Comment Number:	539814-00656
Received:	1/26/2009 12:55:54 PM
Organization:
Commenter:	James Ison
State:	WA
Agency:	Federal Trade Commission
Rule:	FTC Town Hall to Address Digital Rights Management Technologies - Event Takes Place Wednesday, March 25, 2009, in Seattle
Attachments:

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Comments:

As a consumer my problem with DRM is essentially I have no protection. If I purchase content from a manufacturer I am purchasing a right to use that content. If the company goes out of business or if I purchase a new device it is not only possibly but highly likely that I will need to re-purchase content I already own. For me I have been burned with music purchases so many times I now always burn a CD of the album and try to keep it for backup. I should be able to re-download that file anytime i want for any device. MY biggest issue is digital books. I read extensively and it's a growing market so devices come out all of the time. I used to read on my palm and purchased content from ereader.com. Then I upgraded to a sony reader and had to re-purchase a large number of books. When i upgraded to a kindle a few years after that I had to re-purchase them again. This is patently ridiculous. There should be some form of consumer protection for purchased content. Either an industry standard format, or a requirement for conversion, or better yet a license that is format agnostic. I don't care whether the file has DRM on it or not as long as I don't have to re-purchase the content. The essential problem I see with DRM is that it does not punish those people that steal content. They just crack the file and steal it anyway. It punishes the honest consumer those of us who want to legaly purchase content are basically made to buy it over and over again. Thanks for listening