PROMOTE CREATIVITY
Let customers decide how to use and discuss your product.
Even if your business model involves selling or otherwise monetizing content, consider the costs and consequences of aggressively asserting your rights to control the use or distribution of that content, whether through legal or technological means. The law gives you tools to enforce rights to your content, but with this power comes the responsibility to use it wisely. Encouraging your customers to use your content or service in new and innovative ways may attract more paying users, while limiting their ability to enjoy your service could drive them to less restrictive competitors.
ENCOURAGE USERS TO CREATIVELY USE YOUR PRODUCTS AND CONTENT.
Encouraging your users to express their own creativity may draw more attention to your product and even lead to new strategies for generating revenue. Allowing and encouraging hacks, fan fiction, and other derivative works can support your user community—or even recruit a brand new user base around an adaption of your content or service.
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EVALUATE THE IMPACT OF TECHNICAL LIMITS ON YOUR USERS.
Users may be dissuaded from using your product or service if their freedom is constrained by digital rights management (DRM) or other technical limits, especially if there is not enough “breathing space” to allow your customers to customize their own experience. In addition, user trust in your product may erode as customers realize that DRM is interfering with their expectations.
CONSIDER THE FULL COSTS OF TECHNICAL LIMITS.
While the upfront costs of imposing technical limits on your products are fairly obvious and include both financial outlay and development time, the long-term costs can be more difficult to measure. In some situations, you may be forced to choose between maintaining or replacing an outdated system or facing outrage and even lawsuits from users who purchased devices or content that is suddenly unusable.
ENSURE THAT ANY CONTROLS YOU USE CONFORM TO USER EXPECTATIONS.
Controls that directly interfere with your users’ expectations can drive those users away. If you do decide to impose technological limits, make sure you recognize how those limits will affect your users and avoid options that directly interfere with user experience.