Mark has a great post on the foibles of DRM. His verdict? DRM simply does not work. It never has. It's an old way of attacking an old problem. I don't have any religious antipathy to DRM, myself. I'm a strong critic of it when it comes to entertainment because I think it pushes the entertainment companies to think that they can retrofit the 21st Century with 20th Century protections. They can't (or, at least, ha Mark has a great post on the foibles of DRM. His verdict? DRM simply does not work. It never has. It’s an old way of attacking an old problem. I don’t have any religious antipathy to DRM, myself. I’m a strong critic of it when it comes to entertainment because I think it pushes the entertainment companies to think that they can retrofit the 21st Century with 20th Century protections. They can’t (or, at least, haven’t). Just one reason Steve Jobs gave up that fight and moved on.Mark notes something that struck me back during an Antitrust class I had in law school. It’s not the law’s job to defend decrepit business models. Progress can be painful for many. But that doesn’t mean you should legislate/unionize/etc. past successes into status quo. You may want to, but it’s bad for the economy, bad for consumers, and even bad for the incumbents. The truth is also that, as the landscape changes, different business models come and go in their viability. Those folks who try to impose analog rules on digital content will find themselves on the wrong side of the tidal wave. Sorry for you. It’s necessary to innovate (again, sometimes!) and stay ahead of the curve, perhaps even being willing to cannibalize your own existing business – though to be honest cannibalizing someone else’s is so much more appealing. Right now the content owners need to be thinking about how they turn this networked world to their advantage, not fight the tide, and also how to restructure the costs inherent in their own businesses to make them more in line with the sorts of revenues that are possible in a totally digital world.Mark is dead on with this, leading to a point he makes later:Someone will find a business model that doesn’t depend on the old way of thinking, and if it is not you, then they will eat you alive. You will probably sue them, but this will be nothing but a defensive action as the industry reforms around their new business model, without you. And by the industry I don’t mean your competitors – they will likely be in the same hole – but your suppliers and your customers. The distributors of content are the ones at risk here, not the creators or the consumers.In the open source world, we’re in the middle of figuring out these next-generation business models. We’ve got the disruptive part down, and are now perfecting the disruption+serious revenues part. It’s coming. All of which begs the question for the incumbents: What are you going to do about it? Again, I don’t personally feel that DRM is necessarily wrong, anymore than I think it’s wrong to have a fence around your land, a lock on your front door, etc. But it’s difficult to envision DRM working in mass-market, consumer types of applications. In the enterprise, I think it has a much better chance, because (ironically enough) the content there matters much more on an individual basis, and so there is no generalized incentive to crack it. In the consumer space, the individual need to crack DRM is not big (If I must pay for that Britney Spears album, sigh, I must), but the generalized need (or, rather, desire) is huge. Open Source