Wolf Richter

During a recent stay in Beijing, Eric Priest invited me to join him for a panel presentation on “New approaches to the IP Challenge” during the HPAIR 2007 conference. I happily accepted the invitation and used the discussion with the students as a focus group to better understand how Asia’s “Digital Natives” (John Palfrey gave a talk on his pet topic to the panel the day before) use the Internet to access and produce digital media. The group was a diverse crowd of students from China, the Americas, and other Asian countries, who were united by their interest in Media in Asia.

The general gist of the discussion followed what was to be expected: While the majority of the US students indicated that they had stopped file sharing, most Asian students were still using the Internet as their primary source of digital information and entertainment. The only limiting factor, in particular for the Chinese students, seems to be the available bandwidth, which makes access to larger files like movies still a cumbersome process. While CDs have virtually disappeared from the lives of the students and only lead a niche existence as presents, the (unlicensed) DVD is still a popular medium for movies, at least in China:

I learnt that the current DVDs sold in the street corner stalls contained up to 4 movies thanks to the use of advanced compression technology, and that some of the vendors even offered a home delivery service making the walk to the video store around the corner obsolete. I stroke me quite odd to see the creativity of DVD pirates in China to develop new products and services, which address the challenge posed to their “business” by the emergence of alternative distribution channels on the Internet. In the absence of any other means to protect their illegal business activity they decided to compete on the service dimension!

I started to wonder in what kind of world we would be living today if all the time, money and effort, which has been spent on developing DRM technologies, which make a legal product more difficult and cumbersome to use than its illegal, DRM-free copy, had been spent on improving customer satisfaction.