Anti iTunes DRM protests to take place outside Apple stores

June 10, 2006

Despite Apple's major success with its iTunes music store, it looks like not everyone is happy, particularly when it comes to consumers who are aware of its DRM and iPod locking system. Many iTunes customers are probably not even aware that the music they buy is infected with DRM, particularly if they have only been transferring it to their iPod until now, where the DRM appears transparent. However, should they decide later on to buy a competing MP3 player, such as an iRiver, Creative or any other brand, they will quickly find out that all of their investment in iTunes has potentially been a big waste of money and time. This is not the case when it comes to buying CDs, since virtually all competing MP3 players and even the iPod series can play music copied from these, assuming the CDs were not crippled either with copy-protection.

So to help make consumers aware of DRM, the Free Software Foundation's "Defective by Design " group has organised demonstrations to take place across the USA today (10th June '06) outside of various Apple stores at 10:30am local time. These demonstrations will protest Apple's use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) on its iTunes store and its iPod series and will offer handouts to make consumers aware of the hidden dangers of DRM in Apple's iTunes.

Unlike CDs, DRM is widely used by online music stores including iTunes to prevent customers from attempting to give away, resell or lease its music. Unlike Winamp, dBpowerAMP and other software music players, Apple has already blacklisted various iTunes plug-ins and made legal threats to try and stop consumers adding functionality to iTunes or the iPod. Finally, while the artists may seem to be doing well with 99c price changed per song, in fact, most get 7c or less per song, with a vast majority of the price going straight to the music industry. Thanks to RTV71 for letting us know about this news:

Activists in seven cities across the US will picket Apple Stores, handing out information about the dangers of the DRM hidden in Apple's iTunes. iTunes DRM may seem pretty innocuous at first, but every time you invest in an iTunes Store song, you make it more expensive to switch to an Apple competitor's product at any time in the future. You didn't have to abandon your CDs to switch to MP3s (in fact, the more CDs you owned, the better your MP3 experience was, since you could rip those CDs to seed your MP3 collection), but if you want to go from Apple's iTunes to a competing device, ever, you have to be prepared to abandon your whole investment.

This is the first time I'm aware of protests being carried out over the use of DRM, however it seems like it is too late to do much about it, particularly with iTunes running for several years now. On the other hand, we have already seen how well the controversial Russian music download stores get on without the use of DRM. In fact, the AllOfMP3 Russian music store has already grabbed 14% of the music download market in the UK, thus showing that it is possible to have a successful music store that lacks the unwanted restrictions. However, rather than the music industry learning from their very successful approach, all they care about it trying to shut it down and get anything like it out of site! In fact, if the only improvement AllOfMP3 made is pay royalties to the artists for each song purchased, it would potentially be the perfect music download service in my opinion.

Source: Boing Boing