I’ve never been a proponent of DRM (Digital Rights Management) for regularly used business information. Five reasons: 1) DRM is a hassle for users; 2) the shelf life of business information is relatively short (other than some market research reports); 3) the likelihood of someone needing the exact piece of information as someone else and at the same time is pretty small; 4) most individual bits of business information just aren’t that valuable out-of-context and 5) if someone really wants to steal something, they will. Hence the saying “You can only keep the honest people honest.”
Earlier this week Outsell published a briefing that Alacra was mentioned in. We called around to a few people asking for a copy, not of the entire report, but just the couple of pages that mentioned Alacra. Although several people invited us to their office to read the report, no one would send us anything. Bottom line: most people are honest and do respect intellectual property and copyright.
Odd. You'd think if you were mentioned in the report, you could get a copy as a professional courtesy, straight from the content creator.
Posted by: Bryan Batchelder | August 04, 2004 at 03:03 PM