Apple hasn't given up DRM entirely, not by a long shot

By Dennis D. McDonald

Before you get too excited about Apple’s recent decision to give up DRM on its iTunes music service, be sure to read Apple Shows Us DRM’s True Colors by Richard Esquerra. It appeared January 7, 2008 on Electronic Frontier Foundation’s blog. Esquerra lists all the remaining uses of “DRM” being made by Apple.

Some may quibble about whether all the listed examples are, technically speaking, examples of “digital rights rights management.” I think the author hits the nail on the head when he writes that DRM is not really about stopping piracy, it’s about the legally- and congressionally-backed industry attempts to maintain control over media distribution. The two are not the same.

An interesting question is, given that Apple will now be able to pass through music companies’ higher per-track prices to iTunes customers, will composers and performers see increased royalties? Will sources such as Amazon and eMusic (I subscribe to the latter) react, if at all?

Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis D. McDonald. His email address is ddmcd@yahoo.com.

Comments

[James]

Apple has, and always will be, about control. I do appreciate that they're finally letting me do things with music from iTunes. I only bought from iTunes if there was no alternative to getting the music for some reason, but now I *might* use it now and then (although I'll still likely favor Amazon).
However, I agree there should be no illusion about Apple in general taken from this. Apple devices are generally locked down in more ways than any other piece of technology.

[Larry Kilbourne]

If the past is any indication of the future in this arena, I doubt the musicians will profit from this. In many cases music companies still extract a "packaging" fee from songwriters/performers, even though there is no packaging involved in digital downloads.

[Dennis D. McDonald]

James-
I tend to differentiate between lockdown of media, lockdown of software, and lockdown of hardware. I know the three are interrelated but I also believe that Apple customer have benefited on the hardware side from Apple's overbearing control in terms of product quality. But I'm definitely happy to see the music DRM go, and tying display hardware performance to media DRM is nothing short of criminal. (That's why one of the tags included with my post is "corruption.")
Thanks for your comment!
- Dennis

[Dennis D. McDonald]

Larry-
While I agree in principle with your comment about "packaging" fees, it's also true that all of us web users have in fact benefited from the web's performance as a vast communications utility. There it is possible to easily shift to "someone else" the distribution costs that were traditionally borne by legacy publishers and their customers.
Thanks for your comment!
- Dennis

[Dennis D. McDonald]

Bob Weber has a different perspective on the Esquerra article:

http://www.managingrights.com/2009/01/apple-retains-drm-as-well.html