Judeumeh's Blog

Comments have started to trickle in on my rather provocative debut post about wanting my DRM, and thanks to those that read and responded to it. Also fellow blogger David Evans seems to have opened a can of worms with a post about the BBC iPlayer and open source DRM. You can’t deny it DRM is a real pain in the proverbial donkey. But why is it so, and who stands to gain the most from it?

Lets face it so many people are against DRM these days that I thought it would be fun to play devils advocate and actually take a slightly different approach to it. The key thing with DRM is that it is all about who benefits the most as I’ll try and explain below.

DRM occupies only a very narrow niche in the extended media universe; however this is located at a crucial intersection of several worlds which include: content creation, technology, commerce, governance and consumers. These make up the five groups of stakeholder interests that I constantly refer to in my forthcoming book, and in several articles, on DRM. Essentially these stakeholder groups break down as follows:

Digital Content Stakeholder Groups:

1. Creative: Includes all primary content creators (e.g. authors, songwriters, filmmakers etc)
2. Technology: Includes all device makers, software and hardware manufacturers etc
3. Commercial: Includes all businesses that are primarily focused on selling creative content
4. Governance: Includes, lawmakers, legislators, governments and lawyers
5. Consumer: All consumers and users of creative content in any way shape or form.

*Brainteaser: Some of these stakeholder overlap (i.e. individual members may belong to more than one group e.g. a content creator may also own a publisher). Can you spot which group overlaps with all the others, and why?

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Note: Original post, including comments, can be found at: http://www.bcs.org/content/conBlogPost/61