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The slow death of DRM
It's bad for business
By Steve Gordon (former Sony lawyer)
Column The DRM walls are crumbling. Earlier this week, Steve Jobs called on the major record labels to allow online music sales unfettered by digital rights management restrictions.
Today, the Wall Street Journal disclosed that EMI is in negotiations with several digital music services to sell unprotected MP3s of its catalogue. Jobs was motivated at least in part by legal actions against Apple in Europe and the US as discussed below. But whatever his motivation, Jobs is right: DRM has been a disaster for the recording business. This article will outline the brief but sad history of DRM, the current legal attacks on it, and the reasons why the recording business would be far better off without it.
A disaster of historical proportions
When I was still a lawyer at Sony Music, before the BMG merger, we had a business affairs summit. The year was 1999.
This was the first year our annual discussion covered digital music. It was led by an attorney specialising in litigation. The attorney used a projector to show us the original Napster. She asked for someone to name a song. She typed in the title and it immediately came up. She clicked the keyboard again, and boom, the song downloaded to her computer. And it was completely DRM-free.
That is, the song could be copied, ripped, mixed, and burned freely. Then she showed us Sony's digital offering. A consumer could "download" Mariah Carey tracks for $3 each, but because of the DRM, you could only listen to it on your desktop. I seriously doubt that more than a few poor souls took advantage of Sony's offer, and this feeble initiative was quickly withdrawn.
You could argue that the price was the big difference. But if Sony had offered the same product as Napster at a reasonable price, then the music business might now be leading the digital revolution and raking in money.
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It's bad for business
By Steve Gordon (former Sony lawyer)
Column The DRM walls are crumbling. Earlier this week, Steve Jobs called on the major record labels to allow online music sales unfettered by digital rights management restrictions.
Today, the Wall Street Journal disclosed that EMI is in negotiations with several digital music services to sell unprotected MP3s of its catalogue. Jobs was motivated at least in part by legal actions against Apple in Europe and the US as discussed below. But whatever his motivation, Jobs is right: DRM has been a disaster for the recording business. This article will outline the brief but sad history of DRM, the current legal attacks on it, and the reasons why the recording business would be far better off without it.
A disaster of historical proportions
When I was still a lawyer at Sony Music, before the BMG merger, we had a business affairs summit. The year was 1999.
This was the first year our annual discussion covered digital music. It was led by an attorney specialising in litigation. The attorney used a projector to show us the original Napster. She asked for someone to name a song. She typed in the title and it immediately came up. She clicked the keyboard again, and boom, the song downloaded to her computer. And it was completely DRM-free.
That is, the song could be copied, ripped, mixed, and burned freely. Then she showed us Sony's digital offering. A consumer could "download" Mariah Carey tracks for $3 each, but because of the DRM, you could only listen to it on your desktop. I seriously doubt that more than a few poor souls took advantage of Sony's offer, and this feeble initiative was quickly withdrawn.
You could argue that the price was the big difference. But if Sony had offered the same product as Napster at a reasonable price, then the music business might now be leading the digital revolution and raking in money.
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