Ditching DRM could reduce piracy, prices, inconvenience

This will run counter to what your commonsense tells you but, a brand new paper out of Duke and Rice University says that ditching DRM could actually reduce piracy . The study, which trusted analytical modeling, showed that while copy protection made illegally sharing content tougher it had a significantly negative impact on legal users. As a matter of fact, the researchers say, “only the legal users pay the pricetag and be afflicted by the limitations [of DRM].” Many shoppers simply decide to pirate music and flicks because doing simple things, like backing up a media collection, is hard with DRMed content. Even the most effective DRM is eventually broken , and fails to discourage those already determined to steal. Meanwhile, abandoning these restrictions could increase competition and drive down prices (in addition to remove a major inconvenience), encouraging more people to legitimately purchase content. You could have a look at the November-December issue of promoting Science for more details.

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This post is tagged: copy protection, inconvenience, marketing science, negative impact, rice university