Sony BMG Dropping DRM

Lally Singh writes "BusinessWeek is reporting that Sony BMG is planning on dropping DRM from their music. Salon's Machinest had an interesting take on this; 'Actually, what's happened is quite ironic. It was the industry's own DRM mandates that tied many music-lovers in to Apple's music storefront (we all had iPods, and the only way to buy digital music for the iPod was from Apple). Now Apple's become too powerful for the labels. They need an alternative distribution channel — they want to get music to our iPods, but they don't want to go through Apple to do it. The only way to do that is to offer retailers like Amazon the chance to sell songs as plain, unrestricted MP3s, which are iPoddable.'"

Comments

Re:Morals aside - what's the end result?

[grimwell]

Copyright is primarily an economic tool. It provides an incentive for people to create and share new works.

Copyright is not an incentive for people to create and share works. You should put the flavor-aid down.

Before copyrights and the concepts of IP, people were creating & sharing works. People naturally have a tendency to create, sharing is more of a cultural thing.

Copyright is there is enrichen the public domain(and thus human culture) by granting the author exclusive distribution rights for a limited time.

Copyright is basically a social contract between authors and society. Copyright has been perverted and no longer benefits society. It has become too one sided.

Is it really any surprise for the party being ripped off in the social contract, to start to disregard the social contract?

That's just one big straw man. We're not talking about copyright extensions here, we're talking about DRM and the ethics of piracy. And right now, give or take the current imbalance between fair use doctrine and technological protections (which is recent and mainly confined to the US), the use of DRM doesn't inherently break any part of the deal and piracy clearly does.

DRM is an under the table extension of copyright terms by the author both in length of the copyright and removal of the end user rights.

DRM doesn't know when a work's copyright expires, so this effectively puts the work under an never expiring copyright.

DRM also limits what the end user can do with the work; e.g. time or media shifting.

DRM and piracy both break the social contract of copyright. Kettle meet Pot.

If you get a chance spend some time hanging out with groups of artists(little kids, music, writers, coders, actors, etc). They're naturally creating stuff all the time, some good, some bad.