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Warner Music Group Drops DRM for Amazon
SirLurksAlot sends us to Ars Technica for an article about the Warner Music Group's decision to allow DRM-free music downloads through Amazon. This reversal of Warner's former position has been underway for some time, and it boosts the number of DRM-free songs available from Amazon to 2.9 million. Quoting:
"Warner's announcement says nothing about offering its content through other services such as iTunes, and represents the music industry's attempt to make life a bit more difficult for Apple after all the years in which the company held the keys to music's digital kingdom.
DRM is bad. Let it die, and soon.
I have a sudden feeling that I'd like to buy something from Warner's catalog off Amazon.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Since Amazon launched their MP3 store, I've been trying to pick things up there if possible, then fall back on iTunes as a secondary source -- specifically because of the lack of DRM. Good to know the selection's about to jump.
I still would rather buy the CD and encode losslessly (I made a new word!).
This isn't about record companies deciding DRM is bad. It is about making sure Apple doesn't control the distribution of digital media.
As DRM dies the fools will start using digital watermarking to sue people who leak to p2p networks. This will ruin numerous lives until some clever lawyer points out that since the distributor knows the watermark THEY can upload it to p2p networks in order to frame people they wish to sue. Eventually this fact will sink in among judges, but before that happens thousands of people will have been burnt, new draconian legislation will have been passed, and music sales will have fallen even more.
Following this the process of suing based on watermarks will wane, but the distributors will instead disconnect people from their websites if they find their watermarks on p2p. The result will be that those burnt ( weather guilty or not ) will migrate to filesharing.
In essence, despite the obvious fiasco that is DRM the same garbage will continue due to greed and stupidity. Really, DRM in one clothing or another has been arround for some time, it as never been successful, but that hasn't stopped people from trying. It will continue this way for quite some time still.
There's one reason we're seeing DRM-free music: Apple.
Every internet whiner and hazmat-suited protester put together didn't make a noticeable fraction of the impact against DRM that Apple did via their refusal to buy into Microsoft's DRM or license their own to others. They turned the labels tools to control customers into a distributor's tool to control the labels, and now the labels are caught in their own trap, and desperately thrashing and gnawing at their limbs to get away (by selling DRM-free to everyone but Apple).
But, since Apple haven't had the industry-crushing success they had with music in the video market thus far, and no one else looks likely to repeat Apple's feat, we may be stuck with DRM in the video market for a while.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
The difference is that the music industry genuinly wanted DRM to succeed. They honestly believed in the "when there's no way around it, they will buy it" theory.
That the customer (I will never agree to being reduced to a consumer) has an option didn't hit their mind: Not buying. That people would actually rather do without their product rather than taking the rectal abuse DRM is didn't really cross their mind.
Do we get "more" now than we do before? No. But we get again what we want: Music to listen to whenever and wherever we want to. I'm fairly glad that the idea of DRM was already met with resistance at its beginning, not its end (we all remember their pipe dreams of "leased" or "rented" music, where you're supposed to pay-per-play).
It's certainly not the outbreak of common sense this will undoubtedly being tagged as. It's simply that they saw their sales hurt more by pushing DRM rather than dealing with the "loss" of "only" selling us music once. The price for total control of their music simply was too high. Because the price would have been to lose the rest of their sales.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Quack, quack.
What I'd like to be able to do is easily share a track with a few friends (not really P2P, just mail or what have you) for music I really like so they can check it out. But if music is watermarked that means if any of those friends share in turn, and someone else eventually (lets say by accident) shares the same file via P2P - you may just be liable. It still kind of introduces a chilling effect on the world of music sharing as it should be.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Man, who is the dickhead on the loose with mod points this evening. I guess there are some RIAA types that frequent Slashdot nowadays.
Flamebait, my ass. That's actually funny.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
> It's certainly not the outbreak of common sense this will undoubtedly being tagged as. It's simply that
> they saw their sales hurt more by pushing DRM rather than dealing with the "loss" of "only" selling us
> music once.
No, I don't think that is the reason at all. In the end they would probably have won on the take it or leave it tactics with DRM. Most people were lining up, buying iPods and giving each other iTunes gift certificates like good little consumers. No, what did it was fear and greed. Fear among the music cartels that Apple and Microsoft were about to become a duopoly and control all access to media... i.e. replace the music (and eventually movie distributors) companies as the gatekeepers. Really, once they were distributing most music it would have been a totally natural step to start signing up artists directly.... Apple already IS doing that with indy acts. So fear of being cut ALL the way out was motivating them to find a way to create enough retailers in the digital download space to avoid being marginalized.
Now consider the greed and fear at Amazon, Walmart etc. They could read the same tea leaves. Walmart with it's huge iPod display and shrinking sales in their CD dept and the uneasy reality that the Walmart online music store will NEVER be compatible with the Apple or Zune DRM scheme. I.E. every ipod or Zune sale is helping Apple and Microsoft dismantle Walmart's current huge percentage of nationwide music sales. Ditto for Amazon, selling the crap out of iPods, each one sold eating away at future content sales unless they found a way to 'kick the table over' and change the rules of the game.
Odds of convincing either His Steveness or the Borg to open up their DRM system being zero, even with the full unified might (yea, as if) of all of the media megacorps, the only way out of the hole they had dug themselves after considering the file compatibility matrix of the huge installed base of players was unencumbered mp3.
Democrat delenda est
It has everything to do with the fact that Apple won't budge on their $0.99 cent tracks and that makes the labels mad. Apple already sells DRM-free tracks for EMI through iTunes Plus. All the labels could if they wanted to, but they won't. In the years since they killed off the original Napster they've done nothing but sit on their hands. Then Apple came along and filled the void consumers were begging for: legitimate online music sales. They don't care who it is or what the method of distribution is, what they care about is that they control it. They can't control Apple, PlaysForSure is a bust that even Microsoft has abandoned, so they turn to the next biggest thing: Amazon. We'll see how that plays out.
In terms of licensing, encoding AAC audio content in an MPEG4 container is less proprietary than MP3. The only part that isn't an open standard is FairPlay, which is also the least restrictive DRM you'll find.
On another subject, it's also interesting that earlier this year Steve Jobs was whining how he wanted to sell DRM-free music, but "they" wouldn't let him. Well, Steve, Amazon is doing it. Why aren't you?
Apple started selling DRM-free music back in May, before Amazon released their big MP3 store.
Your username couldn't possibly be more ironic.
Some jerk might try to pull this, but I'm pretty sure that the actual labels themselves won't do this directly. Why? Because it's a qualitative difference from what they are doing now.
:)
Right now they are suing people with all kinds of dubious legal theories, but they're still arguably within classical law interpretation.
Outright framing individuals crosses a line into pure fraud, and if correctly proven by a defense team, will smash that label a giant penalty.
"Your honor, I'd like to call Bruce Schneier for the defense expert."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine