I've written before about my experience with PureTracks.com, how music labels have basically blown the opportunity to make a ton of money by giving consumers what they want.
But, like the modern man that I am, I bought into the hype over downloadable music and have been investing some of my hard-earned money into some songs. (I have also been slowly converting my CD collection to MP3.)
This speech by Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) makes a convincing case that the Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology wrapped around purchased music tracks (and other licensed content) is a bad, bad idea. He gave several reasons:
1. It's fundamentally flawed. So, you encrypt the music with cryptography. But then you have to give the users a music player that can play it - a decryption device. So if I have both the encrypted file and a device to decrypt it, what's the point of encryption? That is, DVD encryption can easily be broken by anyone with a camcorder, and audio encryption can be broken by anyone with a microphone.
2. It allows copyright holders to invent new restrictions on their content that isn't allowed under law - for instance, the region coding on DVDs. Why is it that, when someone moves from Europe to the United States, all of their DVD's suddenly become unplayable? Is this legal?
3. It gives content producers control over the design of the hardware. Where would we be if music publishers had full control over the design of CD players? Would we have CD-ROMS in our computers? No, we would still be using diskettes. Would the CD-R ever have been released? No, instead of costing $40 they would still cost $6,000. Sometimes the best innovation changes the game. Of course, the existing winners of the game do not like the game changing, so innovation is stifled with DRM.
4. The argument music and movie producers make about how bad computers and the Internet is matches the same arguments made during other inventions through history. The invention of the paper-roll piano, the radio, the newspaper, the TV, the VCR... all were greeted by scorn and lawsuits by the old guard. But look at 2004. Entertainment has adapted to these new technologies. It will adapt again.
All in all, worth a read. What am I going to do with all these WMA's though?