Digital rights management

There's a simple strategy to integrating digital rights management with your products such that it doesn't negatively affect user experience: Don't use it at all.

Usability issues have been documented in blogs and news articles, but businesses that know their users should have expected these problems. For most consumers, nothing in their experience helps them relate to music files that play only on certain players, or e-books readable only on one computer. Their mental model is the compact disc, which every modern stereo can play, or the print book, which can be lent or resold at will. People don't relate to renting or licensing content. They buy it, and they want to use it as they see fit.

What makes technology attractive is the promise that it will make things faster, easier, cheaper, and better. DRM breaks this promise. True, it was introduced to many media because people were copying and stealing the content. Yet over time this is becoming less of a problem. Hundreds of millions of dollars in Apple iTunes revenue argues that most people will not copy digital music if there's an easy, inexpensive way to purchase it.

While businesses large and small see the importance of DRM-free content to satisfying their customers, it's unfortunate that American colleges and universities are knuckling under. These days, fear of liability prods these institutes into deals with vendors to deliver DRM-crippled music. If you're in business like these, get used to swimming upstream forever, fighting customers' expectations and mental models.

Comments

[James Breeze]

Hi Joshua, I agree with what you are saying! The whole point of creating music is so that others listen to it! So don't stop them! The music industry needs to rethink how it makes money, give everyone the music for free and create another revenue stream... ah, advertising maybe? Breezy

[Joshua]

Hi Breezy, although I'm not certain I agree that recordings should be given away, the industry is finding new revenue sources. Mobile phone ringtones, instant-live concert recordings, integration into video games like Guitar Hero -- technology opens up new opportunities even as it squeezes others.