rights management vs. user-friendly tunes

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Secure music at a crossroads; rights management vs. user-friendly tunes

- Is DRM dead?

Digital rights management tools, designed to prevent unauthorized copying of music and other media content, appear to be on their way out now that Apple's iTunes Music Store has shown early signs of success. Music Store allows unlimited copying of songs, with very little of the protections record labels once demanded.

For years, the recording industry sought to develop digital padlocks to secure online song sales and cripple rampant file-sharing among music fans. But the proven appeal of Apple's 99 cent downloads - more than 1 million songs sold in Music Store's first week - may herald a seismic shift in the labels' anti-piracy strategy.

"Sony is, as are the other labels, adapting to the changes in the marketplace," says Philip Wiser, chief technology officer at Sony Music Entertainment, which, along with other major recording companies, agreed to let Apple sell hundreds of thousands of copyrighted songs with virtually no protections against unauthorized copying.

It's a profound departure from the industry's experiments of recent years with various DRM schemes that limit what consumers can do with the music they buy. Several prompted a consumer revolt, hardware makers were leery of becoming early adopters and none of the schemes found a wide audience.

"I think the DRM model is fundamentally mistaken. The music industry could live on weak DRM at best, and they would make more money if they kept the DRM especially weak," said Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. "I think the Apple system will begin to teach this lesson: Perfect control produces less profits than imperfect control. Always."

Most of the early DRM trials were conducted outside the United States:

_ More than 1 million CDs were released in Europe using a technology allowing songs to be copied to a single computer for listening but not moved to another PC or shared online.

_ Another company found a way to add annoying pops, clicks and other distortions to files extracted from CDs to computer hard drives.

_ Natalie Imbruglia's 2001 CD "White Lilies Island" contained so much copy protection it wouldn't play in some CD and DVD players, and a California woman sued the makers of Charley Pride's "A Tribute to Jim Reeves," which included "stealth technology" preventing her from converting the songs into MP3 files. That case was settled for an undisclosed sum.

These and other efforts by software and hardware makers to join with music labels and develop standards for anti-piracy technologies, such as the Secure Digital Music Initiative, have been abandoned for more than a year after the companies involved failed to reach a consensus.

Sony said it would not completely abandon DRM strategies yet.

"The DRM is just a system," Wiser said. "The rules are what is adjusting. We will always have some form of rights management technology associated with our content."

But now that so much of the music industry's most coveted content has been legitimately purchased by fans who are free to make unlimited copies, who will want to buy identical songs laden with "digital padlocks?"

"Obviously the consumer wants as few restrictions as possible," said Randy Cole, chief technologist for Texas Instruments' Internet audio business, which makes chips for digital music players. "It sure seems like people have voted with their mice and their pocketbooks. I would guess that the Apple model will be repeated quite a few times."

Music Store is competing with several other online music services that offer "streamed" songs that are listenable no further than the computer desktop, or disable them when the subscription runs out. Some offer more flexibility, such as limited CD burning, for additional fees. Their combined subscriber numbers total far less than one million, analysts say.

Some consumers say Apple's model, delivering songs in the high-quality AAC digital format, allows them such freedom to play music when and where they want to, that they may just abandon illegal file-sharing.

"The sound quality is terrific. AAC encoding to my ears is almost completely indiscernible from the original CD. The user interface is as easy as anything I've ever used," said Charles Latshaw, a Music Store user from Nashua, N.H. "It's so well integrated that now it's easier and faster for me to buy music from Apple than it is to steal it off of Gnutella."

Some other analysts criticized even the few protections Apple does provide - like keeping iTunes playlists on no more than three Apple computers and allowing a certain sequence of songs to be burned no more than 10 times before the playlist is shuffled.

Legitimate consumers who pay for music and are then confronted with limitations on music portability and copying will continue to flock to underground file-sharing networks, such as Kazaa and Gnutella, said Fred Von Lohmann, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"I think DRM should go away," Von Lohmann said. "So long as there is an unauthorized P2P alternative, it is counterproductive."from