A new paper by Bill Rosenblatt makes a case for considering digital rights management (DRM) regimes within peer-to-peer (p2p) computing.
Some good historical points, important for a paper working against the grain of intuition: referencing the ICE protocols, and superdistribution. His distinction between fair use, which he finds problematic, and personal use, which he favors ("DRM systems should be able to support a user's reasonable content usage expectations"), is in line with what I'm seeing from the DRM-centered IP models emerging from the recording and movie industries. And he does a fine job in laying out the many problems with DRM implementation.
This offers a parallel approach to the Bollywood-KaZaZ experiment.
I recall a conversation with EFF folk about p2p, Napster style. They compared the music recording industry as it exists to Napster along three dimensions:
1. Making music available to the culture: Napster did this extraordinarily well, surfacing from old collections of vinyl a wealth of music that is not commercially available; RIAA doesn't make a fraction of that music library available to the world.
2. Distribution: Nobody disbutes that digital distribution and p2p online distribution beats CDs. Napster wins again.
3. Compensation: Paying creators to incent them to create; Napster did this not at all, RIAA does it poorly.
There ought to be a way to allow free and creator-controlled p2p distribution to coexist.
Posted by: Howard Rheingold | November 28, 2003 at 19:20