and while I am on the subject of DRM....

Stephen Fry made a great point on DRM in his talk at the Apple Store in London last month (download podcast from iTunes here)*

"People who think that if it can be got for free, no-one going to pay for it..... don't understand the fuzziness of the human mind"

Piracy was a grey area. You are not either a pirate or a good citizen. We have all pirated something in our lives whether it was copying a cassette tape for a school friend or photocopying a chapter of a book or some software. And yet along the way we have bought a hell of a lot of stuff. Our houses are full of CD's and DVD's and books that we have bought legally.

"If the creative industry gets too snotty about pirates and criminalizes and tries to create too much of this "you're a thief" business. People will go <expletive deleted>. They are going to say I've seen you in your Rolls Royce and your house in Barbados, don't come to me moaning like this."

"(The creative industry) have to use their human imagination to find a way to sort this out in such a way there will still be an incentive to own copyrights but also there will be a way of disseminating it around that isn't so locked in in zones and codes and things"

Stephen had artists, writers and singers in mind when he said this, but I think this applies to the whole media business including publishing. Some call our sector "creative and media". It is high time for us to be creative!

*The whole podcast is worth listening to, but if you just want to hear the DRM bit then fast forward the podcast to 44.55 minutes

Is the death of DRM the indicator of real change in the publishing business?

I have been thinking about the future of publishing. It seems to me that above all else DRM represents the old, traditional mindset of publishing. In this mindset it is all about the content. And if content is the asset, it makes perfect sense to protect it with DRM. Let's turn this around, if content is not the asset but something else is instead, then it makes no sense to protect the content with DRM right? By DRM here I mean everything from a simple license enforcing copyright to multi-layered encryption. Rights protection in its broadest sense.

The new mindset is that it is all about what the content does or what it allows you to do. It is about delivering the content in multiple ways, at different times to all sorts of people. It is about embedding content in devices that do something. In other words, the asset is in the use of the content. No DRM needed here.

My theory would indicate that as publishers move from the old to the new mindset, DRM should disappear. At the very least we should see a struggle around DRM as the old guard and the new wave fight it out.

There is perhaps some evidence for this theory. Apple will remove DRM on iTunes on April 7th. There was a huge row recently over the Kindle text-to-voice capability .

Does anyone have more evidence? Examples of publishers moving away from DRM, easing the rights protection, choosing creative commons over copyright? Please let me know.

So what is holding back publishers you might ask? Well I suspect most of them have simply been unable to build products that would allow them to release control over their content. Workflow solutions is the buzzword I hear most often and everyone claims to be doing it. I have seen very few examples from any publisher though.

My gut feeling is that Apple are showing us the way. They have shown us how important the device is. As Chris Arkenberg noted today: "Apple has fundamentally rewritten this paradigm by dematerializing the content - music & movies - and connected it directly with the player".

My top tip for today is to watch any publisher that is partnering with device providers or any publisher that is experimenting with i-apps. I think this is the future.