DRM is probably the most contentious three-letter acronym since GST, and it means most music buyers will continue to prefer the CD, Angus Kidman reports. EVERYONE agrees DRM stands for digital rights management, and that it's designed to stop people from distributing copies of digital music and movies to all and sundry. Beyond that, the role and necessity of DRM depends on who you ask.
Record companies and movie studios say DRM is the only thing stopping them from going broke and plunging musicians everywhere into a life of destitution. (Performers such as Britney Spears seem to be lurching along that path without any technological assistance.) The theory goes like this: if people can readily make digital copies of music and distribute them anonymously to anyone and everyone (a distinct possibility if you know how to operate a peer-to-peer file-sharing program), the entire music business will collapse.
According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (and yes, that name's a giveaway that we're not dealing with a bang-up-to-date digital outfit), there were 20 billion illegal song downloads in 2005. The counter-argument is that DRM is an unfair imposition on the rights of consumers to make copies for backup purposes of music they've legally purchased, or to enjoy it on a range of devices and operating systems. To cite the most common example, songs purchased from Apple's iTunes store, universally reckoned to be the most successful online music retail outlet, can't be freely copied between any device of your choice.
In its native format it can't be played on any portable music player other than an iPod, or swapped freely among computers. Rather, it can only be used on a computer on which the user who purchased the song originally is signed in, or on any iPod connected to that computer. Compare that with a standard CD, which will play in more or less any device with a CD player built in (attempts to add copy protection to some CDs have largely been abandoned).
In this vision, DRM approximates to something like: It's digital, therefore you have no rights. Can you manage that? The reality for most consumers lies somewhere in the middle.
In principle, most people don't object to paying for music, especially if legally acquiring it is simpler than waiting hours for an entirely illegal download. The devil, however, is in the detail. What gets people riled are the difficulties associated with getting music (or, increasingly, video clips and movies) with built-in DRM to work, especially if they are moved from one machine to another.
Australian copyright laws were amended last year to make it legal to format-shift music you have purchased, say from a CD to your computer. This was widely perceived as a catch-up strategy, but in reality the technology hasn't always kept pace with consumer desires to easily access their music collections. While the technical details differ, both Apple's FairPlay system (used on its market-dominating iPod) and Microsoft's Windows Media system (used by just about everyone else) adopt the same approach: embedding a licence in the audio or video file that restricts the ability to play or copy it if you can't identify yourself as the official owner (normally by signing in to your preferred playback program).
In theory you should be able to export files readily from one machine to another, a not unreasonable expectation if you're upgrading PCs, but at best this is a fiddly process and at worst it doesn't work at all. Users not running Windows are particularly restricted, with Mac owners stuck with Apple or nothing and Linux users not even having that option. Consumers have adopted a range of strategies to overcome those restrictions, ranging from burning the music to CD and then re-ripping it as a standard MP3 file, to using widely distributed (but illegal) tools that crack the DRM to produce an unprotected file.
A similar strategy has also been adopted in the world of movies to overcome the copy protection systems used on DVD and its duelling high-definition successors, Blu-ray and HD DVD. Recognising there might be a market for unprotected music, Apple recently began offering consumers the option of purchasing music that isn't encrypted, through Fairplay at the iTunes store. The non-protected files (sold under the brand iTunes Plus) are also offered with better audio quality than standard iTunes tracks, although as a trade-off for this the price of the music is higher: $2.
19 a track rather than $1.69. These files aren't anonymous in the way a standard MP3 file is.
Hackers have discovered that iTunes Plus files still have original purchase details embedded in them, so if you start sharing the music around it's fairly easy to track you down. At $2.19 a track, any album with more than 10 or so songs would still be cheaper to buy on CD, which represents one of the major challenges for digital music formats, DRM-enabled or otherwise.
Consumers seem to have cottoned on to this, as digital music represents only a fraction of the overall market. According to the Australian Recording Industry Association, digital music accounted for only 5.5 per cent of music sales in Australia last year.
That figure is rising, but as long as DRM remains in place and the price of digital music remains comparatively high, for most people the humble CD (except if they want a performer's single track) looks likely to be the dominant preference for some time. Given the hassles associated with most DRM systems, that seems a sensible idea. (What is this?
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