DRM辩论已死，双方都赢了

As a music journalist for MTV who covered the rise and fall of Napster and was therefore witness to some of the music industry’s more ham-handed tactics -- still best personified by Metallica’s Lars Ulrich and best satirized by the animated clip “Napster坏。” which come to think of it was one of the first viral videos -- I couldn’t help but sympathize with music fans who wanted easy access to their favorite tunes without forking over ridiculous amounts for bloated CDs.

 

事实上, 美国唱片工业协会打得太差了, demonizing fans while at the same time perpetuating a system that too often robbed its artists blind, that I ended up being something of a copyright minimalist. I was never so naive as to think that music or any other art should be free for the taking, but when I saw firsthand the kinds of contracts that artists were all-to-often coerced into signing -- not to mention the ways in which absurd licensing requirements just about killed innovation in hip-hop -- well, let’s just say that my heart bled a little less for Sony than it might have otherwise.

 

写为 流媒体 for the past decade has made me no more sympathetic to the multinational conglomerates for whom video is nothing more than “product” (or, 如果他们觉得自己特别慈善, “内容”), but at least the movie and television industry has shown a desire not to repeat the music industry’s mistakes. It hasn’t always been successful -- do you actually know any one who’s ponied up $5 a pop to get digital copies of their DVDs via UltraViolet? -- but at least they’re paying lip service to the fact that consumers should be able to access content they’ve purchased on multiple devices.

 

HBO Go is a perfect example of a service built with both viewers and rightsholders in mind. 如果你通过有线电视提供商为HBO付费, you can get access to all HBO original content on virtually any device you have, 从平板电脑到游戏机再到机顶盒. Sure, it’s still a walled garden approach, and it’s frustrating for those of us who’ve cut cable. But since HBO is one of the few entertainment companies that actually built its brand by focusing on top-notch content, 它的战略毋庸置疑.

 

更令人振奋的是, 虽然, is that rightsholders across the board finally seem to have woken up to the fact that if they price their content right and make it relatively easy to rent or purchase, 大多数人宁愿付费也不愿盗版. The obstacles to making content readily and cost-effectively available have rarely been technical ones; there’s no shortage of effective rights-management technologies available. 而, 它们是经济的和哲学的, reflecting old-media thinking that was simply anachronistic in a new media world.

 

Those philosophical barriers weren’t only in the minds of the rightsholders, either. In March, Thorin Klosowski penned an excellent summary for Lifehacker called “为什么我停止盗版，开始为媒体付费?” that outlined both the reasons why people pirated and the reasons why many have stopped. One of the key paradigm shifts he describes is that consumers no longer feel the compulsion to own the media they consume, 催生了Spotify等服务, 网飞公司, 和亚马逊Prime会员. Consumers also better understand that while catalog titles might be available for next to nothing as part of streaming services, they’ll have to pay a premium if they want to watch (or sometimes listen) to blockbuster content on the day it’s released.

 

例如，这不是一个完美的系统, you still need to be careful what device you use to purchase content in the iTunes store if you want to be sure you can view it on all your devices -- but for most of us, 这比我们想象的要好, 多亏了相对无摩擦的DRM, 明智地应用.