Good news people. Following Steve Jobs call for the the big 4 to stop making demands that their music sell with that horiffic anti-consumer piece of code attached to it, the DRM tower may soon collapse!
The New York Times is reporting that EMI, which holds contracts with artists such as Coldplay, Norah Jones and the Beatles, has a plan in the works to start working its online music sales off the DRM binge they have been on.
This is a very good sign that the other big 3 are likely going to have to follow suite very soon, because if this EMI plan actually comes into fruitation, it won't simply be the big 4 blocking DRM sales while the independent labels provide unprotected music on the other end. If one of the giants sells unprotected music, it simply becomes bad business practice to maintain and be able to justify DRM on online sales for the rest.
God Bless those Europeans and their consumer protection laws, forcing Itunes and the rest to rethink their business policies if they want to be able to sell to those markets. Of course there were many other actors in play, and I don't mean to undermine anyones role, but those pesky Europeans really kept the anti-itunes headlines hitting the papers.
Mr. Jobs also points to the DRM hacking community, as being a source of why DRM is becoming expensive and innefective at protecting music:
The problem, of course, is that there are many smart people in the world, some with a lot of time on their hands, who love to discover such secrets and publish a way for everyone to get free (and stolen) music. They are often successful in doing just that, so any company trying to protect content using a DRM must frequently update it with new and harder to discover secrets.
Guys like QTFairUse and the Hymn project, who provide DRM stripping tools get a nod from that statement.
Another paragraph that stuck out for me in Jobs "Thoughts on Music":
In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.
So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none.
I wonder if this actually goes through, and everyone agrees to end it, if they will formally strip DRM off the tracks that have already been purchased.
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A fair well to DRM - User Video (Aside from the song I think its a useless video) of
Tom Waits - Green Grass
1 comment:
yays... DRM is just one of the many cases where "software/cd protection" is undermined because methods to "reverse" them are simply made, and freely available thanks to the wonder that is the web :)
... i think there's a flip side to all computer software... reverse engineering is impossible to run away from... because there are always going to be those who "know" as much coding as "corporate coders" who aren't really "revolutionizing" multimedia software mediums..there just figuring out a way to capture a market, and then give it no choice... hehe
hoora for freedom of information...no wait... this is software coding and programing were talking about.....thus.. i salute the uber nerds out there who can make those multi billion dollar 1's turn back to binary 0's with the push of a button hehe..
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