Notes from the Cape

There is an interesting article about Mark Shuttleworth‘s views on Digital Rights Management not working.

I cannot agree more with him – it is something that I have been saying for years. Until it is easier and cheaper to legally have access to digital content people are going to find (free and) illegal ways to do so. Why download a bad quality version of a movie or song from a slow, illegal and unreliable source, when you can legally do it cheaply?

Until that happens, every digital rights standard is going to be broken.

I personally believe that we should go to a subscription basis, whereby we never own digit content, but rathare buy the rights to download it. So for example, a $10 per month gives you the right to stream any 100 songs to listen to whenever you want. $20 gives you 250 songs, $50 gives you whatever you want! So kind of like a radio on demaid service.

It will then be easy for the streaming companies to distribute revenue depending on what is played, it will kill the illegal free distribution, simply because it will be too much hassel.

The same can apply to movies.

What do you think?