Andrew Odlyzko's latest is a short rant on DRM. Consider it in light of the recent Rick Rubin profile, The Music Man in the NYT Magazine.
The fundamental issue that limits current use and future prospects of DRM is that, in the words of [10],
The important thing is to maximize the value of your intellectual property, not to protect it for the sake of protection.
DRM all too often gets in the way of maximizing the value of intellectual property.
People are very frequently willing to pay more for flat rate plans than they are for metered ones, even if their usage does not change. The trend towards flat rate plans is not universal, and there is likely to be a spectrum of charging schemes. Flat rate plans are likely to dominate for inexpensive and frequently purchased goods and services, and extreme examples of differential pricing are likely to prevail for expensive and seldom-purchased things, see [4] for a discussion and evidence.
But overall, we should expect to see growth in flat rate pricing and bundling (as in subscriptions to magazines, or in a collection of cable channels for a single price). In addition to a willingness to pay more for flat rate plans, people tend to use more of a good or service that does not involve fine-scale charging or decision making. Typical increases in usage are from 50% to 200% when users are switched from metered to flat rates. Depending on whether one wishes to increase or decrease usage, this may or may not be desirable, but in the case of information goods, the overwhelming incentive is to increase usage. This provides yet another incentive to avoid fine-grained pricing and control that DRM is often designed for.
What we are likely to end up with is a huge universe of free material, much of it of little interest to all but a handful of people.
