Socially Speaking

During our interactive podcast with Cory Doctorow, the first question asked of him was one we think he felt very comfortable answering. As for the conversation, we’ll be posting transcripts here, and of course the audio will be up on Waxxi shortly.

Question, (via email) from Karen in Chicago:

Will DRM die, and if it does, what will be the conduit?

Cory’s profoundly simple answer, was this:

I think, ultimately the force that will drive DRM out of the marketplace — is the marketplace. There is no market for DRM. There is no customer who woke up this morning wishing that three was a way that she could do less with her music.

Here’s his answer, in its entirety:

“Well, I think DRM is definitely reeling. I was just preparing some stuff for the class I teach tomorrow, and I was going through Siva Vaidhyanathan’s wonderful book, The Anarchist in the Library, and he reminded me of something I’d totally forgotten about.

There was a guy in Germany who bought this CD in 2003 or 2004, and it wouldn’t play on his computer because it had DRM on it. He wrote EMI a letter saying ‘I bought this CD and it won’t work!’ EMI sent him back this incredibly awful note saying, ‘Look, thief! You better get used to it, because within months every single CD sold in the entire world will have DRM on it, and there’s no going back now.’

Now, the interesting thing about this is that EMI has just announced that they’re planning to a make a huge portion of catalogue available without any DRM at all, just as mp3s. Not just taking DRM off their CDs but actually just selling mp3s on the Internet. So that’s pretty amazing.

And, I think ultimately the force that will drive DRM out of the marketplace – is the marketplace. There is no market for DRM. There is no customer who woke up this morning wishing that there a way that she could do less with her music. So, to the extent that these companies have shareholders, and these shareholders have got their eyes on the ball, they aren’t very happy about the fact that these companies aren’t making music available in the form that consumers want to buy it in.

Companies that are making music available in better forms are selling more, and ultimately all of these companies have to compete with the free market – the infringing market. iTunes has shown that people will buy stuff even if you can get it for free.

So, you can compete with free, but it seems pretty implausible to think that you can compete with free by making something that sucks. It’s really hard to compete with anything if you start with a product that sucks.”

The audio really brings Cory’s words to life, along with his passion and intense intellectualism. Next up: Boing Boing, Steve Jobs, Google Book Search, and more.