Schinckel.net

John Gruber is well worth keeping in your feed list. Not only is the stuff he writes generally entertaining, on the ball and well written, but he finds other good stuff too.

Take, for example, his recent comment on How Apple is Changing DRM. Which, let’s face it, I wouldn’t have come across otherwise.

The flip side, though, is that DRM rules the day for paid video content.

From Daring Fireball Linked List: May 2008

I think that (tech-savvy) people are more accepting to have DRM applied to video content for a couple of reasons. First, you are less likely to keep watching the same movie over and over again. You are likely to listen to a piece of music over and over again. People will rent movies, either on DVD or from an online source, for this exact reason. By definition, rented movies must have DRM, else you have effectively bought them.

The second, and I think more important reason is to do with viewing modes of video. Most video is watched on a single device - at this stage still the device it was bought with. If you purchase a video on your computer, it’s probably to watch it there. Or, you have purchased/rented something as part of a system and plan to watch it on, say, an Apple TV, which uses the same DRM system as iTunes on your computer.

Perhaps in the future, as people have more video devices that can view the data they buy or rent, we will find less of an acceptance of DRM.

A third reason that just struck me is that traditionally, music was sold without DRM, even whilst in a digital format. Digital video has never really been sold without DRM. Even if it’s trivial to disable the DRM in DVDs and make copies, say to use on a device that doesn’t have a DVD drive.