DRM affects battery life

RealTechNews is talking about a new study that shows that DRM adversely affects battery life. Not really surprising seeing as extra CPU activity is needed to decrypt the songs. A general feeling around the blogosphere at the moment seems to be that DRM is ridiculous and it is coming up with one reason after another as to why it is supposedly unworkable, fascist and anti-consumer.

On many aspects of this discussion I completely disagree. Here's my comment I posted on RealTechNews:

I donÂ’t understand why everyone hates DRM. In itself, DRM is not a bad thing. It is enabling content providers to feel happy about putting their content on the internet, thus opening up whole new business models such as subscription services that do suit large numbers of people. So long as there is a choice iee.Betweenn DRMed files and non-DRMed CDs) I cannot see a problem.

Instead of constantly vilifying DRM we should be working out ways to make it work effectively, ideally so that it does not noticably restrict what a user wants to do with their content and only kicks in when the user tries to do something either illegal or that they have contractually agreed not to do.

In this case music players and providers should be looking at new DRM technologies that simply require less power to decrypt. Anyone who wants to decrypt DRMdesperatelyy can anyway, so why not just encrypt it to 8-bits or something.

DRM in general is always going to be controversial, but I think that when used responsibly, DRM can be successful and actually beneficial to consumers.