Opinion: Who needs DRM?
I am not a big fan of Apple and not of Steve Jobs in particular. Yes, Apple products look nice, but they are for people who drive to the grocery store in a Lexus rather than a Toyota. And Steve Jobs still doesn't blush when pocketing all those standing ovations for a new product, although there may be hundreds of other Apple employees who would deserve that recognition much more.
But then, I really can't deny Jobs' brave and - in the IT industry - stunning move to question the value of copy protection technologies for digital music, commonly referred to as digital rights management (DRM). In fact, his "Thoughts on Music" may bring common sense to an industry that suffers from piracy paranoia. Jobs' conclusion that DRM-free music would create "a truly interoperable music marketplace" and an environment that "Apple [would] embrace wholeheartedly" could inject a sense of reality into board rooms that have been haunted by the Napster ghost for almost a decade.
Oh yes, Napster. Remember the Napster that became the first successful P2P service in terms of market reach, that attracted millions of music downloaders in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but was sued into meaninglessness by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)? Wikipedia does a great job of refreshing our memory about the events surrounding Napster, which was shut down in late 2002.
Once the RIAA had caught up with the trend and realized Napster's impact sometime in 2000, Napster's fate was sealed. Of course, everyone was aware of the fact that there was a serious problem with facilitating mass-piracy, which Napster essentially did. But I have my doubts that the RIAA was so honest in its motive to close down Napster: Foremost, the organization claimed that musicians suffered from those illegal downloads. Artists would need a model that would allow artists need to be compensated, we were told.
But the RIAA campaign was not about artists. It was about infrastructure. Napster provided evidence that people would embrace music downloads and listen to music on their PCs, if content was made accessible in a convenient and simple way. The problem, however, was that Napster became a threat for the RIAA, as it cut out the middleman from music distribution and was in a position to render music publishers - the main financiers of the RIAA - irrelevant.
It was bad luck for Napster that it grew too big too fast, leaving the RIAA seemingly no other choice than to swing the axe and get rid of what really was an ingenious idea that revolutionized the way music was distributed. Today we know that the legal proceedings against Napster were foolish, as the existing user base was abandoned, while many of them surely would have signed on to a reasonable commercial Napster. It could have developed into what iTunes is today or, in a worst case, could have provided a balance in the digital music distribution market - a balance the music industry so badly would need today.
Unfortunately, we don't live in a world of could's and would's and music executives have to deal with an iTunes that controls 70% of the digital music download market. Apple filled the gap that was left by Napster and built a goldmine from the Napster experience: Apple knew that users were ready for multimedia on their PC and MP3 players, if there was a comprehensive library of music and easy access to that content.
A quick thought on the claim that people were using Napster just because it was free, all-you-can-eat service: Yes, there are always users that pirate content for the simple purpose of pirating. But anyone who used Napster knew that finding complete songs in an acceptable quality for PC listening (and I am not even talking CD burning here) often was a very time-consuming task. And I'd claim that the vast majority of those Napster users would have switched to a commercial service with reasonable prices in a heartbeat - in exchange for higher quality music and the guarantee of complete, virus free tracks.
Let me also take a quick swing at commercial download services such as iTunes enable a fair compensation of musicians. There aren't official numbers out there, but credible sources told me that out of those 99 cents you pay for a song, only five cents go to the artist. Apple takes a bigger share in order to be able to pay for the service, the development and the infrastructure to provide those downloads, but the lion's share, an estimated 60-70%, disappears in the pockets of music publishers. I leave it up to you to decide whether that is fair or not.
Read on the next page: DRM going overboard and the first signs of DRM going away
