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Is Copy Protection Needed or Futile?
Hugh Pickens writes "Columnist Saul Hansell is hosting a debate about copyright issues and technology on his blog at the New York Times . On one side Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, says that anyone who is intellectually honest must 'acknowledge, confront and speak to the tidal wave of unlawful, wholesale reproduction and distribution of copyrighted content that is currently occurring in the digital world' and that we should be 'identify workable, flexible and effective approaches that reduce piracy without being intrusive and that fully respect other interests such as privacy and fair use.' Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, responds that 'locks will be broken, and so a business model that depends on locking is very vulnerable' adding that locks may form a part of certain successful business models but 'too much reliance on locking can seriously backfire.' Wu and Cotton will respond to each other and to comments by readers today." As for the man on the street, Panaqqa wrote us with word that the Question Copyright site has posted an interesting video of ordinary people explaining why they think copyright exists. It's pretty clear that most people don't understand it at all.
DRM tends to punish your paying customers as much (or more) than those stealing it. When your business model punishes your customer the result will be decline and eventually failure.
Price the content based on quality, and make it convenient. People prefer convenience.
People won't bother to steal if there's a quality, low-cost solution they could just pay for.
For example- I pay $15/month to subscribe to Yahoo Music with my MP3 player, because it's just easier than stealing. The catch? I don't even keep my music if I stop paying. But I don't care! I'm paying for convenience.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
'very vulnerable' isn't the half of it. You can't lock a tent . If your business model depends on end users not copying your product, you might as well save everyone a lot of trouble and move on to another project. Copyright/Patent/Trademark may protect you a bit against some commercial competition. But you can't do much about end users violating them. And maybe not against mega-corporations with brigades of lawyers either.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Let's also assume that they hand the secret crypto keys to Carol (the attacker) in an utterly unbreakable meanner
It's still totally futile. Let's take music as an example:
There comes that point, no matter how secure the path, they keys, the algoritm, etc where a digital signal must be transformed into an analog, human "readable" signal. That signal can be re-captured and re-digitalized (and with the right equipment in good quality too)
Thaat's also referred to as the analog hole and no amount of DRM will ever get around that.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
its unenforceable
i mean, you can also outlaw alcohol. but people will still drink, you just wind up rewarding is the mafia
people will copy files and share them. before the internet, that was a work intensive and very localized effort. anyone remember bootleg cassette tapes of concerts?
nowadays, the effort involved in sharing files is practically zero. and so a major shift has developed. people will copy files and share them. with ease. nothing you say or do will stop that
as for morality, what is moral or immoral about sharing files? someone "owns" them? oh really? their "ownership", unlike say, their ownership of a house or a car, is an abstract legal notion, derived from a business model that is now defunct in the age of the internet
there is nothing immoral or dishonest about sharing files. except among those minds who can't adapt and shift to a new paradigm about how media will be consumed in this world
new business models will develop. and they surely won't be as lucrative. again, is that a bad thing? not at all. music is about community, a passion for art. it's not about the passage of filthy lucre
so deal with change. or don't, and remain defunct. your choice, but copyright is dead
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Shops and bars take the cost of stolen goods into account when they price stuff, as they know that glasses will be stolen, things will break, etc. Why can't the entertainment industry realize the same thing? It will be more profitable for them to sell digital music with or without DRM and cost it with "wastage" included and expect piracy, then to hinder it continuously with law suites and such.
I also realize that they should go after the people sharing 1,000's of music / movie files, just as they go after the thief who steals from stores (I know, piracy != theft).
Since the music companies are gradually dropping DRM, I think the argument is already over. Movies will go online (leaving BluRay and HD owners screwed) over the next few years and still have certain protections, but nothing that can't be broken as has been proven time and time again.
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
If we are truly to be intellectually honest, then we must address the problem of supply versus demand. Rampant piracy suggests that the demand for content delivered over the Internet is obvious. Yet digital content has traditionally been held hostage by physical media. In many of the instances that content is provided digitally, it is further held hostage behind walls of incompatibilities, digital restrictions, overpricing, poor terms of services, and other devaluing options. All in the name of "protecting" digital content.
The preciously few times that digital content is loosed upon the populace at a fair price and fair terms, it blooms and propers. Which (if we are to be "intellectually honest") means that the failure to prevent copyright infringement is a failure to provide what the average consumer wants. When the content producers fail, many consumers take matters into their own hands.
My dear Warner Bros., why has the DVD of 300 been available for over 6 months, yet it is impossible to purchase or rent online? BBC, why are you not catering to your international audience by providing quality shows like Doctor Who on services like iTunes? NBC, thank you for your website. We very much enjoy the television content you provide. Now why are you backing out of the lucrative iTunes deal? You don't need exclusivity in this business. Viacom, CBS makes a killing on promoting their Late Late Show on YouTube. Why are you cutting off promotion of your excellent Comedy Central series rather than embracing it? (And thereby having some modicum of control over it.)
No. If we are to be "intellectually honest", we must face the fact that content producers are afraid. The world has changed, yet content producers cling to any false sense of control they can find. Each of these walls crumble under the might of economic demand, for which content producers only call for a bigger wall. Your customer is not your enemy. As with the barbarians at the gates of Rome who only wanted the land and crops originally promised to them by the emperor, your customers only want easy access to the content you promise them. No one has proven that they are not willing to pay for that privilege.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Licenses are for publishers, not end users. You don't "license a work" to me, you license the content to the publisher, who sells me the media containing the work. This is how it's worked since Gutenberg.
Now that the printing press has been invented, all the scribes will be out of business and nobody will write any more books!
Just like Gutenberg changed media, the internet changed media. The world is not as it was in the 20th century and never will be again. This is no more the time to invest in media companies than 1900 was the time to be investing in carraiges. Like that business then, the future paradigm is completely unlnown. What is known is that DRM doesn't work and cannot work. As has been said countless times before, making bits uncopyable is like making water not wet.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I disagree. The people in this video get some concepts mixed up (e.g., patents versus copyrights, economic rights versus moral rights). But, they seem to get the gist of what intellectual property rights are supposed to protect.
People definitely seems to struggle with their ideal view of copyright protection and their desire for convenience and low cost. Some of the people seemed to go to some lengths to rationalize copyright infringement.
One of the arguments given is that the artists do not see much of a profit from their works. That is, because the content creator has a bad deal with the content distributor, the consumer can legitimately chip away at the content distributor's profits.
This is poor rationalization. The ability of content creators to make reasonable deals with content distributors is a result of supply versus demand. Content creators that are good at controlling supply (e.g., programmers, who control supply simply by not having an overwhelmingly large population, members of the writers guild, who control supply through unionizing, or established artists, who have managed to survive the fickle markets) are in a better position to establish favorable deals than content creators who do not control supply very well (e.g., new musicians, who seem to grow on trees).
Copyright plays an important role in controlling supply. If there was no copyright, new musicians would have to avoid playing their songs in public or otherwise distributing their songs. Recording studios could troll for good songs, take them without any compensation, and hire their own musicians or established stars to take the songs to the big time. The marketing power of the content distributors would be much more important than it is today.
Copyright transferability plays an important role in stimulating demand. If the copyrights were completely non-transferable, then the risk of investing in content would become very high, reducing the demand from content distributors. Again, the marketing power of the content distributors would be much more important than it is today.
What is the effect of widespread infringement by consumers? The effect is that the risk of investing increases, again reducing the demand from content distributors.
Content producers can try to cut content distributors out of the loop, but that only works if consumers purchase from the content producers. Infringing on the copyrights of works that are in the hands of content distributors does nothing for content producers.
Remember, that even if content producers get no royalties for their works (something that is common with programmers), content distributors have to meet some threshold of reward to get content providers to assign their copyrights over the the content producers. The more risk there is in investing in a content producer (e.g., because of widespread copyright infringement), the less demand there is from content distributors, and thus the worse the deals are for content producers.
Here's a second critical difference: Breaking the lock on one physical item nets you one physical item. Breaking the protection on a copy-protected work nets you as many copies of that work as you care to make.
And a third difference: Sometimes breaking the copy-protection on a work allows you to copy many other works as well.
If breaking one auto lock gave a thief access to every car of that model, and perhaps every car of that model year, they'd be pretty useless. Such is copy protection.
You're right to bring up the idea of deterrence. Anyone security expert worth their salt will tell you that security is really all about deterrence. You can't make something impossible to access, and even if you could, the only way to completely secure it is to disallow all access, even to the owner. Otherwise, the owner could inadvertently give access to someone else.
So the purpose of security measures is to make it difficult to get unauthorized access, risky to attempt to gain unauthorized access, and very likely to get caught if you do gain unauthorized access. That's all. However, a good DRM scheme has to be transparent to the authorized user, meaning it has to be simple to get access, without risk to gain access, and unlikely to suffer bad consequences from getting access. Therefore it's just incompatible with the idea of security. You don't secure things against authorized access.
The problem with copy protection is that it is totally misunderstood by those attempting to use it. It is 100% perfectly reasonable and possible to prevent a 3rd party from decoding your data. It is 100% unreasonable and impossible to simultaneously allow access to your data and expect it to be impossible to copy. People who use your DVD or music MUST be able to access the data in order to use it. Once you allow access, it is impossible to prevent copying. The mere act of "using" data, at the OS level, is copying the data. Basically, if it can be used, it can be copied.
The impractical part is that this a classic impossible problem but the record and movie companies fail to grasp the simple limitations that facts dictate. It is a classic entropy problem, copying digital data requires almost no resources, therefor it is going to happen. Controlling the copying requires exerting energy and resources. The amount of entropy (copying) if greater than the big companies, even with their considerable resources, can fight.
They need to realize that they can't control copying. They have been trying since the first cassette recorders came out decades ago. Hell, they've been trying since printing presses came out. The trend is, and always has been, to make copying and production easier and cheaper.
The trick is to figure out a new business model. Duh! I'm pretty sure oil lantern produces were fighting tooth and nail against that horrible intellectual property destroying light bulb thing, but that's progress!
Contrary to what a few people like to say, the overwhelming majority of people downloading music off bit torrent/p2p are NOT doing it for 'convenience' and wouldnt pay for the music on ITunes even if it didnt have DRM. Most of the people downloading music are doing it specifically because it means they get it for free.
I don't believe you have cited differences.
...) actually are alike in this respect. When you lock your door, you "give" the thief the key in an obscured way. Ask any locksmith. The information contained in a physical lock, by itself, suffices to create a tool that can bypass that lock and other similar ones.
Not one of the security models used in his analogy depends on giving the key to the potential attacker. With media DRM you are given a restricted format and an obscured key to unlock it. This is its weakness, and has no corollary with the examples he gave.
The listed examples (car locks, home locks
Two - in the case of car and home locks - deterrence is enough. I don't need to secure my house against a perfect thief, unless I have the Hope diamond in my bedroom. I only need to secure my home better than my neighbor does. Even securing my house well enough to change the risk:reward or difficulty:reward balance is enough to greatly reduce the chances of a break-in.
Copy protection is the exact same way. It only needs to be strong enough so that for most people, their utility is maximized by doing something *other* than copying the work. The person adding the copy protection is, just like you, trying to manipulate the risk:reward ratio of copying.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
There is a bigger difference. With the other items you listed, the person who has paid for the item, owns the lock. When I have a car, home lock, email account and computer firewall, I get to control the lock on my stuff. I can even unlock them and let anyone or everyone have access to them. DRM is the only lock where someone else gets is trying to lock up my stuff, and telling me who I can give access to, or even how I access my stuff.
Except, as has been mentioned by others elsewhere in this thread, for the fact that picking my home's lock does not give you access to my neighbor's home.
Also, to pick my Honda's lock you need physical access to my home. This limits greatly the number of people able to work on picking the lock. To break the security on a DRM'd file - any (easy to make) copy will suffice.
You are also ignoring the fact that other grossly overpriced items invite theft and law abuse.
There is such a glut of entertainment that there is no reason that Tom Cruise gets $20 million for a $100 million movie when a movie (and a host of people involved with the movie also get 7 figure and 6 figure salaries as well).
The fact is that a movie -- the hard technology of it, the writing, the editing, can be done at a 10th the cost it is currently done at (probably 1/100th).
Sane people do not pirate $6 dvd's. However $89 DVD is something different. Especially for a movie that made it's profits years ago and is in the "all gravy" phase.
Do people have a *right* to infringe (steal) creator's works? No.
But to think they will not when they can easily do so for $1 and two hours of their time is insane.
Also... I used to write software which was used to earn my company 8 billion dollars. Why are movie and television writers so special that they get paid for the rest of their life when they write yet another boilerplate television script?
Actors... writers... everyone in hollywood is in for a wakeup call. Multi-million dollar salaries are going to be unsupportable very soon. Already, I spend 30% of my entertainment time on free things like Star Wreck, Fan Movies, and so on. A huge chunk of my time goes to Mmorg's at $15 a month (maybe 50 cents per hour). And then DVD's of series like Mission impossible and Heroes run me about $1 per hour for entertainment. Why does a movie justify $15 per hour? It doesn't.
The compensation in the entertainment industry is grossly inflated.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Copyright is a bargain, not an actual "right". A "right" is something you could stop other people from doing to you. Since you can't stop Alice from copying to Betty, nor Betty copying to Cynthia, you have no "right" to prevent copying. No, copyright is a *bargain*. The public gives up something (the right to copy) for a LIMITED period of time as an incentive for creators to create. Creators have unilaterally abandoned their end of the bargain by seeking to control copying forever. The public is, IN RESPONSE TO THE ACTIONS OF CREATORS, taking back its right to copy.
Don't like that? Uphold your end of the bargain and see what happens.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Unless a design defect is discovered in a line of locks, picking one (or creating a specialized pick) does not grant all would-be attackers instant access. The best it can do is lower the barrier to entry, it can make the task easier. Physical access, time, and a certain level of skill are still required of the attacker.
This is very different from current media DRM schemes. Once a file is broken there is no longer a barrier at all. Anyone can use the broken file, without physical access, without spending time "picking the lock", and without any skill.
If a design defect is discovered in a line of physical locks, the locks can be changed. Until no media is delivered on physical media such recalls are impossible for the subjects of the original argument.
The point I would like to see Rick Cotton address is how his mythical "workable, flexible and effective approaches that reduce piracy without being intrusive" addresses the problem that copy protection only needs to be broken once to show up on the file sharing networks. After that any copy protection only serves to burden the rightful owner.
"Workable, flexible and effective approaches that reduce piracy without being intrusive" only stops the casual pirate from uploading their file. It does nothing from stopping the casual pirate from downloading a cracked file that a serious pirate uploaded.
If the content producers are dead set on controlling the flow of their material given the realities of broadband, what they're looking for is digital watermarks, not digital locks. At least in that case you can track down whoever it was that originally purchased the file. No it doesn't work with any content that was ever given away freely (I'm still not sure why you'd want to protect that anyway) and no it isn't perfect. Yes, it is also a bit of closing the barn door after the horses are out, but it at least has some deterrent value.
shouldn't they be able to deploy a wide range of ever-changing DRM systems?
This is significantly dangerous for the consumer since it means that the consumer's right to access their legally purchased content may be revoked at any time. For example - if the DRM server becomes inaccessible you really don't want all your content to be revoked (if the rights holder has gone bankrupt, for example, they aren't going to care that none of their customers can access their content any more).
Sadly many of the public who I have talked with about DRM seem to think this is a problem. Usually they say something along the lines of "I don't care if I lose access to my music in 10 years, after all it's 10 years old so not important" - I don't know about anyone else, but I still listen to music I purchased well over 10 years ago.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
The only way that their copy protection scheme would work is if they had complete end-to-end control of all hardware devices that might capture either the data or the sounds and images which is not only ridiculous but impossible. I have long thought that a different course should be pursued and it is as follows:
First, the music industry should discontinue their lawsuits and refund all money and reasonable legal expenses that they have inflicted upon average citizens of modest means in their lawsuit campaign. Second, they should apologize to both the artists and the fans for years of skullduggery, ripoffs, and other assorted nastiness. Third, they should charge reasonable prices for downloads of music in the format chosen by the user (ogg, mp3, aac, or whatever the customer wants). Finally, after all of these steps have been taken, they should make the case against wholesale copyright infringement by taking the moral high ground and appealing to peoples' sense of decency and fairness. Most people are reasonable and would be swayed by such an argument. They would not infringe copyright wholesale for the same reasons that they don't empty the cardboard change box (i.e. the one with no lock or other security) of the charity candy stand. The honor system works, and works at least as well as treating everyone like a thief. There will always be wholesale copyright infringers no matter what the industry does. However, the problem can be minimized for minimal cost and expense by taking the high road and appealing to peoples' noble side rather than taking the low road with lawsuits and injustice for all.
I think you'll find that it is customary to use brackets around an inferred term if it does not appear in the source material. In this particular case, I think you'll also find that I never stated nor inferred that overpricing was the problem. I stated that high price in concert with unfair terms lead to a devaluing of the product that made it undesirable to the consumer.
iTunes was successful despite its DRM. Part of the key to its success was that the DRM was not intrusive and thus not devaluing to the product.
At the risk of sounding cliche, all you have done is produce a strawman argument and then successfully knock it down.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
See subject, but I should also note that Thomas Babington MacAuley saw this coming a LONG time ago... and delivered the following in 1841 in British Parliament when a bill proposing copyright extension to a length of 60 years was being debated:
At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.
And yes, indeed, the whole nation *IS* now in on the plot. Why? Because, as the parent rightly notes, creators have broken their end of the bargain. No one expect you to uphold your end of a contract once the other party has broken it and defaulted on it; why should the public, then, uphold its end of the copyright contract when big copyright interests have unilaterally broken their end of the bargain. Grant and consideration - we GRANT copyright holders exclusivity of copying in CONSIDERATION for the deliverance of their work to the public domain. Since copyright holders have decided to refuse to provide the CONSIDERATION bargained for (by constantly lobbying for longer copyrights, even on extant works), they HAVE NO RIGHT to the GRANT promised them.
So... if you want to be intellectually honest, you must acknowledge, big media, that by pressing for ever-longer copyright terms (including and especially arbitrarily lengthening terms on on already extant works) YOU DECIDED TO VOID THE COPYRIGHT CONTRACT. Complaining now that the public is not holding up its end of the bargain of a contract YOU VOIDED is a bit disingenuous - YOU defaulted, YOU voided the contract with US, NOT the other way around... and since YOU are the side that is in default, WE THE PUBLIC are no longer morally or ethically bound to respect the contract (and would in fact, be fools to do so).
anyone who is intellectually honest must "acknowledge, confront and speak to the tidal wave of unlawful, wholesale reproduction and distribution of copyrighted content..."
I will agree wholeheartedly with that. But at the same time anyone who is intellectually honest should acknowledge, confront and speak to the absurdity of infinite copyright extension, the industry's use of exploitative contracts, and the generally abusive tack they take with honest customers.
No, two wrongs don't make a right. And most of the people who steal the stuff aren't doing it on any kind of crusade. But the big copyright players have been and continue to be such dick heads for so long that citizens who might otherwise look on copyright violation as a type of theft don't really give a shit about it any more. And that includes me.
Also, when you make completely brain-dead innovative content that panders to the lowest common denominator, dumbing down our culture instead of rising to the occasion and doing something great, perhaps even important, with all that power... well, you end up with a bunch of brain-dead customers who don't give a shit about anything anyways.
You pissed in your bed, now sleep in it.
Cheers.
...and back in the mid 90 we had lots of research to show that the cost of copy protection rises geometrically where the cost to remove copy protection rises linearly. Restated; the more effort we put in to protection cost us much, much more than the cost (and time) to break. This was software copy protection, but the parallels to DRM and such are the same. Anything protected can be unprotected - and when you couple it with studies that show protection doesn't impact (or negatively impacts) consumer choice... it isn't economically viable. People who buy, buy. People who try, buy. Those that steal will steal regardless.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Every 20 years, copyright is extended by another 20 years, so copyrights have been getting worse. This is why I said "no longer".
Why is copyright any more or less unfair now that goods are digital in nature rather than physical?First of all, copyright exists to promote the arts and sciences, not to make anyone money. It is a tradeoff made by the public, where they give up some rights (being able to copy works) in order to encourage authors to make works. After a short term, those works would then fall into the public domain, where anyone could use them to derive more creative works. A big, full public domain of free material then gets built up.
Now to answer the question. Originally, copyright had no effect on individuals. No one had the ability to make mass reproductions. To copy a book, an individual had to hand copy it, since individuals didn't own printing presses. Copying two books took twice as long as copying one book. It wasn't worth it. When it came to copyrights, the public wasn't actually losing anything, since they didn't have the ability to excersise those rights in the first place. Copyright was an industrial limitation, to keep publishers from publishing books before the author got a chance to make some profit.
This is different in the digital age. We all have printing presses now. Copyright needs to be reevaluated.
Demand for software decreases, supply will decrease.Thanks to the digital age we have, the software supply is infinite. Really, copyright creates an artificial cap on this infinite supply. Another way to look at this, I guess, is that there is a limited supply of unique software. But why does demand go down? People won't stop needing software if copyright law changed. I am not sure that the supply-demand curve applies well to creative works, anyway.
Copyright encourages authors to not only create works, by providing a profit motive, but needs to also allow works to fall into public domain so that they can be used to create even more works. Copyright fails the second part, along with the unreasonable restrictions on personal freedoms. The public is the important side of the deal, and should be getting the bargain. Copyright law is backwards right now.
I don't want to plagairize, but I read this article: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyright.html a couple years ago, and I was using things I remebered from it in writing this.
Unfortunately, the premises of the argument as described in the article are wrong. The question of copyright should not revolve around the axis of "lock up all the pirates" versus "gee, can't really stop those darned pirates". The question of copyright revolves around how far we as a society are willing to limit our own rights in order to provide a fair incentive to creators of content (music, movies, books, etc) to be creative. Copyright law does not exist in order to make mega-millionaires out of marginal talent or their producers. Nor does copyright law exist in order to fund a whole cottage industry whose sole existence is to defend copyright law. The question should rather be asked of NBC Universal and other entertainment industry heavyweights: Do you recognize the tidal wave of violations of fair use rights of citizens around the world by giant corporations, the wholesale trampling of our privacy rights by pervasive industry electronic monitoring, and the perversion of our very legal systems to the service of picking the pockets of presumed (but never proven) copyright "violators"? People are fed up, and think it is about time the law swung back over to our side. And if that means fewer mass produced media mediocrities, so be it.
No, but it makes me the owner of that CD. When I buy a book I don't own the copyright on the story but I do own that copy of the book. When I buy a car I don't own the trademark on the car or the design or anything but I do own that car. Same thing. And that is exactly the point: I have certain rights regarding what I can do with my property (that specific copy of the CD), and DRM is designed and intended to interfere with those rights to the benefit of a third party who is not the owner of that copy anymore.
If you lose access to your music 10 years from now, unless you stop buying music today, it won't ALL be 10 years old. Some of it might be a week old. And if you DO still want it, you'd have to buy it again. You bought it. It should be yours.