| Its acronym may be three letters long, but for many online music lovers, it might as well be a four letter word – Digital Rights Management (DRM). It’s software encoding that limits the number of copies that can be made of a downloaded song and inhibits the platforms that the song can be played on. David Ring, a senior vice-president for Universal Music Group E-labs, describes DRM poetically as a "watermark," "a clear, transparent, non-intrusive system" that allows the tracking of individual music files for accounting purposes.
Most users, though, see DRM less as a watermark and more as a Texas boot, agreeing with Laurence Gonsalve, of Xenomachina.com, who writes, "It shouldn't make my machine slower. It shouldn't make my machine run hotter. It shouldn't increase the cost of the operating system or computer. It shouldn't increase the likelihood of bugs. It shouldn't make any legitimate tasks that I might want to perform more difficult. This includes fair-use tasks like backing up my media, moving it between my machines, burning it to a CD so I can listen to it in my car, etc."
DRM is an extension of various copyright and intellectual property laws most famously designed to combat piracy of music and other entertainment works. While there was much interest in the role that cassette recording played in promoting piracy during the ’80s (made famous by the "Home Taping is Killing Music" campaign) that saw an extra tax placed on tapes to be earmarked for lost royalty payments, the mainstreaming of digital media in the late ’90s brought renewed emphasis on piracy prevention. Unlike analog media that eventually wore out and lost quality, especially during duplication, digital media suffered no such degradation. A 1996 international agreement on world intellectual property rights helped set the stage for the appearance of DRM systems that limited the use of digital media by limiting the number of copies a user could make.
Aside from being forced to find ways around being able to make only five copies of a song at a time, one of the other chief complaints against DRM is the inability to play songs from competing systems on the same player. While virtually any player will play an MP3, only the iPod will play Apple’s aac files, and Microsoft has similarly shown preference for its wmv system. In fact, interoperability became a legal issue last spring when lawyers in France noticed that the DRM systems of Apple and Sony had gone too far. They began steps to make Apple comply with French requirements that digital files be compatible with all players, a move that would effectively end the iPod/iTunes domination.
More recent announcements may spell the end for DRM. In January, Bill Gates called for a removal of DRM. Some analysts viewed this as an admission of defeat at the hands of Apple, which controls 83 per cent of all legal music downloads and 95 per cent of all revenue. Without Apple on-board, Gates’s stance on the DRM-issue amounted to little, but then in mid-February, Steve Jobs shocked the industry by calling for record companies to allow the sale of DRM-free music. Skepticism over the so-called "Death of DRM" was so high that none of the panelists at the SXSW session on the future of DRM believed Jobs’s proposal was credible. Instead, they felt that Jobs’s position was intended to encourage other online vendors to use the iTunes system.
However, Jobs was apparently serious about his desire to eliminate DRM systems on music files. The week of April 1 he announced an agreement with EMI to sell DRM-free EMI music on iTunes. The end of DRM-encoded music files would mean that all DRM-free music could be played on any digital music player, the overwhelming majority of which are iPods. It seems that Jobs, having firmly established iTunes as the place to download music legitimately, may be willing to sacrifice iTunes revenue to ensure the continued success of the iPod and iPhone. Two weeks later, at a McGill-based conference on copyright, many of the gathered legal minds argued back and forth over whether DRM had a future.
Hiding in the shadows of all this discussion of the death of DRMs for music files, is the impending development of an Internet protocol for broadcast television, and downloadable movies on demand. Again, Apple is leading the way with its new Apple TV and iTunes is well poised to benefit from any development that encourages more legal downloading. |
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