Posted by Ablang on 07/12/07 06:20

DRM Drags Down Economic Growth
Countries that back digital-rights management technology are doomed to
lag behind, Linden Research exec says.
Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service
Thursday, June 21, 2007 6:00 AM PDT

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,133231/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

Digital-rights management (DRM) drags down economic growth, and
countries that back the technology are doomed to lag behind, a top
Linden Research Inc. executive said Thursday.

DRM refers to any technology that restricts how a digital file or
software can be used and shared. The technology is meant to protect
the interests of copyright holders by limiting how digital content is
used and insuring they get paid. But critics charge DRM is clumsy,
infringes on fair-use rights, and restricts competition.

DRM makes education and learning more expensive, which results in less
innovation and a lower gross domestic product, said Cory Ondrejka,
chief technology officer at Linden, the company behind the Second Life
virtual world.

"DRM makes you less competitive," Ondrejka told attendees at the iX
Conference alongside the CommunicAsia show in Singapore.

Countries that want to close the gap with more advanced nations should
avoid DRM or they will continue to lag behind, he said.

While Ondrejka's comments addressed the issue of DRM in the real
world, Linden has wrestled with copyright infringement in the virtual
world.

Last year, some Second Life users began using CopyBot, a program
capable of replicating items that other users had created and sold in
Second Life. Faced with a growing chorus of complaints from users who
saw their products being copied, Linden ruled in November that CopyBot
violated the virtual world's terms of service and threatened to ban
any user found using the program for copyright infringement.

But Linden stopped short of using DRM to protect against copies in
Second Life.

"While Linden Lab could get into an arms race with residents in an
attempt to stop this copying, those attempts would surely fail and
could harm legitimate projects within Second Life," Ondrejka wrote in
a blog post at that time.

In that same post, Ondrejka noted Linden isn't in the business of
fighting copyright infringement. "The communities within Second Life
should have the tools and the freedoms to decide how and when they
deal with potentially infringing content," he said.

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