온라인 음악시장의 성장과 DRM-free 판매 방식의 확대에 대한 이론적 분석

Abstract

일반적으로 DRM(Digital Rights Managements)은 온라인 음악시장의 형식적, 구조적 특징에 따라 발생하는 불법복제 및 유통의 문제를 해결하는 유효한 수단으로 인식되어 왔다. 그러나 DRM은 동시에 적법한 사용자의 이용권한과 범위를 제약함에 따라 이들의 사용가치를 낮추게 하는 측면도 존재한다. 본 연구에서는 이러한 DRM의 상충관계, 즉 ‘불법복제 방지’와 적법한 사용자의 ‘사용가치 감소’를 명시적으로 고려한 모형을 설정한 후, 판매자의 이윤을 극대화하는 DRM의 수준을 살펴보았다. 특히 최근 제기되고 있는 것처럼 사용자의 이용권한과 범위를 전혀 제약하지 않는 DRM-free 형태의 판매방식의 주장이 과연 판매자의 입장에서 정당화되는지를 살펴보았다. 분석의 결과, 온라인 음악시장의 성장에 따라 보다 현실적으로 해석되어지는 파라미터의 범위에서는 DRM-free 형태의 판매방식이 판매자의 이윤극대화와 부합되는 것으로 나타났다. 아울러 사회후생을 극대화하는 DRM의 수준을 분석하고, 이를 판매자의 이윤을 극대화하는 DRM 수준과 비교하여 시사점을 도출하였다.

The advanced digital world unnecessarily accompany several unpleasant phenomena on copyrights protections. One of them is that copying and distributing of digital products have become easier without legal authorization. Users can copy high-quality unauthorized digital products either by 'ripping' originals or by downloading from the Internet. They also can freely transmit unauthorized copies in digital format among themselves via peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies. This trend inevitably causes a concern for the legal content provider, and the most obvious observation is the decline of revenue. This difficulty also means that the traditional measures, such as legal and regulatory protections, have less effect on fighting against the piracy. As a result, significant amounts of efforts have gone into designing technical protections rather than relying on legal measures to reduce the extent of digital piracy. Among them, DRM(Digital Rights Managements) is considered as an effective measure to tackle these online piracy problems since it enables to solve the problems technically. However, DRM systems also constrains the user flexibility and scope, reducing the value of the originals. This paper explicitly incorporates this trade-off, and study the profit maximizing levels of protection in DRM. The framework augments the feature of DRM choice to the commonly used vertical differentiation model in the previous literature. In particular, we extend the vertical differentiation model in such a way that a higher level of DRM reduces the quality of the legitimate products as well as raises the copying cost of unauthorized copies. This specification contrasts to Sundararajan (2004), where DRM also degrades the quality of unauthorized copies proportionally to consumer's valuation. In addition, we introduce an assumption that the unauthorized copies have the lower quality than the DRM-free legitimate products. With the model, we investigate whether DRM-free, which is increasingly suggested and implemented among digital music sellers recently, is rationalized from the point of seller. We find that DRM-free is consistent with the seller's profit maximization with more realistic parameter ranges, which can be interpreted as reflecting the advanced digital world. The intuition behind this solution is rather simple. With less effective anti-piracy function in DRM, which in fact reflects the reality of advanced digital world, DRM-free becomes the optimal choice of the firm. A higher level of DRM only deteriorates the quality of the legitimate products without much effect on the copying cost of unauthorized copies. On the other hand, the firm chooses the maximum level of DRM to deter unauthorized copies in the market when DRM is highly effective in protecting piracy. In this case, legal users experience severe quality deterioration of the legitimate products. Additionally, we present the welfare maximizing DRM levels and compare with the profit maximizing levels.