‘DRM was a bad idea’.

That’s the title of an article of the Dutch website / magazine Emerce. It is a quote of entertainment lawyer Fred E. Goldring of Goldring, Hertz & Lichtenstein who apperently said this during a panel at CES in Las Vegas yesterday.

It seems that not that many news outlets have picked this yet (or search engines haven’t updated their indeces yet) as I could only find one other article. This time in English (see here ). In this article the exact quote is:

Goldring added, “DRM was a terrible idea from the consumer’s point of view, but it did help the music space evolve.” The fact about music, he said, is that the industry is competing against “free.”

source: Betanews 2007

Interestingly this is the same person who said in 2004:

“People used to bitch that you can’t compete with free,” Ken Hertz of Goldring Hertz, Lichtenstein and Haft LLP, which represents artists and has lobbied for the universal licensing of content for use on the net.

“Now everyone has accepted that you can compete with free, offering something that is better than free.”

source: BBC NEWS 2004

Apperently offering paying customers songs encumbered with DRM or suing music fans with lawsuits is not the way to get or keep customers. Let alone competing with ‘free’. It took ‘em almost four years, but at least it did ‘help the music space evolve’. Yeah, right.

At least the music industry seems to finally take small steps in a more positive innovative direction. Something they should have done at the beginning. Let’s hope other industries will learn a lot quicker and don’t even start with DRM, although some people in European politics clearly did not get the memo.

Sign the petition and make sure the politicians get the memo!  Stop DRM once and for all.