How Publishers Repeated The Same Mistake As Record Labels: DRM Obsession Gave Amazon Dominant Position

from the very-predictable dept - techdirt

One of the more amazing things over the past decade or so is just how clueless legacy content companies are when it comes to the realities of DRM. For years, content creators have misunderstood the issue of online infringement entirely -- assuming that the effort had to be focused on somehow "protecting" works and ratcheting up infringement, rather than giving users more of what they wanted. The dirty secret of DRM is that it does exactly the opposite of what the content companies wanted: rather than protect works, it basically hands all the power in a market to a single tech provider, stripping much of the content companies' abilities to control their own markets.

We saw this in the music market first. Even as Steve Jobs was clear that he thought DRM was a stupid idea for music, he was happy to give the record labels what they "wanted" in the early years: building DRM into the early version of iTunes. Of course, this did absolutely nothing to stop infringement. Because all you need is a single copy to get out in the wild, and then all DRM is completely useless on that particular piece of content. So Apple's DRM did absolutely nothing to stop file sharing... but it did make Apple the most powerful player in the music market. Because the DRM locked people into Apple's platform, and there was no significant competition at the time, once people started using Apple, they were pretty much locked in. And the labels hated it, even though it was their own damn fault in demanding DRM. Eventually, of course, the labels agreed to give up DRM, by which point Apple was already so dominant that no one really challenged their position, though alternatives are finally starting to get more serious.

Three years ago, we noted that book publishers were bizarrely making the exact same mistake with Amazon. Publishers, just like the labels, were so focused on the fear side that they were adamant about having DRM. And, once again, all this has done is lock people into the Kindle platform, and made it (by far) the most dominant player... which people can't really get out of.
Full story at techdirt.