DRM: A knotty problem

This article (via Tim Oren) on Digital Rights Management brings up some tough issues for anyone in the content business. Although it focuses on broadcast rights, the same type of thing is going on in the print/online content world.

There's a fine line between greed and IP protection. Increasingly, the world is moving to a free content model, but there has to be some way to make a buck. (Even the WSJ is running a free site access test this week.) If the moneymaker is advertising, and the most market-efficient solution is hyper-targeted advertising, then there has to be a subscription or registration mechanism so the provider knows which user is getting which ad. Sure, there's IP tracking, but that's pretty imprecise.

That makes me even warmer about our model, where the user has a real economic incentive to let us track him in realtime.