There are many ways to lure consumers and one of the most common is to put a positive name on things (e.g. Fair-Play). Digital Rights Management is hardly the sweetest and most wonderful name one can think of, which is also something HBO executive Bob Zitter has realized. He has namely come to the conclusion that DRM has a bad reputation and that we should change the name to DCE: Digital Consumer Enablement. This is supposed to reflect the actual purpose a lot better. What he seems to misunderstand is that DRM is not what makes the media so versatile, but the media itself. Parents have been calling broccoli nature’s candy for years, but the kids have never fallen for it. We have no reason to believe that people are getting dumber by the year.
Beside the name change he had some other and very interesting ideas. He says that there should be a technology that makes it possible to burn DRM-protected material directly on to a DVD and that they should explore the possibilities of releasing movies via pay-per-view when they hit the theaters. These ides, we like, alas they are far from becoming real anytime soon.
