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Promoting European Content Online - Is DRM the right way?

Posted on October 12, 2007 | Filed Under digital content 

In a recent speech at the High Level Seminar on European Audiovisual Content Online in Lisbon, Viviane Reding gave an outlook on the forthcoming Communication on Creative Content Online (see the related post here). Among other things the Commission is planning to set up an “EU Platform on Creative Content Online” and will prepare a proposal for a Recommendation on Creative Content Online. According to the Commission the transfer of content services from an offline to the online environment is a major change that will give fresh impetus to the content industry and could therefore help to achieve three related objectives:

• Ensuring that content achieves its full potential in contributing to European
competitiveness;
• Promoting the availability of the great diversity of European content
creation and cultural heritage;
• Fostering users’ active role in content selection, distribution and creation.

The Communication on Creative Content Online will therefore explore actions that could be taken at European level to improve the competitiveness of the European online content production and distribution industry. According to Reding DRM shall be part of these community actions:

“Efficient Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems to manage and protect digital content are viewed as an effective way to secure sustainable roll-out of digital distribution. However, many stakeholders are concerned that the lack of interoperability or standardisation in DRM might hold back the development of digital content services and devices in the longer term.”

Indeed the difficulties with interoperability or standardisation seem to be hard to handle and have lead to inconvenient consumer experiences in the past and consequently reduced business opportunities. In one of the most developed sectors of market for online content - namely digital music downloads - major companies like Amazon therefore have started to carry DRM to its grave by focusing on the offer of DRM-free music. Most curiously one of the most vivid advocates of the DRM idea, Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon too and will be featuring over a million of DRM-free tracks on its new Zune store going online apperently in November.

Yahoo Music’s general manager Ian Rogers who has been part of the online music business from nearly its inception, makes a point in arguing that DRM has been more of an impediment to the creation of new business models than an enabler and concludes in a recent blogpost:

“I won’t spend another dime paying engineers to build false control, making listening to music harder for music-lovers. I will put all of my energy into making it easier and making the experience better.”

It will be interesting to see how the european approach will look like and if it will present solutions for management and protection of digital content without holding back the development of new business models for digital content services.

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