While the entertainment industry happily continues crippling everything they can with DRM, at this point it is getting very clear that DRM has more evil to it than any good it has brought. Just recently, the head of Yahoo Music even suggested that labels should let their music be sold online without DRM and now Security Focus has published an article going deep into the big mistake with DRM.
For example, iTunes, which grabs most of the music download market locks its customers to the iPod. TiVo added DRM support its PVRs to allow broadcasters to control what viewers can do with their recorded content, including remote deletion. It seems to specifically target the wrong people by affecting paying customers, including their Fair Use rights since these are forced to use compliant hardware, obey its restrictions, etc. If they attempt to get around the restrictions, they are in effect breaking the law due to the notorious DMCA, where as those who decide to download 'illegally' are free to do what they want with their downloaded content, rendering DRM useless against these! So while the Entertainment industry claims DRM stops casual piracy, they may not realise that this does not stop them asking help from their friends and before they know it, they will end up using file sharing services or some other means of getting their copy.
When it comes to investment, everything the customer has paid for is worthless, since unlike physical media, consumers cannot sell unwanted purchased downloaded content, as the DRM effectively ties the user and their equipment to the content. Also, what happens with purchased music once a particular online store ceases or if the company decides to change to a new format, dropping support for an earlier format? Finally, no matter how sophisticated DRM may get, it will not stop the real pirates either, since all it takes is one successful copy to be made, even as simple as an analogue re-recording and the system is beaten. In order for DRM to be truly effective, all forms of file sharing, search engines, etc. would need to be closed off or at least restricted in order to make it as difficult as possible to get hold of a non-DRM protected version.
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Apple's successful iTunes Music Store, in addition to forcing users to accept a pretty sonically-limited format with a proprietary DRM scheme called "FairPlay" (using Orwellian language to mask what you're doing is double-plus ungood, Apple). FairPlay limits what you can do with the music you buy, leaving Apple in charge of your music, not you. Want to play a song you purchased from iTMS on a device other than an iPod? Uh-uh. Want to load music onto an iPod using something other than iTunes? Silly boy. Even worse, some universities are now making lectures and classes available using iTMS, a slap in the face to the open nature of learning and education. Sure, you can remove FairPlay's DRM, but you're still left with a music file recorded at a pretty crappy level, and converting it to a more open format only makes it sound worse. The iTunes Music Store isn't the only offender, as a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation made clear. iTunes is just the most popular, by far. (Solution: Music stores that give you real choice, without DRM.) The British equivalent to the Oscars is the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award. Members of BAFTA are sent "screeners", free DVDs of the movies they're supposed to vote on, so they can view the movies and make judgments. In an effort to prevent the release of those screeners to non-BAFTA members, the DVDs are encrypted to only play on special DVD players that were also sent free to BAFTA members. As you can imagine, this is a royal pain in the posterior for many BAFTA members, who have to hook up special hardware just to watch a few films. In a bit of supreme cosmic irony, the screeners for Steven Spielberg's Munich were encoded for Region One (the US and Canada) instead of Region Two (Europe), so BAFTA members couldn't view the movie to vote on it. Oops. The full article can be read here. |
As the music industry has managed to get file sharing to pretty much flatten out, but not decline, they should really start reconsidering what they are doing to try and get consumers to move to legitimate services. In order for them to compete with file sharing, they really need to offer something that lures in customers and stop with the mess they are at with all their lawsuits. For example, as the head of Yahoo Music mentioned, if they offer content that is better than what file sharing networks have available and make the price more affordable, I can easily see a serious hike in legal download services.
At the moment, the RIAA claims that it is impossible to sell anything that has to compete with an illegal service that offers the 'same thing' for free. Well, if they offered a service like AllOfMP3, where consumers can choose their audio codec (to suit any hardware player), charge a reasonable price and do away with DRM restrictions, there is a good chance that consumers will start thinking twice of the hassle of re-downloading songs over & over from free file sharing networks to find a complete clean correct copy, never mind doing this for a full album's worth of music, particularly compilation albums or with tracks which are more difficult to find.
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Source: Security Focus
