Some time ago I watched a TV documentary about the New York Stock Exchange. I learned that people trade virtually everything on the stock exchange and I realized that, once they have interoperable DRM systems, they will trade the rights to access DRM protected content. A stock market is the ultimate business model for trading digital media.

Interestingly this scenario was described by Scott Wilkinson already in 2001 – the World Song and Album Exchange:

Most of the big record companies collapsed after fighting copyright infringement for years while music artists were figuring out ways to distribute music without their help. A few of the survivors banded together and bought the rights to the great archives that were left over and looked for a new way to make a buck.[...] In July of 2009, the banded together companies became the WSAE, the World Song and Album Exchange. Instead of pre-determining the value of the songs in the archives, the WSAE decided to put them into a market exchange and let the consumers decide their worth. Using some pretty wild computer algorithms, the WSAE began selling music like company stock. If a song was popular or was in demand, the price would go up. If a song were bad or unpopular, the price would go down. The system worked great. It worked so well in fact that many new bands were paying the WSAE a commission to list their songs on the exchange [...]

I believe that exactly this will happen and Scott’s prediction about the timing – July 2009 – is not too bad.

Last year I read John Markoff’s book ‘What the dormouse said – How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer industry’. Markoff gives evidence that the personal computer was invented by a bunch of ingenious hippies in California in the 1960ies who foresaw the revolutionary potential of users owning their own computers. Nice story, but here is another version.

This February I visited the Olivetti archive in Ivrea and learned that in 1965 the Italian research team headed by Pier Giorgio Perotto invented the P101 desktop computer. I like the idea that, while Markoff’s nerds took LSD and dreamed of it, a group of engineers from the Piemontese mountains brought the personal computer to the market. Pier Giorgio Perotto’s version of the story is available here.

Leonardo Chiariglione published a speech he will hold at the DVB World forum in Dublin. I like the historic approach of comparing proprietary DRM systems with fiefdoms in the medieval age but in my opinion he missed one point.

As he says, there is this clash of cultures between the television world and the “parallel” internet world, between closed “DRM fiefdoms” and the open access to public information.

Television is a pretty good closed loop system. I think the challenge for the lords of television is not that end-users can choose for more (channels, programmes, content). As long as the lords control the DRM technology they can uphold their “DRM fiefdoms” and thus press money or attention from their vassals. In a world of abundance there is no scarcity – if the vassals want a better choice, they will get more (sometimes at the expense of the quality).

The real challenge is that with open standards for an interoperable and scalable DRM there will be an open access to the television platform. The lords of television will not be able to control the minds of the end-users anymore and because of a “decentralization of taste” the “DRM fiefdoms” will start to fall apart.

With interoperable and scalable DRM in place, end-users will not only be able to choose for more (in terms of number). They will also be able to choose for what role to play in the value-chain and whom to support with their money and attention.

It looks as if there is a chance that end-users will be able to choose for more quality and that in the television world feudalism will decline.

Who knows – maybe DRM fiefdoms as specified by DVB will be replaced by Democracy.