Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the technology embedded in music files that prevents users from copying and sharing copyrighted music. It's not a very a very popular technology, not because people want to share and copy music, but because it's implemented very poorly.
Today's DRM causes all sorts of headaches for users attempting legitimate and legal uses with their music. A campaign named Defective by Design started up recently to highlight the problems with DRM and to stem the RIAA's rampant and generally unsupportable law suits.
It occurred to me today that we're likely to see something of this nature in podcasts in the not-so-far future. Granted, most podcasts are currently free and most podcasters want listeners to copy and share, but there are more and more pay podcasts cropping up each day. How long until those pay podcasts have DRM in them to stem copying? Or perhaps they already do.
Music is somewhat timeless, but many podcasts are not. I doubt that podcast sharing will ever reach the level that music sharing has, but aside from charging for downloads, there may be other reasons why a podcaster doesn't want their show shared.
Internal corporate podcasts, of which we're seeing more and more of, may be a good candidate for DRM. If there is sensitive information in those podcasts, corporations may want to use existing DRM or develop their own in-house system to prevent copying and sharing.
Thoughts?
