DRM

DRM: Paranoia and panic is the default setting

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Seven years ago, it was an effort to get people interested in DRM issues. Today, as the internet pulsates with rumour, paranoia and conspiracy, there’s a different kind of problem. This constant background noise – and people’s willingness to jump in fear at their own shadows. Instead of information scarcity, there’s information overload. So to … Read more

Free music has never looked so cheap

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For the major record labels, yesterday’s deal between EMI and Apple doesn’t herald a new beginning, but the beginning of the end.

From next month, EMI will distribute much of its repertoire without DRM through Apple’s iTunes store. Independent labels have been distributing DRM-free songs for three years, avoiding the lock-ins created by competing hardware manufacturers. But EMI is the first of the “Big Four” majors to recognise that artificially recreating the inconveniences of physical product in a digital form isn’t good business.

Let’s leave aside the many gotchas in the announcement, such as the price increase which takes the cost of an unencumbered song to almost $2 (that’s the UK price converted to US dollars, folks), the absence of the Beatles’ catalogue, and the continuation of DRM as “on by default”.

Let’s also leave aside the mutual panic which brought Apple and EMI together yesterday. EMI is in financial free-fall, it’s unsuccessfully tried to find a buyer for several years, and it’s now so desperate it will try anything. Apple is under regulatory pressure not only to modify its DRM consumer lock-in but, along with EMI and the labels, faces an EU anti-trust probe into its pricing. Both companies jumped before they were pushed.

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Lessig, RMS on DRM

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Professor Lessig tells us that he should have reviewed the Sun Microsystems press release before it went out. It doesn’t fully reflect his position, he says, and he’s emphatic that this blessing doesn’t constitute an endorsement. Read more

Lessig blesses DRM

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Oh.

Dear.

If you arrive for work today and discover a grisly pool of brain tissue and bone fragments where a colleague used to sit, we may have the explanation right here. For, n a move that risks causing Scanners-style head explosions across the land, Professor Lawrence Lessig has endorsed DRM.

Don't read on. This could happen to you

Not just any old digital rights management, but Sun’s open source DRM initiative, the Open Media Commons.

“In a world where DRM has become ubiquitous, we need to ensure that the ecology for creativity is bolstered, not stifled, by technology,”. says Lessig – or somebody purporting to be Lessig.

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