Digital Content Models

Today at the Micropayments Conference at the Harvard Club, hosted by Peppercoin, an MP company (named after the smallest possible coin payment in England - quarter penny=farthing?), digital content and payment systems (see this NYTimes article describing generally micropayments and these companies) were the order of the day.

On the Digital Music panel: David Card (blog) of Jupiter Research moderated, and panelists included Richard Burgess of Smithsonian Folkways, Brian Cullinan of Sony, David Goldberg of Yahoo and Howie Singer, CTO of Warner.

Notable exchange at the end of that panel:

Steven Levy/Newsweek (from the Audience): Is there a standardized DRM model?

Singer/Warner: For rules, or an expression language? Is there a marketplace solution? ITunes appeared successful, with rules on the PC -- and 3 m downloads. Not yet known.

Cullinan/Sony: Precedent? For DRM? Don't know until things play out, but there is no market benchmark.

Levy/Newsweek: But what will it take, what will keep things going at this level with DRM?

Cullinan/Sony: Deals are only as good as the marketplace will bear, and the next deal is only as good as set up; every company is different, can't speak for others… but there is a least common denominator problem with the labels, every label wants the most restrictive rule, although Universal wants no rules and they are adamant, and upset that they can't sell their stuff through iTunes with this least restrictive DRM but instead have to go with the lowest common denominator of iTunes which is set by the most restrictive models.

The future? We won't have the rules we have today, because even now, if you burn something once, you can rip it and it's analog, what's the point of DRM? So songs eventually will be sold in the marketplace, unrestricted. There is no reason to restrict people to give less than what they have with other media, with analog or digital.

The conference covered a variety of topics from the technical, to the theoretical, looking at content, a couple of success stories now on the web, subscriptions verses downloads, granular content verses bundled, and mostly asking a lot of questions about media, the internet, and what all the considerations are regarding consumers, media companies, copyright and money. Interesting day with interesting people. Though I did hear that a couple of the journalists were unhappy due to the lack of soundbites. But these are complicated issues and it takes time to learn the intricacies and figure out the solutions, so I guess at this stage there is too much confusion over MPs for soundbites. However, it was a great opportunity to learn what people are doing and thinking about on these issues. And there were some nuggets that were very useful.

BTW, the Harvard Club is nice, surprisingly good food too. Makes you almost want to go to Harvard, just so you can hang out there.

Also, checkout Dan Gillmor's column on MP's last Sunday.

Posted by Mary Hodder at November 03, 2003 11:02 PM