Music industry still insisting on DRM
January 23, 2007 – 5:31 pmAt their annual meeting in Cannes, the music industry is still trying to manage its digital rights, but it’s angering customers while failing to stop piracy.
For starters,, here’s a choice quote from the article:
Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired magazine, argues that some form of piracy should simply be accepted.
“You cannot have zero piracy, and if you try to get to zero piracy you will make the experience of consuming music so painful you’ll have zero industry.”
Despite thousands of pleas for sanity, the industry seems intent on angering as many customers as possible and destroying their public image. Thanks to Digital Rights Management (DRM), aka Technological Protection Measures (TPMs), a steady stream of angry customers come forth with their stories of incompatibility or worse–including the Sony rootkit debacle.
Customers want music downloaded via Rhapsody, or iTunes to transfer as easily as that from their CDs, but thanks to competing formats, transferring tracks from a computer to MP3 player to a cell phone is just too much work–wasted effort for the tech savvy and a veritable Berlin Wall for other honest users. Add in some lawsuits, and you have millions of young people who talk openly of toppling the industry’s titans.
Additionally, DRM has to date failed to deter piracy. Part of the problem is described well by Cory Doctorow in his Microsoft DRM talk: most DRM implementations require designers to hand end users both lock and key, so some enterprising person merely has to take something (a program or a black box) apart and figure out how it works. Then, they can (and somebody always does) teach the world how to do it on the interwebs.
We only need one DVD Jon to hack a format, and then the rest of us barely-tech-literate noobs can follow the instructions to liberate our encrypted content. Still, the industry is still hopeful that DRM can still pull them out of this mess.
Perhaps even less probably, we’re all still hopeful they’ll come to their senses and try to compete with more releases on more compatible platforms–rather than fewer releases packaged in ever-more-elaborate digital cages.
3 Responses to “Music industry still insisting on DRM”
Digital music publishing services should consider using Numly.com’s Digital Rights Assignment (DRA) services rather than continuing to punish consumers with Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions.
Unlike DRM, DRA is not restrictive. It simply “assigns” a license number (Numly Number) to a copy of digital music and associates the number with the licensee’s name and/or membership details. The end result is a trackable MP3 or AAC or whatever format without DRM.
If the copy is reported stolen, it can be tracked to the rightful owner. Sounds simple enough - right? This methodology can also be used on video, ebooks, etc.
By Chris Matthieu on Jan 23, 2007
Thanks, Chris. I’ve long supported this type of watermarking instead of DRM.
It’s imperfect, for sure; the really clever folks can still find ways to remove the watermark. Yet Jane and John Q. Consumer can still make free use of their media products.
I’m not familiar with Numly specifically; I’ll check it out.
By Bill Herman on Jan 23, 2007
It will actually do more to eliminate piracy than all the DRM ever could. As it stands now, one single MP3, watermark free is absolutely anonymous, untraceable. All those that use P2P, and post there, well, now, every MP3 is directly traceable. Are they sure they wiped the watermark out completely? Is the watermark removal software going to adapt to the myriad random ways to encode, move, obfuscate the watermark? I don’t know about the tech mentioned above, but some claim/state that the watermark even survives format shift and CD burn/re-rip. It just becomes way too much for the typical user to bother with and worry about.
Sure, they can’t do this with Linux because it is open source, but how hard would it be for WMP/Itunes or other to see 7000 different watermark signatures tied to 7000 unique individual keys and decide that something is up? How much easier becomes the finding of P2P offenders. (I hate the RIAA/MPAA and all they currently stand for, but illegally sharing songs is theft). A real tool to actually do something about it.
Watermarking MP3s or other COMPLETELY open format is about the only business model choice they have left if they still want to be relevant in 3-4 years.
By TripleII on Jan 23, 2007