DRM doesn’t work, right? Copyright is a failed project, yes? And, of course, information wants to be free. Well, maybe not. Reading the tea leaves on the future of copyright in the digital networked age leads to contradictory conclusions. We may be witnessing the beginning of a copyright comeback and content producers should not sign off on the death of copyright just yet.

Mark Helprin, US novelist and journalist, recently stirred the anti-copyright hornets’ nest with his New York Times opinion piece (20 May 2007). Helprin argued that copyright should be like rights in physical property and be granted in perpetuity to creators instead of being limited to a set term.

A day later at least 10 pages (including discussion) of refuting text had snapped into existence on Lawrence Lessig’s wiki - see ‘Against perpetual copyright’ - and Helprin’s rant had unleashed indignant quivers across the blogsphere:

• http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=6581
• http://chadaldeman.blogspot.com/2007/05/this-blog-is-mine-forever.html
• http://www.theittlist.com/site/ittlist/ind/4328/

Just three days earlier the BBC news ran an article about the push in the UK for an extension to the current 50 year term for performance copyright for music and songs. It appears that UK pop stars from the 50s and 60s are living longer than expected and a facing what is argued to be a premature end to their performance royalty streams. Who ever thought that Keith Richards would last this long? Interestingly, one of the main arguments in support of such an extension is that the US term of 70 years could lead to artists migrating there at a time when creative industries are increasingly important to economic welfare.

Perhaps the biggest development in digital content distribution so far in 2007 is the emergence of a new breed of online video distributors who are starting operations on the premise that copyright and strong DRM is fundamental to a sustainable business. The leading example appears to be Joost, a UK-based company started by the founders of Kazaa and Skype (which was purchased in 2006 by eBay for US$2.6 billion) that raised US$45 million in venture capital in May 2007.

Joost represents a striking departure from the YouTube-UGC-copyright-free-zone business model. Joost’s technology puts a proprietary video player onto the user’s PC with DRM built in. Joost is negotiating deals with content owners and presumably one of the first things they say in meetings is that ‘we will protect your content’. Companies with similar business models are appearing rapidly, for example, Babelgum and Move Networks.

In the geeky domains of Slashdot and similar, copyright is evil, DRM is dead and ‘information wants to be free’. And it is true that the near simultaneous (in long run historical terms) arrival of content digitization and the global electronic network represent an epochal challenge to those who earn their income from copyright assets.

But from a longer run perspective these developments are nothing new but rather additional steps in the long downward march of the costs of reproducing and distributing content. In 1700 one ream of paper cost $8,000 in terms of today’s dollars. The arrival of the photocopier massively reduced the cost of reproducing printed text and was predicted to precipitate the ‘death of the book’. Similarly, some thought the cassette standard developed by Philips in the 1960s would lead to the demise of pop music through unrestricted copying and sharing. In fact, copyright owners have been in a 400 year long arms race with technological advances that make copying and distribution ever cheaper and easier.

Nonetheless, events of the last decade or so have shown that DRM is perhaps ultimately impractical when content is embodied in physical media (CDs and DVDs) that are played on dedicated (home entertainment) hardware. These embodied dedicated systems require a long term commitment by vendors (of content and hardware) to a single DRM standard and once the disks and the players are ‘out there’ it is practically impossible to update the DRM standard should it be cracked.

But once the content player moves into the PC as a piece of easily updateable software and users are satisfied with content ‘living’ in digital form on their hard disks, the DRM game changes. DRM key and even systems can be updated on an ongoing basis as they are compromised. In fact, companies such as Joost may well be building into their distribution and player software easy DRM update functionality as a core feature. The DRM arms race cycle time gets shorter but the arms race goes on.

The fact that multiple companies are appearing bodes well for competition and therefore consumers. No one would ever think of running five or 10 video players in their living room but; 10 video players in software? Why not?

This kind of competition is just what is needed to enable the content cornucopia of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail and will empower content producers and owners to choose their business strategy and rather than having one thrust upon them. Let a thousand business models bloom.

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