shaping that realm and advancing other viable business models within it.
7:47:18 AM 
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