dennis.ca

Matt Haughey wrote recently about the point at which he lost all respect for Bill Gates. The issue turns out to be Gates' position on the legalities surrounding personal online publishing, which he he equates as being equal to print media. There are all sorts of open-ended questions here, and I don't think anybody has sorted it out yet. Observe Warren Kinsella's (a Toronto-based lawyer and former assistant to Jean Chretien) recent words of warning:

"...I also don't understand RSS feeds and crap like that. (I do understand a little bit about libel law, however, and I think anyone who runs a 'comments' section on their web log is at considerable legal risk - because they will be held liable for any defamatory statements others post on their sites.)"

Matt has long been a great supporter of Creative Commons. Indeed, this site is licensed under a Creative Commons license, as well. A Whole Lotta Nothing was one of the first weblogs I regularly read and was the inspiration for one of my first formal weblog designs.

Once I had established my Matt-inspired design offline, the etiquette of actually using it online wasn't clear. It was obviously going to be different than Matt's site, but it certainly shared some similar visual traits. After exchanging several emails to make sure no toes were being stepped on I came away feeling excited that he hadn't flatly rejected me. Wasn't that exactly how things were supposed to work? See something -- be inspired -- build something new. It was a great first introduction into the world of weblogging that I haven't forgotten.

Back to the topic at hand, though. Matt equates Microsoft's desire to control online content with the push for their Digital Rights Management (DRM) tools. He further and points to some of their past failures as reasons why they won't succeed:

"They've tried to be the king of web publishing, but Dreamweaver owns that. They tried to be an ISP but AOL is still in front. IM? AOL is crushing them again. Passport was supposed to give MS control of every login on the web, but it turns out people didn't trust nor like it. They've tried search over and over, but Google is still the clear king. They're the newest johnny-come-lately to blogging and they don't stand a chance against Blogger, MT, Wordpress and everything else that came before."

I'm going to be purposefully vague here because the company I work for is heavily involved in DRM. The fact that I don't necessarily agree with a lot of the mindset probably wouldn't be good for appearances (or my bank account)...

The question isn't if people will adopt Microsoft's DRM, but when. All involved parties of any consequences already have or are working on implementations for their specific software, devices, and other hardware. Microsoft still has the ability to strong-arm pretty much anybody that wants a piece of the revenue pie, and that pie is going to extend beyond the desktop in very short order. We can look at iTunes as a success story, but how long will content vendors stay in bed with Apple, etc. -- to the exclusion of others -- when handheld devices, televisions, PCs, and toasters all support a foreign delivery format?

Market size rules, and convergence will arrive whether we want it or not. 100% of small can still be less than 0.1% of massive. Technological superiority matters not, as we've seen so many times before.