With no controversies currently going on, it may seem odd to talk about DRM, but I thought of something after I walked by a poster for the Steve Jobs biography with a QR Code on it. Like 100% of the population, I don’t read QR codes. But let’s pretend people actually did take out their smartphones and checked them out. Where should this one take you? The generic press page for the book? A mobile optimized version? Directly to iBooks if it detects iOS?

While apps have their platforms, content doesn’t. You have to pick a store and then get locked into whatever the DRM demands of you.

While getting annoyed by this, I thought of something. If these stores didn’t have DRM, we probably would never have gotten the ability to redownload purchases. Before we gained redownload for TV shows and Movies on iTunes, I was considering getting a RAID 5 array or some sort to hold/back up my content. Now I don’t have to and I recently got back a few hundred gigs. Streaming HD doesn’t always work in realtime (I have 25Mbit down from FiOS) so I pre-download content before watching (like when you “Rent”) and manually clean the drive when I’m done.

If those m4v’s were DRM free but couldn’t be redownloaded, I would have to have had to buy that array by now.