Friday, June 18, 2004

Cory on DRM

by Suw on June 18, 2004

Cory publishes his Microsoft Research DRM talk from June 17th, which really is a must read. A snippet for you:

When MP3 rolled around and Sony's walkman customers were clamoring for a solid-state MP3 player, Sony let its music business-unit run its show: instead of making a high-capacity MP3 walkman, Sony shipped its Music Clips, low-capacity devices that played brain-damaged DRM formats like Real and OpenAG. They spent good money engineering “features” into these devices that kept their customers from freely moving their music back and forth between their devices. Customers stayed away in droves.
Today, Sony is dead in the water when it comes to walkmen. The market leaders are poky Singaporean outfits like Creative Labs — the kind of company that Sony used to crush like a bug, back before it got borged by its entertainment unit — and PC companies like Apple.
That's because Sony shipped a product that there was no market demand for. No Sony customer woke up one morning and said, “Damn, I wish Sony would devote some expensive engineering effort in order that I may do less with my music.” Presented with an alternative, Sony's customers enthusiastically jumped ship.

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BlogTalk wiki and meetups

by Suw on June 18, 2004

If any of you are going to BlogTalk 2.0 in July, there's now a wiki on Joi's site for people to make arrangements.
I'm going to be arriving on 3rd July and departing on the 9th, and am particularly interested in meeting anyone involved in EFF/Creative Commons/copyright/copyleft/DRM issues. Email me or leave a comment here or on the wiki if you want to meet up.

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