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January 11, 2005
great expectations
It's started to occur to me that our expectations of digital stuff is very different to that of real tangible goods. An example: if I bought a song from an online music store, I expect I'm buying some kind of entitlement, or deeds: a license (and with DRM I guess that is all I'm buying). They keep track of what I have bought - so why can't I redownload it?
This is a natural assumption I've seen lots of people make. To retailers, it must be baffling. "They lost a CD, and they expect us to replace it?" Well, yes, because the cost of digital distribution approximates to 0. They don't see you being put out by reproviding the music.
Basically, digital = free, in all senses of the word, even if I paid for it, and this I think is where customers will bite DRM on its ass. We're getting used to big sloppy buckets of digital data (iPods and digital cameras starting the living room attack) that can be poured at whim.
Take the idea of lending. I've seen a few DRM types try to cope with the natural use case of lending. It gets very technical very quickly, with key exchanges and lots of malarkey. What isn't realised is that mentally we see the replacement cost as 0, so lending isn't the action, but copying. The thought is the same.
I noticed this again when reading interviews with a couple of people being sued by Apple for distributing betas of Tiger. They were just sharing with a few interested parties - where's the harm in that? It's digital, it's free. It has a replacement cost of 0. Note, replacement cost, not manufacturing cost, or development cost, or even purchase cost.
Now the hard part is to make something digital that is so appealing it becomes tangible to people.
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