01/22/2007, 4:40pm, EST
Monday, January 22nd
Music labels ponder removing copy protection
While holdouts such as the RIAA defended copy protection by noting that DRM is not inherently opposed to cross-platform support, the trend is increasingly leaning towards unrestricted formats, according to Electronista. The effective implosion of physical music stores in South Korea and similar countries has all but made the distribution of MP3 tracks necessary, while online stores such as VirginMega in France and Yahoo! Music in the U.S. have experimented with releasing some or all of their music in unprotected form.
The Western market is generally more resistant to such decisions, but may have little choice should the current model fail to convert dedicated pirates or those resistant to the idea. "The question is what is their level of pain," Yahoo! Music's manager David Goldberg said. "What level of sales decline is needed to take that leap?" Online retailer eMusic recently surprised industry watchers by claiming second place behind iTunes last year despite selling its music solely in high-bitrate MP3 format.
Filed under: industry
Other story tags: digital music/video
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The trouble is guys like you will make 10,000 copies of your "stuff" and either sell it or give it away to your friends and then try to justify theft as "personal use". That's why we have DRM in the first place. It's difficult to make high quality copies of vinyl LPs or cassette tapes but a copy of an mp3 file is identical to the original in every respect. Maybe the record labels should start putting watermarks in the mp3 files when you download them instead of DRM. Then when your "stuff" starts showing up on p2p networks the cops can ask you how it got there. How would that be? There would be absolutely no reason for a legitimate user to remove the watermark from their mp3 files since it wouldn't affect how they are used or backed up for "personal" use.
Pirates are already pirating music and no DRM will stop them. Bypassing it is easy. Just do a search on any torrent site and you'll find all the popular music that is sold on iTunes being traded freely.
So if DRM doesn't hurt pirates, but creates problems for honest consumers and costs millions to develop, it seems like a sound business decision to stop using it.
I quite like Sun's idea (the gist of which was using a device like your mobile as a key to playing content on any device - thus you buy the rights to a movie and you can watch half of it on your iPod, then as you come in, watch the other half on a HDTV). Their agenda is basically flogging the server half of the equation, rather than locking in the client, which is the most consumer friendly. But I don't expect business (which sees money in repeatedly selling same content in different forms) to go for it.
And yeah, I mostly use emusic too. But then the music on emusic appeals to people who spend money on music.
And in this world of yours that you live in, do you really think people are selling mp3's they download to others?
PS. This is the best idea I've ever heard the record labels utter. I hope it comes to pass.