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technology always gives us more art with a wider reach: that\'s what tech is *for*. 

Tech gives us bigger pies that more artists can get a bite out of. That\'s been tacitly acknowledged at every stage of the copyfight since the piano roll. When copyright and technology collide, it\'s copyright that changes. 

Which means that today\'s copyright -- the thing that DRM nominally props up -- didn\'t come down off the mountain on two stone tablets. It was created in living memory to accommodate the technical reality created by the inventors of the previous generation. To abandon invention now robs tomorrow\'s artists of the new businesses and new reach and new audiences that the Internet and the PC can give them. 

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5. DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT 

When Sony brought out the VCR, it made a record player that could play Hollywood\'s records, even if Hollywood didn\'t like the idea. The industries that grew up on the back of the VCR -- movie rentals, home taping, camcorders, even Bar Mitzvah videographers -- made billions for Sony and its cohort. 

That was good business -- even if Sony lost the Betamax-VHS format wars, the money on the world-with-VCRs table was enough to make up for it. 

But then Sony acquired a relatively tiny entertainment company and it started to massively screw up. When MP3 rolled around and Sony\'s walkman customers were clamoring for a solid-state MP3 player, Sony let its music business-unit run its show: instead of making a high-capacity MP3 walkman, Sony shipped its Music Clips, low-capacity devices that played brain-damaged DRM formats like Real and OpenMG. They spent good money engineering \"features\" into these devices that kept their customers from freely moving their music back and forth between their devices. Customers stayed away in droves. 

Today, Sony is dead in the water when it comes to walkmen. The market leaders are poky Singaporean outfits like Creative Labs -- the kind of company that Sony used to crush like a bug, back before it got borged by its entertainment unit -- and PC companies like Apple. 

That\'s because Sony shipped a product that there was no market demand for. No Sony customer woke up one morning and said, \"Damn, I wish Sony would devote some expensive engineering effort in order that I may do less with my music.\" Presented with an alternative, Sony\'s customers enthusiastically jumped ship. 

The same thing happened to a lot of people I know who used to rip their CDs to WMA. You guys sold them software that produced smaller, better-sounding rips than the MP3 rippers, but you also fixed it so that the songs you ripped were device-locked to their PCs. What that meant is that when they backed up their music to another hard-drive and reinstalled their OS (something that the spyware and malware wars has made more common than ever), they discovered that after they restored their music that they could no longer play it. The player saw the new OS as a different machine, and locked them out of their own music. 

There is no market demand for this \"feature.\" None of your customers want you to make expensive modifications to your products that make backing up and restoring even harder. And there is no moment when your customers will be less forgiving than the moment that they are recovering from catastrophic technology failures. 

I speak from experience. Because I buy a new Powerbook every ten months, and because I always order the new models the day they\'re announced, I get a lot of lemons from Apple. That means that I hit Apple\'s three-iTunes-authorized-computers limit pretty early on and found myself unable to play the hundreds of dollars\' worth of iTunes songs I\'d bought because one of my authorized machines was a lemon that Apple had broken up for parts, one was in the shop getting fixed by Apple, and one was my mom\'s computer, 3,000 miles away in Toronto. 

If I had been a less good customer for Apple\'s hardware, 
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