« Legal Grey Area? Mixtapes | Main | Diebold in Swarthmore Newspaper »

"Music Wants to be Free

In the Feb 10-16th edition of The Economist, there is an article entitled “Music wants to be free.” It discusses Steve Jobs recent essay published on Apple’s website entitled “Thoughts on Music” (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/). Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the technology everyone, including Apple, uses to guard against theft of downloaded music. Jobs, under criticism from European regulators to open up Apple’s DRM technology (“FairPlay”) so that music purchased from iTunes can be played on digital devices purchased from other companies, offers a different solution.

Previously, Apple has supported DRM because it kept the “pirates at bay.” But in his essay, Jobs says that the record companies demands that Apple protect the music using this technology is the reason for the current system Apple has in place:

“Apple was able to negotiate landmark usage rights at the time, which include allowing users to play their DRM protected music on up to 5 computers and on an unlimited number of iPods. Obtaining such rights from the music companies was unprecedented at the time, and even today is unmatched by most other digital music services. However, a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store.”

Mr. Jobs now advocates for the position that music companies sell their music unprotected. This new “solution” seems like a shrew political move by Jobs to shift the blame (which I know from personal knowledge comes from consumers as well) away from Apple to the record companies. But the Economist article argues that getting rid of DRM would promote competition between MP3 players. Apple is in a good position to fare well in a competitive market due to their current situation. This freeing of the market would of course greatly benefit the consumers who are currently locked into a particular player due to the difficulty in transferring music. As the article and Jobs point out, record companies may be in favor of a switch to selling unprotected music for the simple reason that piracy may be impossible to stop.

I have a couple of quick thoughts of my own on this situation. I believe that a far bigger problem than the transferability of the music is the fact that iPods seem to brake every two seconds. In fact I read an article about a year ago in the NYTimes that this fragility in the iPod was an increasing source of consumer frustration. Hopefully, if music begins to be sold unprotected, the increased competitiveness in the market will force Apple to improve this aspect of their product.

Also, a big part of this story is what partly prompted this essay from Jobs. European regulators are putting a lot of pressure on Apple to license FairPlay to rivals. It seems that our current IP regime will face ever increasing clashes from the rest of the world (including the ever more powerful China) that may create a whole new set of problems.


Posted by at February 18, 2007 11:06 PM in Commentary Posts , in Current Events