Gillespie

Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology just gets in the way. It forces the consumer who, probably more often than not, doesn’t know what they’re getting themselves into, into using a specific piece of software or hardware to use the content that they purchased and should have the right to use however they would like. As Gillespie points out, one of the biggest reasons that companies use DRM is to tie a consumer to a certain service, like iTunes and how it ties the consumer to using both iTunes to play the music or video that they buy as well as buying only Apple produced personal media players. What’s even worse is that these songs or videos that are purchased that contain DRM are often low quality files as well. The same aspects of DRM that limit the consumer to doing what they would like with the items that they spend their money on can also be applied to regional coding on DVDs. It’s just an attempt to make the consumer purchase specific products and prevent them from using the products however they desire, which the consumer should have the right to do. The price discrimination that goes along with DRM and region coding should be done away with because then competition would be encouraged, which is never a bad thing. If there are online web sites that would be able to sell the consumer a product at a low price, then the other companies should have to work hard to gain the consumer’s attention and money, just like it is with every other product on the market today.