Call an audible

After reading about calling and audible I decided to write a letter to amazon.com. Below is the letter I sent to them about "MP3 Downloads".

At the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference this past winter there was an image that was so obvious to everyone that even though there were proponents of DRM in the audience they laughed when they saw it. The first image was of a sidewalk that led in an indirect path to a library with a dirt path worn through the grass of the more direct path that obviously most people walked down. The second image was the same as the first but there was a chain link fence around the grass and dirt path forcing walkers onto the indirect cement path. The chain link fence is DRM. What those images don't drive home is the difference in digital versus physical. In the physical world it would be a rare person who got wire snippers and cut his way through the fence to the other side. In the digital world it is still the rare person who would do that, but with digital snippers can be given to anyone who wants them. Even if there are only a few hackers that can defeat your DRM, they can create software and send it out to everyone on the internet. If you up the ante and make better DRM, you put the legitimate paying customers at risk because now their legitimate activity has been disabled in order to thwart hackers. Hasn't the success of Apple's iTunes store proven that most people want to be honest and will pay for content rather than steal it? If you create DRM that doesn't work as well as the stolen content (which already there are compatibility issues with certain devices), honest people will wonder what they are paying for. Usually pirated content is either equal or less than the original. Don't reach a tipping point by making the legitimate content so difficult to use that the pirated content is better than the legitimate content.

B