Cory Doctorow On What iPhone's Missing Headphone Jack Means For Music Industry (fastcompany.com)

Rumors of Apple's next iPhone missing a headphone jack have been swirling around for more than a year now. But a report from WSJ a few weeks ago, and another report from Bloomberg this week further cemented such possibility. We've talked about it here -- several times -- but now Cory Doctorow is shedding light on what this imminent change holds for the music industry. Reader harrymcc writes: Fast Company's Mark Sullivan talked about the switch with author and EFF adviser Cory Doctorow, who thinks it could lead to music companies leveraging DRM to exert more control over what consumers can do with their music.From the article:"If Apple creates a circumstance where the only way to get audio off its products is through an interface that is DRM-capable, they'd be heartbreakingly naive in assuming that this wouldn't give rise to demands for DRM," said Doctorow. If a consumer or some third-party tech company used the music in way the rights holders didn't like, the rights holders could invoke the anti-circumvention law written in Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Steve Jobs famously convinced the record industry to remove the DRM from music on iTunes; is there really any reason to believe the industry might suddenly become interested in DRM again if the iPhone audio goes all digital? "Yes -- for streaming audio services," Doctorow says. "I think it is inevitable that rights holder groups will try to prevent recording, retransmission, etc." Today it's easy to record streamed music from the analog headphone jack on the phone, and even to convert the stream back to digital and transmit it in real time to someone else. With a digital stream it might not be nearly so easy, or risk-free."Doctorow shares more on BoingBoing.

Comments

Idiotic Argument

[macs4all]

So, I guess Cory Doctorow has never heard of a Digital to Analog Converter (DAC), eh? Once a signal is converted back to analog (which it still has to be to be amplified and heard by us non-digitally-enabled humans), it is once more free for the taking.

And unlike video, where you can play all sorts of games with resolution, etc, you can't decimate audio data nearly as much.

Also, if this happens, there will be about 5,000 adapters to use analog earbuds/headphones with the data stream; and again, there's that pesky DAC... So, in reality, this is nothing more than a tempest in a DRM-free teapot.

Re:Idiotic Argument

[richieb]

You missed the point of DRM. The stream of bits coming out of the iPhone can be encrypted and must be decrypted before the DAC can take place. The decryption keys will only exist in approved devices (speakers or headphones).

not what i expect

[eyenot]

When I heard that the iPhone was "missing" the headphone jack, my first thought was "good call".

Here you have this insanely popular electronic device that people have with them at all times, and what's the number one complaint about it? No, no, /. friends, no, it's not planned obsolescence. It's "this thing dies if it so much as looks at water."

Well if you're going to try to take care of that problem one thing you might go for right away is getting rid of that crazy big hole in the top that by its very nature of design is all about exposed metal contacts.

I guess you could get all crazy in your head about DRM and shit but as someone else points out, at the end of the day however the sound is delivered it must end up being converted into a signal that can be used by standard speakers or headphones.

The only way around that is if Apple plans on making it so you have only two options:
* play the sound directly through the iPhone's built-in speaker
* send the sound via some Apple-proprietary encrypted cousin of bluetooth to one of Apple's own special speaker systems that if they get large enough to entertain a party probably cost many thousands of dollars

If that's the direction they're going to go I'd like to imagine it's going to be a complete failure because people don't have the money or wherewithal to spend on special speakers from Apple (the computer company, not the music company).

But then again you only have to know a handful of Apple users to understand that they would do exactly that, and would be glad to go broke doing it.

speakers will always be analog

[kimvette]

Speakers will always be analog so the easy workaround would be to source "digital speakers" that utilise a single high quality full-range driver, snip the leads to the driver and hook up a LOC and record the analog level coming out of the LOC. There will always be an "analog hole" which can be used to bypass any and all DRM.

A few weeks ago...

[QuietLagoon]

The media content industry wants to get rid of all analogue output jacks because an analogue jack cannot be locked down. .

The media content industry has already done away with analogue video output jacks. Now they are focusing on audio.

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