by Playfuls Staff |
3rd April 2007
Despite media’s enthusiasm and despite the high hopes posed in the recent deal between EMI and Apple, DRM is definitely NOT dead.[more]
By now, you all know that Apple and EMI have reached a landmark agreement to sell the latter’s music in unprotected format on iTunes.
The new higher quality DRM-free music will complement EMI's existing range of standard DRM-protected downloads already available. Starting yesterday, EMI's retailers will be offered downloads of tracks and albums in the DRM-free audio format of their choice in a variety of bit rates up to CD quality. EMI is releasing the premium downloads in response to consumer demand for high fidelity digital music for use on home music systems, mobile phones and digital music players. EMI's new DRM-free products will enable full interoperability of digital music across all devices and platforms.
According to Jeanne Meyer, the Senior VP of Corporate Communications at EMI, it was the record company that approached Apple in this matter, not the other way around. EMI came up with this decision after having noticed customers’ increasing desire to have DRM-free music. Following the deal, full DRM-free albums sold on iTunes will have the same price.
In theory, EMI’s move should boost the company’s online music sales, despite the fact that piracy also becomes easier with unprotected songs. EMI hopes to grab a bigger share of the digital music market (which is expected to steadily rise in detriment of CD sales until 2010), putting its bet also on music downloaded on mobile phones (more than 500 million handsets available worldwide by the end of 2007). The sole condition to have a bigger market share in the digital music domain is to have your songs playable on multiple gadgets, which means interoperability.
Interoperability has been the magical word that has given Apple and record companies so many headaches. It has also been the dream all MP3-player owners dream of since the beginning of the portable-music era, triumphantly inaugurated by Apple’s iPod. And it has been the nightmare that haunted Steve Jobs’ nights for too many years, enough to make him write down his famous “Thoughts on music”.
According to Deutsche Telekom's Musicload, one of the largest online music stores here in Europe, almost 75% of the problems customers stumble upon after buying songs from the online music store are related to DRM. 3 out of 4 customer service calls are ultimately the result of the frustrations that come with DRM, and considering that most of the DRM-related costs are supported in this business by online retailers, things are more than frustrating.
Musicload also tried to differentiate itself by allowing independent music labels to sell their music on the service sans DRM, and the move has reportedly been a success. Championing the "Comeback of MP3," Musicload said that artists choosing to drop DRM saw a 40 percent increase in sales since December, and that more artists and labels are showing interest.
In France, the French Parliament voted last year a law that was supposed to make the FairPlay DRM technology used by Apple available for other MP3-player producers, like Creative or Toshiba. In the end they’ve watered it down, allowing copyright holders to object in case they felt their intellectual property was violated by the DRM licensing to third party publishers.
Following France’s leadership, more European countries joined the crusade against Apple’s way of doing business, with Scandinavian countries voicing their concern about the choice limitation at which customers are submitted.
It all culminated this week, when the EU Commission finally confirmed that it had opened an antitrust probe into Apple's iTunes and the way it sells music online in coordination with major music companies.
The EU stated that Apple’s agreements with major record companies violate the EU regulations, mainly because it "contains territorial sales restrictions”.
People can only download singles or albums from the iTunes store in their country of residence, the commission said.
"Consumers are thus restricted in their choice of where to buy music and consequently what music is available, and at what price," the EU Commission said in a statement. "For example, in order to buy a music download from the iTunes’ Belgian online store a consumer must use a credit card issued by a bank with an address in Belgium."
Apple spokesman Steve Dowling responded on Monday that Apple’s initial intention was to operate a single store across the European territory, but was faced with restrictions from content owners. “Apple has always wanted to operate a single, pan-European iTunes store accessible by anyone from any member state, but we were advised by the music labels and publishers that there were certain legal limits to the rights they could grant us.”
"We don't believe Apple did anything to violate EU law," Dowling said. "We will continue to work with the EU to resolve this matter."
Apple and the unidentified record companies have two months to reply in writing to the commission's formal objections. The companies can also ask the commission for a hearing.
Legal issues are not the only DRM-related problems signaled so far. DRM-protected files are also battery killers for most of the MP3 players, according to a test conducted last year by CNET.com. Apparently, the battery of a tiny gadget that has to deal with DRM-encrypted songs only lasts for up to 12 hours, compared to an average of 16 hours for MP3 players that play unprotected songs. That's a full 25% less.
FairPlay DRM-protected tracks bought from the iTunes Music Store also resulted in lost battery life, though not quite as big: only 8%.
DRM also seems to have caused playback delays and overall slower responsiveness, as it required extra processing.
Following a simple equation, DRM’s effects on the battery contributed to a quicker death for the MP3 player: shorter battery time produced the urge to charge it more, also shortening the player's life.
But what stopped interoperability from becoming a reality until now? According to both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs DRM is simply bad.
During a December 2006 interview with Techcrunch, Gates said that the current DRM technologies are too complicated for regular users and they are better off purchasing music CDs and ripping the music from them for listening on computers and portable music players.
According to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Gates noted that DRM “causes too much pain for legitimate buyers” and overall is not an effective solution. He went on to say that “DRM is not where it should be, but you won’t get me to say that there should be usage models and different payment models for usage. At the end of the day, incentive systems do make a difference, but we don’t have it right with incentives or interoperability.”
But in spite of these promising comments, Microsoft is still not ready to drop the DRM technology.
They have developed a DRM technology, called PlaysForSure, which is used by music services like Napster, Urge, and Yahoo Music. Surprisingly, when Microsoft launched its latest attempt to compete with iPod, the Zune MP 3 player, the company decided to unveil a new form of DRM technology, separated from PlaysForSure.
Windows Vista, the latest PC OS emanating from Redmond, is also packed with a lot of DRM features that restrict the kind of media content you can use on your Vista machine. Ironically or not (for MS), a well-known Romanian security blogger and Microsoft Student Ambassador called Alex Ionescu proved that Vista’s DRM can be cracked.
At CTIA WIRELESS 2006, Microsoft also announced it will make significant investments in its digital rights management (DRM) technologies to enable a new offering and drive scenarios that support the wireless industry.
Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs also dismissed in a recent interview with Apple Insider that the DRM-free songs will soon be followed by DRM-free movies. “Video is pretty different than music right now because the video industry does not distribute 90 percent of their content DRM free; never has, and so I think they are in a pretty different situation and so I wouldn't hold the two in parallel at all.”
Referencing the CSS (Content Scramble System) technology used on DVDs, Jobs said that "CSS makes the video market different than the music industry because music CDs don't come with copy protection. "As a result, Jobs' argument has been that digital music should be sold in an equivalent manner as CDs – “without copy protection".
Also, other record companies among the “top four” (Vivendi’s Universal Music, Sony BMG and Warner) have soundly voiced in the past their disagreement with Steve Jobs’ vision of a DRM-free world of music.
