p2pnet - rss feed: EMI to drop DRM?
p2pnet.net News:- Britain’s EMI has all-but admitted DRM was, and is, a waste of time and where it goes, Warner Music (US), Vivendi Universal (France) and Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), its colleagues in th eBig 4 Organized Music cartel, are sure to follow. Eventually.
The dinosaurs who run the Big 4 Organized Music cartel made a gigantic mistake when they decided they could take on p2p and win, suing young children, and trying to paint their customers around the world as as “criminals” and “thieves”.
They could turn things around in a flash and regain their credibility (and many of their lost customers) at the same time. All they’d have to do is admit they made a mistake - after all, everyone does, now and then - and that they now plan to work for, instead of against, their customers, dropping the sue ‘em all lawsuits.
But they won’t. EMI, et al, will instead to to figure out how to retrench, covering their world-class screw-ups, such as their attempts to foist DRM on consumers, with even more blustering and blundering.
There’ll be tortured press releases explaining how they’ve always been on the side of the p2p community, how they’ve been working like dogs to get mp3s accepted as The Way, how they’ve always had their customers’ best interests at heart. And how DRM was, well, only an experiment.
First up seems to be EMI which, according to Reuters, is, “reviewing its use of the controversial content protection technology used on CDs, known as digital rights management (DRM), but has not scrapped it altogether”.
People who pay good money for CDs and DVDs want to be able to back them up. But because they can do so doesn’t mean they’re going to use the ability start up cottage industries mass-producing discs for re-sale on black markets.
That’s left to the true criminals, and DRM has zero effect on them or their activities.
The entire concept of DRM is ridiculous. Anything which can be seen or heard by one means can be copied by another. End of story. So DRM hasn’t worked, and never will.
“Music companies launched DRM in a bid to curb piracy but the software means that the discs are incompatible with the iPod, the market-leading digital music player made by Apple Computer Inc,” says Reuters. “Critics also argue that the system has not worked as consumers could be driven to illegal sites to download music to the popular iPod instead.”
Could be? They’ve been doing that since Day One, and the iPod has nothing to do with it.
‘Consumers’ [read customers] are driven to the p2p networks and fast increasing numbers of independent music sites and services because they flatly refuse to pay $1 for digital files which are only worth a few cents. iTunes is a huge success? Not. It may be making a little money now, but not a lot. Until very recently, it was a loss leader for the iPod and even now it’s no more than a front-end loader funded by punters. And iTunes never has, and never will, figure in the true world of online music.
The statistics routinely trotted out by the Big 4 to ‘prove’ the viability of the corporate online music industry are a sham. There’s no such thing, not at the moment, anyway, and the people who cough up for iTunes represent only a tiny fraction of the online community.
Meanwhile, “A spokeswoman for EMI said it had not manufactured any new disks with DRM, which restricts consumers from making copies of songs and films they have purchased legally, for the last few months,” Reuters continues. “She said the company had mostly used the system in markets such as Asia, Latin America and continental Europe but not the UK or the U.S.
But, “It doesn’t mean we’ve scrapped content protection but we’re evaluating it.”
DRM has been called C.R.A.P. by Zdnet’s David Berlind, referring to Apple’s special brand of it. And that sums it up nicely.
Also See:
Reuters - EMI reviewing CD content protection technology, January 8, 2006
C.R.A.P. - Apple and its C.R.A.P., March 4, 2006
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