Eric and Kevin continue the public discussion of what DRM is (or should be) and are getting closer to a reasonable groundwork for discussing DRM.

But as Kevin points out, and I alluded to yesterday; the only people who have been designing DRM systems have been publishers and software vendors.  The software vendors are happy to build whatever the publishers want, even if customers hate it, as long as the publisher is paying.  Publishers aren’t listening to the content creators and they aren’t listening to their customers.

Eric makes a very important point in response:

Now we’re getting somewhere! But the problem is that Big Content is unwilling to think peer-to-peer.  At the end of the day, their business isn’t art, it’s marketing and distribution.  They think supply-chain and supply-chains aren’t peer-to-peer.  Big Content wants to maximize the profitability of their chunk of the content supply-chain by squeezing the artists on one end (raw materials producers in their world view) and the customers on the other end (ever notice how rarely we are termed customers instead of consumers?).  Big Content isn’t interested in competing in a five forces world, so they are attacking everyone who isn’t Big Content with the legislative stick.

Eric says that both sides are being exploitive for their own purposes, but that is missing the massive middle-ground of people who are willing to pay for digital content.  But we aren’t willing to be shackled by software-license style, “one copy, one machine, not my problem if it doesn’t work, customer support is $3.00/minute, my way or the highway” business models.

So we can talk all we want about what we want as customers.  But Salon wrote the description of the perfect consumer digital audio product almost two years ago.  And while there are a few positive signs ( PressPlay just announced a $17.95/month plan with unlimited streaming and 10 “portable downloads” that can be burned to CDs.), for the most part Big Content would rather litigate than listen (sort of the evil dark side of the Cluetrain, yes?).

A LawMeme excerpt of a Chronicle of Higher Education article on the evolution of copyright law sums the current situation up well: