I am no fan of DRM as a consumer but support intellectual property owner’s rights to control how their property is distributed. While I think the RIAA are a bunch of antiquated goofs they’ve got the right to destroy their business as they please as far as I’m concerned.

This morning of course, Apple and EMI announced that the entire EMI catalogue, minus their biggest act - the Beatles - would be made available, DRM-free and at 256 kbps (most iTunes downloads are at an irritating 128 kbps, which has noticeably inferior fidelity vs. a CD, for instance). They’ll cost $1.29/song rather than 99 cents/song, but I know I’ll happily pay that premium. I’ve refused to buy anything but one-hit-wonder-type songs off iTunes thus far because of the low fidelity of their music but this will certainly make iTunes my preferred method of obtaining new music.

What I love about this announcement is that it’s a sign that the big music companies are finally waking up. People who want to steal music are going to steal it regardless and you’ll never win a DRM arms race. That doesn’t excuse the thieves, of course, (and shame on you!) but business is/should be about reality not wishful thinking. You can delay the tide a bit but fighting this battle via DRM is an ultimately losing proposition.

Of course, it’s easy for me to cheer DRM-less content. MMOs by the nature of their server-side simulation are not particularly amenable to being ripped off as a whole experience. Users can take parts of it (art, music, etc) but even reverse-engineering the server and putting up pirate servers doesn’t amount to stealing the totality of the experience in the way that ripping off a movie or a song does. You can’t steal the community and bring it with you, for a start.

Some game publishers have even begun to abandon games that don’t have an online component specifically for this reason.

As the (now) cliche saying goes in reference to MUDs/MMOs, “They’re not products - they’re services.” You want to make your IP hard to steal? Wrap it in a service that meets a user’s need (rather than a “service” that is just DRM in disguise, such as the all-you-can-eat monthly models for music downloads). Live music concerts are a good example. Can’t steal a live performance. You can record it and rebroadcast it but it’s no longer the same experience at all. Prostitution is another good example. While porn is easily stolen, the live experience cannot be replaced. Those pimps are some savvy bidness dudes! Same goes, of course, for live sporting events, and so on.

Basically, they all come down to controlling the platform. You can’t easily steal a Giants baseball game because the “platform” (in this case the stadium) is relatively easily controllable. You have to be willing to brazenly try to sneak past armed guards or engage in some very clever forgeries. Both of those have relatively high barriers to entry for the average person. Similarly, piracy on game consoles, while certainly theoretically possible, is pretty minimal. Todd Hollenshead of id Software said, a couple of weeks ago, that id moved from publishing almost exclusively on PCs to taking a more multi-platform approach largely to combat the rampant theft on the PC platform, which nobody has control over the way Sony has control over the PS3, for instance (which isn’t to suggest anyone should!) .