Certain Silence

Keeping Pace December 28, 2006

Posted by Tim Schneider in Uncategorized.
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I’ve been working on a paper-cum-book-chapter on Digital Rights Management since sometime in early October. It’s not done yet, which makes it the last remaining Thing to Do from the Semester of Things I Don’t Want to Be Doing. [Apologies for the Needless Capitalization, which is something of a habit]

There are a number of reasons the paper’s not finished yet, including:

• absence of a clearly defined deadline
• absence of any feedback (or solicitation for said feedback) on drafts
• failure to properly cite in the aforementioned drafts
• no clear idea of the intended audience
• failure to create an outline before beginning writing
• the dread in returning to any project that started fun but became a chore

But mostly, writing about DRM for any medium other than the web is a fool’s errand. Everything one writes is irrelevant or proven false almost as soon as it’s said. When I started writing this paper one of the key observations was that Microsoft might buy out existing iTunes users to get around the restrictions imposed by the DMCA and neutralize Apple’s first mover advantage. This rumor has since been proven false, the Zune has by all accounts failed (for reasons that are DRM-related, but not to the thrust of my paper), and Windows Vista is about to be released with elaborate embedded DRM, which, if implemented, require a whole new way of thinking about the impact of DRM on secondary markets. By the time I finish this paper and it’s submitted to a publisher, etc., any policy prescriptions or predictions will already be out of date.

It seems like whatever I write is irrelevant before it autosaves. How do you write about tech policy in any medium other than online?

You could just always be right, I guess.