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Yahoo Music Chief Comes Out Against DRM
waired writes "It seem that a trend has begun in the music industry after Steve Jobs essay. Now a senior Yahoo chief has spoken out in favor of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' call for major labels to abandon digital rights technology (DRM). It points out that consumers are getting confused and that the Microsoft DRM "doesn't work half the time"."
Anyone could have predicted that Yahoo would back up statements by Jobs concerning DRM. Yahoo, after all, is partnering with Apple to provide some of the IMAP "push" functionality with the new iPhones.
They're like telcos: you can only hurt the RIAA/music licensors in one of three very basic ways:
1) legislation/lawsuit (unlikely as they own the legislatures and have armies of lawyers)
2) have a massive clientele defection (unlikely because they're a monopoly like the telcos) or
3) have their talent pool stop making revenue (crappy quality music, and so on-- also highly unlikely).
Bottom line: he's sucking up to his clientele (us, supposedly) and Wall Street, especially Wall Street who wants to pound the crap out of them for other foollish moves. They should have demanded that Mark Cuban stay with them for a few years after they bought his Broadcast.Com.
It's all PR. Nothing to see here.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
[TFA] points out that consumers are getting confused and that the Microsoft DRM "doesn't work half the time".
...
So Microsoft's standard approach of writing software that confuses users and doesn't work very well is telling the public that this is what all DRM is like. We see this all the time, for example with viruses which are invariably reported as infecting "computers", not just "Microsoft computers". Similarly, the difficulty of learning to use the little beasts is a property of "computers", not of any particular brand.
It reminds me of the old saying: "Nobody is all bad. They can always serve as a bad example."
In this case, though, MS could well be doing us a service. By convincing the gullible public that "DRM is confusing and doesn't work very well", they are inadvertently helping in the fight against DRM everywhere. Even if someone will come up with DRM that works (for some value of "works"), it won't be used, because it won't run on Windows (and on non-MS systems, the crypto geeks will break it within hours of release). Most users will just accept that MS's DRM is what DRM is like, and will oppose its use anywhere as a result.
Of course, one could argue that a correct implementation of DRM is probably intractable. This is mostly because determining which "fair use" rules apply wherever the use might live is a seriously difficult AI problem. It can't actually be determined by a human-level intelligence, as demonstrated by the need to ask the courts rather than just reading the law books. So we need an AI that's much more intelligent than any team of human lawyers, and has deep understanding of all the "IP" laws of every jurisdiction in the world. Of multiple jurisdictions, actually, when Net transactions are considered. We won't likely see this level of AI in our lifetimes.
Discuss amongst yourselves
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Most of the indie labels (approx. 30% of sales) already do want their music sold without DRM.
I don't really see this. Put a big 'UNENCUMBERED' notice next to all the DRM-free songs. Start giving priority to DRM-free music on the front page of the store. Only recommend DRM-free music. Pretty soon, all of the other labels are going to want to re-negotiate their contracts to allow DRM-free distribution.
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