thwartedefforts

Roughly Drafted usually has some interesting things to say, but gets it wrong when it comes to DRM:

When DRM is created to serve the needs of both producers and consumers, it works to create markets; DRM creates a product that can be sold, creating demand for content that would otherwise be unavailable.
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Without DRM acting to turn content into a product that can be sold in the same manner as other physical goods, there is no market because there is no way to establish a price using supply and demand.

If (I emphasize the if) DRM creates a product that can be sold, then this increases supply. Demand doesn’t just suddenly appear when something can be sold, when supply appears. Creative works have two things working against their supply side: the authors’ and creators’ drive to create and the infinite replicatability of bits. The lack of scaracity doesn’t change that. And it is useless to talk about price in this context, yes.

Techdirt has an ongoing series of posts about how lack of scaracity doesn’t mean anything new for economics. The problem is that the goods and services that once did map very neatly to the supply/demand economic curves do not necessarily do so anymore. This doesn’t mean an industry, like the music industry, is in trouble, it just means that, historically, the most obvious method of extracting a profit, forcing bits into physical form and selling those forms, no longer applies. The music industry may need to reinvent itself as a service industry (or find something else that they do/provide that does map to the supply/demand model) in order to still remain relevant.

Dirt farmers are welcome to try to sell dirt, but such a dirt-selling business will run into problems once everyone realizes they are standing on dirt. One would be stupid to enter the dirt selling business after everyone has already realized this. Just because you were selling dirt before everyone realized scarity was zero doesn’t mean you, or your product, deserve any kind of artifical protection. And providing such protections, either via laws, technology or artifical scarcity, produces an inefficient market. And an inefficient market is quite anti-capitalistic.

This Talkcrunch podcast about Adobe’s Apollo is interesting. Looks like interesting technology, in as much as rehashes of current capabilities and repackaging of current technologies are interesting. But what strikes me about this podcast is that, in 2006, there are people, presumably technically inclined, still dealing with email syncing between mutliple machines and having off-line access. Near the beginning of the podcast (9 minutes), that is one example of trying to handle on-line and off-line access that, presumably, a properly written email application written in Apollo could solve. There has to be a better example. The protocols and products that deal with this have been around for a while. They are IMAP and email applications that support working off-line. I read my email regularly from four different machines using a variety of different applications and operating systems using these technologies.