Will iTunes save DRM?
p2pnet.net news view:- Has iTunes pushed “billions of dollars in revenue to Disney”, and established itself as a “de facto standard on college campuses” to the extent, “students would rather use iTunes than free alternatives?”
Ars Technica says it has and iTunes is, “the best way to reach consumers with music, movies, podcasts, and television,” says the story.
That might apply to the relatively few (compared to what happens on the p2pnetworks and other p2p community areas) people who actually buy from iTunes. But it’s unlikely it applies in a general sense. In fact, it’ll be interesting to see how things have shaken out in five years, say.
By then, hopefully, the entertainment cartels will have figured out which way is up and the hundreds of millions of new people with web accounts will have discovered blogs and tapped them for unspun, non-vested-interest corporate news and information, as well as the hugely populace worlds of sharing and open source and innovation and discovery where the corporations hold little, if any, sway.
As things stand, the mainstream media are still the largest suppliers of news, data and information, but thanks to texting, IM, chat, email, blogs, web sites, and so on, their roles as THE means of communication are being surplanted, and fast. The only way the continuing massive erosion of their power will be stopped will be if somehow, the corporations are able to gain 100% control of the internet, something they’re striving for but which, fortunately, will never happen. Their own greed will see to that.
Meanwhile, iTunes, which in 2007 actually has very little influence in the larger scheme of things, may be one way to reach consumers, but it certainly won’t be the only, or even the best, way.
We don’t mean to disparage Ars Technica. It’s great, possibly the premier non-corporate tech news site. But in this instance, we doubt if the assertion that students would rather use iTunes than free alternatives, especially when Napster is the one linked to, is accurate. And we especially doubt if iTunes has been responsible for driving “billions of dollars in revenue” into Disney’s coffers, even though Apple and other vested interests would undoubtedly dearly love it to be true.
According to AppleInsider, by late last year, Apple had, “sold nearly a half million films through Apple Computer’s iTunes store since announcing the distribution deal a little less than two months ago.
“The sales figure, which amounts to approximately $4 million in revenue, was announced during the entertainment conglomerate’s fiscal fourth quarter conference call with analysts and members of the media. Disney said it expects movie downloads to generate $50 million in added revenue during the first year of the program.”
And as long as the younger generations are the ones coming up with the cool ideas and the neat, new ways of doing things, as they’ve always done and always will do (corporate attempts to penetrate schools with phony educational programs notwithstanding), iTunes will never be the de facto standard anywhere.
But this isn’t what the Ars Technica story is about. It’s saying that perhaps DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) consumer control will survive and if it does, it’ll probably be thanks to Apple.
It’s all about control, says Ars Technica, and that’s certainly correct. But control of what, and by whom?
The story predicates its statements on the presumption that iTunes is all.
“With iPods commanding such a large part of the player market, and iTunes integration so complete that it’s the easiest option for new iPod owners in search of more music, Apple can present the best case for DRM to the industry: the success of the iTunes Store,” says the story.
However, iTunes is very far from being the easiest option.
The daughter of a friend of ours got an iPod for Christmas. Her mother, knowing our interest in such things, phoned to say her daughter, aged 12, had figured out how to find free music downloads and get them onto her music player without any help from adults. Her mother didn’t, though, say if she’d had any help from school friends.
In his call for help to get the ourTunes music sharing application upgraded so it’ll work with iTunes 7, “Some of the music comes from the iTunes music store which, says Apple, has sold more than 2 billion songs since its inception,” says college student Justin Stanely. But, he goes on, “by far the largest portion comes from the various p2p services and networks, and downloading music and movies from them are daily activities for many college students, to the disgust of the RIAA and MPAA.
“Within these huge networks lies a huge repository of music coming from every possible source that’s largely untapped.”
In our humble opinion, that’s the way it’s been, that’s the way it is now and that’s the way it’ll continue to be as new people sign up and log on. The “huge repository of music,” and other materials, will grow larger and larger until it becomes a universe unto itself, with all that implies, data, information and art of all kinds. And it’ll repesent a criticial mass – a paradigm shift.
DRM has been singularly unsuccessful in preventing the spread of the concepts of open source or anything else, and that’s in spite of the fact the cartels have the power of the mainstream media, limitless financial resources, awesome political clout, behind them in their efforts to destroy them.
p2p and sharing are here to stay, and DRM is incompatible with them.
“DRM is dying?” – asks Ars Technica. “Not while Apple lives.”
In that case …….
Also See:
Ars Technica – Why DRM’s best friend might just be Apple Inc., January 11, 2006
AppleInsider – Disney sells nearly a half million films through iTunes, November 9, 2007
work with iTunes 7 – ourTunes update project, January 11, 2007
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January 12th, 2007 at 4:40 am
Of course iTunes is prevalent on college campuses, but only because of the iPod dominance, the ability to stream music on LANs, and because it’s an efficient jukebox. It is NOT because of the iTunes Store, which I assume relatively few people use (other than myself).
I’m in college now, and despite that our university, like so many other big colleges in the country, has gotten in bed with the content industry and promises punishment upon those who are caught sharing illegally, LimeWire is still hailed by many on campus as the best and most convenient way to get files. Few of the students care that transmitting copyrighted files without permission is against the law, just as few of the students care that underage drinking is against the law (a statistic which includes some of their parents as well).
Equally ironic is the university’s assumption that all P2P networks have “educational uses” and are therefore allowed to pass through. This may be the case for BitTorrent, which has saved many a creator serious bandwidth savings when they want to distribute their work on a Web site, but that case really can’t be argued for the other decentralized protocols like Gnutella and FastTrack. Yes, these networks can transmit files legally IN THEORY, but in reality it is much smarter and more common to find legally redistributable files on the Web, due to the fact that the fear of a lawsuit or a takedown notice doesn’t exist in this case. Yet they are allowed anyway. It’s like a double standard.
No one I know uses iTunes for movies. And why would they? Just buy the DVD and watch on a nice large TV set instead of crowding around a small monitor to watch a VGA-resolution picture or, even worse, a tiny iPod screen. That’s not to say that movies are as commonly pirated as music; in fact my neighbor has an astounding DVD collection of at least 50 different titles, and most people I know have a worthy-sized movie and video game pile lying around somewhere in their dorm room. Video just isn’t as portable as music, and it never will be if it continues to be so difficult to author a DVD. Placing DRM on a pay-per-purchase video file and prohibiting DVD burning is just stupid. The only thing that poses any true “threat” to the movie industry is people watching movies on their basic cable connections (which, by the way, do not fund any of the basic cable channels, which is why they have commercials).