(2005-12-30) Bray Drm Direct Artist

Tim Bray seeks alternatives to DRM. I think that if we value sanity and democracy and freedom (as in a Free Market dammit), we have to keep whacking away at this whole tangle of corrupt legislators and misconceived technologies and submarine patents, because we're right and and they're wrong. But I suspect that the way forward, the way to arrange that artists make art and get paid for it, is off in completely another direction: the direction of disintermediation, of people buying art from artists, and paying them for it. No, not the record company, nor the Hollywood studio, but the artist. This is a sort of Patronage (Business Models For Information). I'm not quite clear of his point, but I think the underlying concept is that people are less likely to "steal" from a "person" they have a "relationship" (trust, guilt) with, compared to a BigCo.

This doesn't smell very scalable, but as long as the big market players follow the DRM path, it's one Route Around a broken system. (Tim himself notes that groups like Magna Tune are already creating new markets, so you don't have to quite go direct-to-artist.)

Update: Cory Doctorow on Amazon's Author Blog-s and the Age of the Conversational Artist. Your virtuosity is matched by someone else's, somewhere, and if you're to compete successfully with her, you need something more than charisma and virtuosity. You need conversation. In practically every field of artistic endeavor, we see success stories grounded in artists who engage in some form of conversation with their audience.