If you’ve ever had trouble playing a DVD while traveling, transferring songs from your iPod or watching TiVo-recorded shows on your computer, you’ve seen the dark side of digital rights management. DRM is meant to protect media publishers from wanton copying while still letting consumers fairly use the music, movies and other material they’ve bought.
As both sides have quickly learned, it’s a tough balancing act. Few companies are good at it, and none have gotten it perfect. DRM makes possible region-coded DVDs, which stops European DVD players from showing videos meant for the American market. That’s why it’s pointless to take along your video rentals on an overseas vacation.
Apple Computer uses it in the iTunes Music Store to placate nervous music industry executives. But DRM makes it hard to transfer songs to your new laptop.
TiVo’s new ToGo service scrambles shows so you won’t share them over the Internet, protecting the profits of HBO and Blockbuster. It also limits how you can record the shows to watch later on DVD. Michael Miron, a digital media consultant and former CEO of ContentGuard, knows this tension all too well. ContentGuard, which licenses DRM technology, wants to create an industrywide standard for protected content. The idea: make it easier for consumers to play their movies and music on a range of gizmos from different manufacturers.
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