Privacy Digest

The online music rip-off - Via PC Pro: Blogs & Analysis: Features:

The perils of DRM-riddled music that we've been buying for years are now starting to come to light. Stuart Andrews finds out what's gone wrong.

Take yourself back to the days when everyone bought only CDs. Imagine what you'd have thought of a store that sold discs that might work on your CD player now, but weren't guaranteed to work on next year's models. Imagine that some required you to phone the music store on a regular basis to reassure them that you were the legitimate owner, and were that store to go under, all the CDs you bought from it would one day cease playing. And once you started buying music from this store, you found yourself locked into a system that discouraged you from buying from a rival store down the street. Why, you might think, would you have bought anything from a place like that? Well, if you're like millions of people in the UK, there's a strong chance you already have.

How to get free music

It's now four years since the iTunes store launched in the UK, and only now are we beginning to understand the full implications of buying music online. With vinyl or CD you knew where you stood: you bought the album or the single and, provided nobody lost, stole or scratched it, your music would still play in ten years' time. In the digital download age, however, that can't be taken for granted.

Digital rights management (DRM) has been a disaster. In December 2006, Bill Gates said "DRM was not where it should be", admitting that it "causes too much pain for legitimate buyers". By February 2007, Apple's Steve Jobs was in agreement: "DRM hasn't worked, and may never work to halt music piracy," he noted in an essay. Yet, even though consumers hate it and many industry insiders admit it doesn't do its job, DRM remains a major part of the online music buying experience.

Pirate-proof?

Why is DRM so contentious? Surely it's designed to protect the rights of artists and record companies in a climate where, as one international music industry body claims, illegal downloads swamp legitimate music store downloads by a ratio of 20 to 1? The problem is DRM doesn't affect the pirates, who upload and download DRM-free files often ripped directly from CD. Instead, it affects legitimate buyers in a range of deeply irritating ways.

(Read Original Article - Via PC Pro: Blogs & Analysis: Features .)

Editor: The author has a few basic facts wrong, but may have the basic anti-DRM point correct.