Bye Bye DRM / February 7 2007
All Big Arena Records’ releases are available without any form of copy protection software.
We believe that the abolition of such software – known as Digital Rights Management (DRM) – is good for both consumers, artists and music suppliers.
Major record companies are afraid of ‘leakage’ where one person illegally copies a track for somebody else. This problem will pale into insignificance however compared to the massive extra sales that will be generated when people feel free to use their purchases in any way they want for their own personal musical pleasure.
Even Steve Jobs, the boss of Apple, has today urged the world’s record companies to begin selling songs online without DRM. Apple has been under pressure recently to make its iTunes music store compatible with other music players, not just the iPod.
I am all for the universal protection of artists’ rights and believe any copyright offense should be dealt with stringently, but the fact remains that DRM copy protection has simply failed to tackle music piracy. (Any pirate can take the audio output of a CD player and convert the signal to MP3, whether or not the CD has DRM. And Apple’s FairPlay system was cracked almost the moment it came out.)
When major companies insist on locking up your digital media, it interferes with fans’ perfectly lawful use of music, movies and other copyrighted works: it can prevent you from making backups of your music downloaded from online stores, recording your favourite TV programmes or using the portable media player of your choice. And that is what it really is all about: your choice.
I am in no doubt whatsoever that the current restrictions that are in place are only harming music and its creators - a lot more than they are helping.
Ashley Morgan of Big Arena says ‘We believe that once you have purchased an album or a track you should be able to freely copy that album or track to other devices that you own. It is in an artist’s best interest that his or her music be heard as often as possible.’
I agree with you unreservedly, Mr. Morgan.
Filed under Big Arena Records / DRM / Digital Media / Download Music / Movies / Music / Music Piracy / Record Companies / Songwriters / The Internet / iTunes / mp3
Comments
2 comments on “Bye Bye DRM”
Ashley Morgan / February 8th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
I read the Steve Jobs statement with a lot of interest. One minute he was being quite aggresive towards the consumer, saying that anyone who buys music doesn’t have the right to copy things for their own use, and the next he was claiming to be happy to pull DRM.
DRM is not, and never has been, in the interest of the artist nor the consumer. No artist minds if someone buys an album and then copies it to a iPod or a backup CD for fair use elsewhere. Why would they? Artists want their music to be heard. All real artists are motivated not by money, but by the need and wish to be creative.
Fair use is not piracy. DRM prevents fair use whilst doing nothing to combat piracy.
Napoleon Fantastic / February 9th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
I agree. The single biggest problem with DRM is that it inevitably spells trouble for the user. As far as I am aware, no-one has yet come up with a DRM system that permits the user their full spectrum of legal rights (not that we have many in the UK in this respect, but in the US they do) and freedom for the purchaser to enjoy their download in any way they wish.
David Mellor: ‘And the legislators of some European countries have started to see it the same way. Why should one company dictate which brand of hardware an individual must use? Norway in particular has given Apple a deadline to resolve this issue. Apple must either open up FairPlay to other manufacturers, or stop using it.
Apple has said that it is impractical to open FairPlay to other manufacturers. The reality however is that if any manufacturer can use FairPlay, it is useless to Apple as a means of locking in iTunes customers to the iPod. Once these measures are enacted in Norway, it is likely that there will be a wave of change all over Europe. Apple will either have to remove the iTunes service from those countries or give up FairPlay.’
Leave a comment
