Apple's DRM Is Bad For Consumers and Business

BoredStiff writes "Cory Doctorow, noted sci-fi writer and Boing Boing editor, marshals a strong argument against digital rights management in a recent InformationWeek article. His assertion is that there's no good DRM and that Apple's copy-protection technology makes media companies into its servants. Other copy-protection technologies, like Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, are just as bad."

Comments

This guy must be a slashdot reader...

[jhfry]

... considering that this topic has been beaten to death here and every side of the argument has been discussed. It's a well known fact to any Slashdot reader that DRM is bad. Maybe this article should be posted on Apple's, the DMCA, and every other media monster's website. Here it's just telling us what we already know.

Re:Your first mistake

[ronkronk]

What will happen when Apple goes bankrupt? Or when the next generation of mini-players comes out with a new DRM?

You must be thinking of the OTHER music companies, that re-authorize every month or what have you.

If Apple went out of buisiness, you music would continue to play on your current Mac until the end of time.

However, like you say eventually you'd want to move the music. Two options then:

CD's - I can burn any ITMS song to CD as much as I like (limit of ten burns a playlist, but I can always make new playlists...)

Hymn - I can convert protected AAC files into unprotected AAC files, which I can then play on anything that undrestands AAC (most PC players, not many portables) or convert it from there.

So yeah I feel sorry for anyone buying music from anywhere other than ITMS or AllOfMP3.com. I still don't like to use AllOfMP3 though as I don't feel it gives artists as much as it should. Perhaps in the future I'll buy from ITMS, then buy the non-lossy version from AllOfMP3. Too much work though, so I probably wont...

Re:Your first mistake

[Incongruity]

Don't forget emusic.com -- cheap, 100% legal and 100% DRM free-music. [I wish they paid me, but sadly, I pay them for access, just to be clear.]

Re:Conflicted Feelings

[KiloByte]

The copyright holder can not restrict use, just distribution (copying). No amount of small print can change this. To restrict use, they would have to get you to enter a valid contract with them.

Re:sooooo they say...

[peacefinder]

"The irony is that it was the media companies who gave Apple this power, by mandating DRM."

Exactly. Apple is neither demon nor saint here... they're just riding the wave of the moment.

Their success comes because they put together a vertical integration: a playback device, a content distribution platform, a music store, and most critically an agreement with enough major record labels to support the rest. (It's probable that other tech powers could have managed this, but Apple is the one which did it.)

DRM doesn't do Apple any good in itself. (Or didn't at the iPod/iTunes launch, anyway.) I'm sure DRM was a big headache to design and implement, and they could just as well have done without it. But a plausible DRM implementation was the only way for Apple to get the record companies to play ball, so (in order to reap the profits from the other stages) Apple had to include it.

Now, the iPod/iTunes/iTMS/FairPlay stack is a raging success. It's so successful that it has given Apple the whip hand over the record companies. (Which is more than a bit amusing.)

If at some point the record companies want to break Apple's grip on power, they can do so easily... just drop their DRM demand, thereby cutting their own throats. Or they can stop selling through iTMS, and watch that revenue stream dry up, their artists leave, and listen to their customers howl. Or they can go to an Apple competitor and negotiate a better DRM deal... which consumers will ignore, because a better deal for the record companies is necessarily a worse deal for the end user.

So I think the record industry is done as a power broker. This is undoubtedly bad for them and for Apple's competitors, and it's less than ideal for consumers, but it's too soon to say that it's really bad overall. With the record companies' power broken, more artists are going to retain the rights to their works, and publish via TuneCore.com or iTMS or whatever. In time, that's going to change the face of the industry.

Re:Ummm.....guys?

[cpt kangarooski]

The DMCA makes it a crime to circumvent "effective means of access control." To me, the key word, there, is effective . As far as I'm concerned, if I can circumvent it, it isn't effective, Q.E.D..

I'm going to take a guess here: you don't really know anything about the law, right?

Not only is that not what it means, but no judge would ever think that your interpretation is correct, for the following reason:

It is a rule of statutory interpretation that Congress never intends to pass a meaningless law. Laws all must do something that wasn't already being done, because there are no useless laws. So only interpretations where there is some use to the law, some real meaning, are valid.

If it is illegal to break access controls that are effective, where effective means that they are unbreakable, then the law is meaningless. No one ever could break it, because it would be impossible to do so by definition. This cannot possibly be what Congress intended. Therefore, effectiveness must mean something else, something that permits a TPM to be broken, yet still be considered 'effective.' Maybe the word doesn't quite match the dictionary definition, but the law frequently uses words in a specialized manner. (Think of how various fields created their own definitions of words like 'computer' or 'broadcast' or 'network' or 'drive' or 'memory.')

What it actually turns out to mean is that it has any material degree of effectiveness against nearly anyone at all. ROT13 is likely not effective, but analogue Macrovision probably would be.

Your argument would get laughed out of court. You're coming across like one of those schmucks who rejects the authority of a court due to trivialities like the flag in the courtroom.