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Digital Rights and Wrongs

If you haven't read Fredric Paul's rant about Why Everyone Hates The Music Industry you should check it out. Fred is reacting to a Forrester Research study that actually uses Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' famous five stages of death and dying as the framework for its analysis, but he goes further, and I think he's absolutely right.

I'm a pretty typical consumer. I'm not in favor of piracy, but the entertainment industry -- the recording companies and movie studios and TV networks have got to meet me halfway on this one. Fred's point, that us consumers don't want "rights," we want to own what we buy, is right on. The problem seems to me to be that the entertainment industry isn't just trying to hold the line against the easy theft of music and movies made possible by the Internet, it's trying to pick up the line and move it so that consumers have fewer rights than we had before.

Apple's introduction of its video iPod underscores the problem. The gadget will hold up to 160 hours of video, but what does Steve Jobs have to offer? Some Pixar short subjects and Disney and ABC TV shows. Disney's arm is the only one he could twist.

The record companies are in rebellion over the success of iTunes, because Apple is making money they want for themselves, and the film and TV companies are unwilling to release any properties until they're guaranteed total control of the money.

This isn't an entertainment industry, it's an entertainment-prevention industry. It's crawled into hiding and pulled the hole in after itself rather than work with its customers. It deserves to die in there.

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