I recommend watching Fred Wilson’s keynote at the Information Industry Summit. Fred Wilson is a partner in Union Square Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund in New York City. They focus on IT-enabled services in the media and marketing, financial services, healthcare and telecom verticals.

Fred says answers the frequently asked questions: If content is free (i.e. easy to download, costs nothing to read or watch), then who is making money? What are the business models?

He has very strong views about the future of Digital Rights Management (DRM), which most people know today as the customer-unfriendly mechanism by which copyright owners limit the way you listen to the music you have purchased (for example, iTunes). Fred says DRM is dead. There’s never been a DRM system that has not been hacked, customers hate it and there’s too much overhead in managing it.

The keynote is available on the Union Square Ventures weblog. It is also available on Scribe Media.

Fred also writes a terrific blog:
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/

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