newsweek on DRM and Defective by Design

Newsweek has a pretty good article on DRM that mentions the Defective by Design campaign. The only thing I don’t understand is this bit at the end:

Music industry observers agree that once the public catches on to the limits of DRM, it will either be abandoned or a dominant technology will emerge across all players; this is what happened when VHS beat out Betamax.

I believe that once the public understands what DRM is, it will go the way of the dodo. What I don’t understand is what this has to do with VHS vs. Betamax – that was a format war. Two things are muddled here – on the one hand the compatibility problem between the various DRM systems in existence today. On the other hand the general problem that DRM is completely against the interests of the consumer, and once the consumer catches on to that, it is pretty much doomed – unless we’re all completely locked in by that point.

On a semi-related note, it seems Microsoft’s Zune isn’t selling very well at all: it’s at position 53 in Amazon’s electronics sales rank. Two days ago, it was somewhere in the low thirties. Yawn.