DRM – Driving us to piracy?

Dan Wallach tipped me off to a Times article explaining Hollywood’s latest effort to get consumers to buy new DRM-wrapped videos. Danielle Levitas, an analyst at IDC, remarked “The market desperately needs this, but in some senses it is already moving past it toward rental of content over ownership.”

I think to most consumers of digital media, this is a bit of an oxymoron.  The studios will be the first to admit that they see consumers as only licensing content (especially digital)–never really owning it. Can one ever really own DRM protected content?  I may have a library full of DRM protected music in my iTunes library, but despite the move to iTunes plus, something interesting has happened. A number of songs I “bought” cannot be upgraded, even though they are available in the store.

With lousy customer service like this (…make that customer service based in restrictive copyright policies), is there any wonder consumers are becoming slow to “buy” DRM protected media. Strangely enough, those who download “unauthorized copies” of their media don’t have these sorts of problems.