How to Achieve Digital Nirvana

How can we get to a world where online music, movies, and video are widely

available, not just tentative experiments? This tantalizing vision is largely

stalled, though not because of inadequate technology. Instead progress is held

up by warfare among the entertainment, computer, and consumer-electronics

industries with lawsuits and lobbying their weapons of choice. To get to the

digital future that will benefit everyone, this has to end. But progress will

require important concessions on all sides.

Consumers, including the folks who’ve enjoyed free music from Napster and

its successors, will have to realize that unless the owners of content get paid,

there won’t be any content. In the future, digital-rights management, a fancy

term for copy protection, will limit what you can do with downloaded music and

video.

The entertainment industry, for its part, must realize that it cannot use new

technology to take away rights that customers have long taken for granted, such

as the ability to make copies for personal use. And the leading technology and

consumer electronics companies, which have mostly sat on the sidelines afraid to

offend either the entertainment industry or their customers, must play an active

role in developing new standards. For starters, I think everyone should

subscribe to some basic principles for a new digital world.

First, the right of fair use must be preserved. Consumers who buy music or

videos should be able to watch or listen where they want, using the player of

their choice. That includes the right to copy downloaded music into MP3 players

or a TV show into SonicBLUE’s upcoming Personal Video Player. Consumers must

realize that fair-use rights are limited.

Second, the entertainment industry has to realize that copy protection can

never be perfect. As retailers know, a certain amount of pilferage is a cost of

doing business. The trick is to keep the losses manageable. By demanding

perfection, the entertainment industry is just throwing up roadblocks to digital

delivery.

Making digital-rights management work for everyone is a technical challenge.

It is hard to develop a system that allows the downloading of content to

different devices but limits the ability to create copies of songs or movies for

others. But I’m sure that the smart people working on it can design an

effective system.

The best way for this to happen is for everyone to support open standards,

openly arrived at. The entertainment industry’s attempts to develop

proprietary schemes have been disasters. A big question is: Who can lead the

effort to develop a sensible approach to digital rights? Consumer-electronics

companies have no history of cooperative standards efforts and a long tradition

of format wars. Microsoft clearly wants to lead, but too many others fear the

colossus of Redmond’s real goal is to extend its Windows monopoly to rights

management. The best candidate might be chipmaker Intel, which has taken a

strong public stand against the entertainment industry’s more extreme

positions while working alongside it, particularly with AOL Time Warner, to

develop hardware solutions. In the end, both consumers and industry will have to

give up something to get a lot. Consumers will lose some freedom to make copies,

but will gain much richer online choices. Industry will give up some control and

will have to accept some losses to piracy, but could gain vast new markets–as

it did after the Supreme Court rejected its attempt to bar the sale of VCRs. It

will take some time and a lot of goodwill, but the result could be a win-win

outcome.

By Stephen H Wildstrom in

BusinessWeek. Copyright 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc