2 Great Posts on DRM

I was doing a reference question and in the course of finding the answer I found 2 great posts on DRM:

• What web 2.0 could teach Warner Music’s Eric Bronfman posted by Alan Graham on Tales from the Web 2.0 Frontier
• Good Job Jobs posted by Collin Douma on Radical Trust

I will be reading both these posts again more carefully tonight or tomorrow as I only had time to quickly scan them while on the desk. Here are a few highlights that made me know in an instant that they are bookmark worthy:

Graham states at the outset of his post:

In the Web 2.0 world everything makes or breaks on interoperability…or sharing. Sharing of thoughts, ideas, media, code, and work. If any point that openness is constricted, the whole system breaks down. Without this environment there would be no mashups, and many of the online services we rely on today would not exist.
Just imagine if all that open interoperability went away and we were back to the old days of closed APIs and closed systems. That's what DRM does.

Then just before his call for action, asks a crucial question:

Steve Jobs claims he wants to eliminate DRM. The music executives claim to want what's best for the consumer and their bottom line. These two things are not mutually exclusive. How about trusting your customers instead of assuming that every one of us is a criminal?

Douma, along the same lines, opens his post with this:

Let’s be frank for a moment. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is antitrust and anti-radical trust. Personally, I’ve never been a fan of the iTunes music store because of its DRM. Why should you pay $1 for a track loaded with DRM when you can download it for free from a torrent with no restrictions at all? Why should anyone pay to be restricted?

And concludes with this:

This week’s call from Steve Jobs is long overdue. I hope that more visionaries like this guy can convince the world that there is more money to be made in trusting people than there is in restricting them.