Yahoo Music Chief Comes Out Against DRM

waired writes "It seem that a trend has begun in the music industry after Steve Jobs essay. Now a senior Yahoo chief has spoken out in favor of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' call for major labels to abandon digital rights technology (DRM). It points out that consumers are getting confused and that the Microsoft DRM "doesn't work half the time"."

Re:Good news but...

[Gr8Apes]

What you're asking for is uniformity in stance by all developers, a group that historically does not play well together, and a large percentage of which is mercenary (consultants). Those consultants' only concern is how to extract money from their customers. They'll promise them anything to get in the door, and if it's impossible, that translates into continuing revenue streams. Thus your posted position is at best a figment of your imagination.

Re:And the RIAA won't listen to him EITHER.

[Technician]

3) have their talent pool stop making revenue (crappy quality music, and so on-- also highly unlikely).

Don't rule this one out.. Some talent is going inde. Some consumers are moving outside the Clear Chanel CD advertising route. Talent now gets exposure on youtube, Google Videos, etc. They put their products on CD Baby and emusic. You get higher quality (192Kbs VBR compared to 128Kbs fixed) with no DRM and lower prices. This trend is growing. Given time it will gain critical mass. It is legal and the RIAA and their team of lawyers are powerless to sotp it. They will have to adopt or die.

Arvil Lavine and Bare Naked Ladies have already moved. I think some of the newest TSO releases are now on inde labels. The RIAA can only screw the talent and consumers so much before they both seek an alternative.

Yahoo! did this last year.

[scottschiller]

For the record (pardon the bad pun), David Goldberg from Y! Music was asking the labels for No DRM, Please [ymusicblog.com] last year (February 2006.) It's good to see more executive types speaking out about the idea, in my opinion.

Re:How the heck is parent insightful?

[93 Escort Wagon]

"The only thing it flies in the face of is consumer convenience."

I agree with much of your post, but this is incorrect. "Fair use" is a well-established legal principle, not just a Slashdot mantra. While not its primary goal, DRM does its best to contradict our established rights by preventing even fair use of legally purchased material.

Re:jobs against drm?

[badasscat]

Source?

Here: http://www.emusic.com/ [emusic.com]

Re:As predicted

[kirun]

You're right, Yahoo have made this point [ymusicblog.com] in the past. In fact, there was a Slashdot story [slashdot.org] on it at the time.

Re:jobs against drm?

[Trillan]

With Mac OS X, Apple has a unique form of copyright protection: One that gets in the way of absolutely no legitimate users. And no, it doesn't use the TPM. The TPM isn't even on recent models.

Re:How the heck is parent insightful?

[Dog-Cow]

"The irony, of course, is that 'GPL violation' would be completely meaningless if that were true."

This is not the case. A GPL violation is a copyright violation. The genius of the GPL is that it uses both license and copyright law to force developers to give up their usual rights under copyright law. If license law is suddenly struck down, no one can use GPL code because they no longer have a right to do so, because of copyright law. If copyright law is struck down, one does not need the GPL to legally distribute the source code. The whole point of the GPL is that the GPL wins in either situation.

Re:jobs against drm?

[ObligatoryUserName]

Jobs has said that doing a mixed store with some DRM and some non-DRM isn't something he's interested in doing.

It would be similar to the Zune where you can squirt some songs, but not others. Confusing.

Re:Monkey see, Monkey Do

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't yahoo come out with non-DRM music a few months back? Wouldn't that technically mean that steve jobs is copying yahoo?

Re:I own my own phone

[nico60513]

I think you missed the parent poster's point, probably because you are not American or old enough to remember when the phone company was a monopoly (AT&T) and required you to lease all of your equipment from them. Back in the late 1960s my dad hooked up an old phone in our basement with the ringer disabled. He said that that was the only way they could detect how many phones you had installed -- and he designed phone switching systems for Bell Labs so I assumed he knew what he was talking about.

I think the parent poster's point was that opening up the American phone system to allow customers to own their equipment was beneficial for the consumer -- and didn't prevent phone companies from making a profit. I think that this point also applies to most European locales, as well. I seem to remember that connecting a modem to a land line in Europe was a big deal as recently as the late-eighties.

Re:How the heck is parent insightful?

[mstone]

Actually, it's both.

Copyright law gives a creator the right to license a work. License law gives the creator power to write a set of rules that say how other people are allowed to use the work.

Using the work in a way that isn't allowed by the license is first a violation of the license, and second a violation of the creator's rights as established by copyright law.

The two tend to get rolled together in conversation, though.

Re:The obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to worry about any of this, since you think WMA sounds fine. It's not the same quality, especially if it's coming out at half the file size, but if you can't tell the difference, don't worry about it.

Enjoy your WMA. Just don't share it with anyone, nobody else prefers WMA. Everyone else thinks it sounds like shit, even at high bit rates.

Re:The obvious

[Hatta]

Would you choose to buy an mp3 or ogg format track over a smaller wma one (sans 'DRM') for the same price?

I would. What happens if microsoft shifts gears and won't license WMA players anymore? Are there patent issues that could endanger free software players? There are too many unknowns to justify settling on a proprietary compression format.