I imagine this drm effort, if it such, will fail just like all the others.
Which DRM failures do you have in mind? iPod? Macrovision, which you reference later as a failure and yet is shipped in every video device in the US? Or maybe Windows Trusted Computing? Too early to say if that will be a failure or not, but it sure will be a pain in the neck.
DRM is a technical failure because what they're trying to do is technically impossible. But DRM is a business success and, alas, a technical impediment that we are increasingly subject to with digital video and audio. Even stupid completely compromised DRM like DVD copy protection is still deployed widely making things expensive for device manufacturers and users. You can't dismiss DRM.
We're at the beginning of the development of some amazing location-specific data and services. My biggest fear is that these businesses are going to be built where their entire business model is "we have the only source of data and we protect it with all the DRM we can muster". If that happens, the result will be that a lot of interesting legitimate businesses will be impeded and we'll be left having to steal data and use modchips to do powerful things with geographic data.
PS: I'm not sure if I introduced myself to this list. I'm a software guy, most recently from Google and before then a dead Internet startup. I'm a total novice to geodata but am getting increasingly excited by what I'm finding. I have a blog at http://www.somebits.com/weblog/
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