[...] I argued that it would be deucedly difficult to continue to apply the Adam Smithian economic principles regarding the relationship between scarcity and value to any products that could be reproduced and distributed infinitely at zero cost. I proposed, moreover, that, to the extent that anything might be scarce in such an economy, it would be attention, and that invisibility would be a bad strategy for increasing attention. That, in other words, familiarity might convey more value to information that scarcity would.

To understand what DRM does to artists, you need to understand how copyright and technology interact. Copyright is inherently technological, since the things it addresses—copying, transmitting, and so on—are inherently technological.

But the Supreme Court ruled against Hollywood in 1984, when it determined that any device capable of a substantial non-infringing use was legal. In other words, "We don't buy this Boston Strangler business: if your business model can't survive the emergence of this general-purpose tool, it's time to get another business-model or go broke."

Piano rolls didn't sound as good as the music of a skilled pianist:
but they scaled better.

Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we've changed copyright. Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a utilitarian one. There's nothing moral about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there's nothing immoral about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They're just the best way of balancing out so that people's physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings.

Technology that disrupts copyright does so because it simplifies and cheapens creation, reproduction and distribution. The existing copyright businesses exploit inefficiencies in the old production, reproduction and distribution system, and they'll be weakened by the new technology. But new technology always gives us more art with a wider reach: that's what tech is for.

[...]

Which means that today's copyright--the thing that DRM nominally props up--didn't come down off the mountain on two stone tablets. It was created in living memory to accommodate the technical reality created by the inventors of the previous generation. [...]

I'm a Microsoft customer. Like millions of other Microsoft customers, I want a player that plays anything I throw at it, and I think that you are just the company to give it to me.

Yes, this would violate copyright law as it stands, but Microsoft has been making tools of piracy that change copyright law for decades now. Outlook, Exchange and MSN are tools that abet widescale digital infringement.

More significantly, IIS and your caching proxies all make and serve copies of documents without their authors' consent, something that, if it is legal today, is only legal because companies like Microsoft went ahead and did it and dared lawmakers to prosecute.

Microsoft stood up for its customers and for progress, and
won so decisively that most people never even realized that
there was a fight.

This technology, usually called "Digital Rights Management"
(DRM) proposes to make your computer worse at copying some
of the files on its hard-drive or on other media. Since all computer
operations involve copying, this is a daunting task—as
security expert Bruce Schneier has said, "Making bits harder
to copy is like making water that's less wet."

The Supreme Court threw out these arguments in a 1984 5-4
decision, the "Betamax Decision." This decision held that the
VCR was legal because it was "capable of sustaining a substantially non-infringing use." That means that if you make a technology that your customers can use legally, you're not on the hook for the illegal stuff they do.

This principle guided the creation of virtually every piece of
IT invented since: the Web, search engines, YouTube, Blogger,
Skype, ICQ, AOL, MySpace… You name it, if it's possible to violate
copyright with it, the thing that made it possible is the
Betamax principle.

Unfortunately, the Supremes shot the Betamax principle in
the gut two years ago, with the Grokster decision. This decision
says that a company can be found liable for its customers'
bad acts if they can be shown to have "induced" copyright
infringement. So, if your company advertises your product for
an infringing use, or if it can be shown that you had infringement
in mind at the design stage, you can be found liable for
your customers' copying. [...]

The futurists were just plain wrong. An "information economy"
can't be based on selling information. Information technology
makes copying information easier and easier. The more
IT you have, the less control you have over the bits you send
out into the world. It will never, ever, EVER get any harder to
copy information from here on in. The information economy is
about selling everything except information.

The US traded its manufacturing sector's health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong.

But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn't know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world's copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check.

It'll never work. It can never work. [...]