> Data yearns to be free -- sharing it and copying it costs nothing.
The latter part of that is true (setting aside quibbles about bandwidth and storage not being absolutely 100% free), but here's the thing: back in the days of physical media, of books and DVDs and CDs and what have you, the bulk of the price was never the physical media itself. The paper and plastic was never the valuable part.
> There are so many other ways to monetize media content...
Maybe, but just about all the ones that I've seen boil down to one of three methods:
- charge people directly for the content
- give the content away for free and sell ads against the content
- give the content away for free and make ancillary sales (e.g., merchandise)
Charging people for content doesn't require DRM: essentially all digital music sales are now DRM-free, for instance, and many ebooks are, depending on the publisher.
Also, two other observations.
First, while music publishers were always unduly whiny about the ability to record music at all, burning CDs and making mix tapes did cost money; it may have "felt" just like putting your entire music library up on Napster, but unless you had enough money to just hand out thousands of CDs of other people's music on street corners, it wasn't. It's not really super surprising that digital music piracy made those music publishers a lot soggier and hard to light.
Second, "data yearns to be free" sounds like a rephrasing of "information wants to be free," and I think it's worth remembering that the full quote from Stewart Brand went on to say "Information also wants to be expensive. This tension will not go away." Technology may let us reduce the marginal cost of reproducing anything that can be expressed as data to zero, but that doesn't make everything that ben expressed as data valueless.
We may have DRM and walled gardens, but media distribution is much more consumer friendly than it used to be.
There are many services that offer streaming at a flat rate, where you can watch or listen what you please and when you please without being subjected to third-party advertising. You can also subscribe and unsubscribe with ease, without paying additional fees. Contrast that to prior decades where none of that was true.
There are other services that offer perpetual licenses (I am hesitant to call them purchases) of books, music, videos, and software. You can access that content across multiple devices. In some cases you can even legally acquire it without DRM. Contrast that to early digital media. I remember floppy based software that would disable the installation media once it was installed to a hard drive. You could not re-download your music in the early days of iTunes, and they were considered consumer friendly.
I doubt that many people actually expected information to be free. What they wanted was for information to be convenient and cheap. As for those who actually did want information to be free, there are options out there that respect the creator's wishes (creative commons licensing, open source, etc.).
Free is nice, yes. But money isn't the only reason for piracy. Downloading is easier and frequently faster than ripping the DRM off myself.
Data yearns to be free -- sharing it and copying it cost nothing. Shows are just video data. Forcing real-world, scarcity economics, in a realm where the only currency of the land is plentiful, seems strange to me.
There are so many other ways to monetize media content, and yet we keep going back to DRM and publisher-controlled walled-gardens. It's a complete and total shame.