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