Yahoo Music Chief Comes Out Against DRM 304
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"."
As predicted (Score:5, Insightful)
These people are not dumb, and slashdotter's aren't the only ones that understand the folly of DRM.
jobs against drm? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:jobs against drm? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm reminded of that song... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why didn't he just come out and say Apple? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good news but... (Score:5, Insightful)
If they had stood firm against DRM in the first place, these online stores would have never happened.
Now that they've demonstrated that these stores work, and the public is transitioning to them, they can start making demands.
You have to get your foot in the door.
Re:Good news but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why didn't everyday people speak out? (Score:4, Insightful)
The very idea of "managed rights" flies in the face of the Constitution, the ideals of the Founding Fathers, and what it truly means to be American. It's difficult to say for sure why most people didn't take a far more active stance against DRM. The first reason is no doubt because it'd take effort to do effectively, and most Americans would rather watch the NFL or American Idol instead. The second reason is perhaps because they just don't give a fuck, and that's quite dangerous a stance to be taking.
Regardless, the American people as a whole should have stood up and said NO! to any sort of "rights management" system. DRM is just plain un-American.
Re:The Jobs Fanboyism Is Sickening (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good news but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I can explain this to you. Your problem is that you are a rational human being. You must understand first of all that the music industry is irrational. Imagine the following conversation, which illustrates the problem:
Tech company: We'd love to sell your music in non-DRMed format.
Music company: We're not interested in selling it without DRM.
Tech company: We're not going to sell it with DRM!
Music company: Fine. Don't sell it. Get nothing. We can live without online sales. If you want a piece of the pie, you have to sell it with DRM. No negotiations. No exceptions. That's how it will be done. Take it or leave it.
Yes, the music industry really is that dumb. They would rather not sell it at all then sell it without DRM. Remember, their goal is to rip you off. They have proven time and time again that they would rather sell one CD for $18 than 3 for $10 each. This is irrational behavior, but they have been very consistent in it. If they can't sell you something at their price and on their terms, then they don't want your money. They really don't. It truly is "their way or the highway". So when you realize that the only deal that could be made was to sell music with DRM or not sell it all, is it any wonder that Yahoo and Apple and everyone else agreed to DRM? There weren't going to be any sales without it. Besides, they were able to make the major labels take the heat for DRM, which is totally fair, so it wasn't a difficult business decision to sell DRM music since they could make money off it and they wouldn't have to answer to pissed off customers who don't like DRM since it wasn't their fault the music had DRM. It really is that simple. Make money off selling DRMed music or make nothing.
Remember too that I am talking about the major music industry companies and smaller labels or individual artists have a more rational outlook. How rational is it to decide "We'd rather sell one at $18 than 3 for $10 each", but that is exactly how they operate.
How politic of him (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of this is just saying, "it's them, not us". Fine for geek politics, but it probably is not going to make a pig's fart of difference to the RIAA/MPAA cabal.
I want DRM to go away to, but it isn't going to happen through these feel-good speeches. It's going to happen through things like the recent EMI announcement (which frankly only applies to a chunk of their catalog that isn't selling anyway).
I don't get this "killing our friends" meme (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently nothing can satisfy you? Are you all just terminally apolitical? The enemy of the enemy is our friend. Back them the hell up.
The obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
In a well duh moment, they figured out the installed base of equipment that can play MP3's is just about everyting. A MS or Apple format locks out all other format players. People don't buy incompatible formats. DRM in any format is incompatible with the majority of media players out there. Before you jump on the iTunes bandwagon... Do you have a DVD player? Do you use Linux? Do you have a MP3 player? Do you have a CD player that can play MP3 CD's in your car or as a portable CD player? iPods are everywhere, but not nearly as everywhere as MP3 players.
Selling MP3's is a much bigger market than selling something that will play on a Windows PC and Plays for Sure devices or just iTunes on Apple and PC platforms and iPods, or worse yet Zunes.
Re:Back the truck up, Chuck (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Jobs Fanboyism Is Sickening (Score:3, Insightful)
What's that supposed to mean? The real world, like the one 20 years ago where anyone could duplicate a casette tape? It wasn't as fast as downloading a song and compiling a CD if you have broadband, but it wasn't that hard to do. And yet the publishers didn't go out of business.
The ONLY reason "DRM" exists is because they think they're smarter than me and they can make MY computer prevent me from copying, so they try to do it. Everything else is BS.
How the heck is parent insightful? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think those things mean what you think they mean. "Digital rights management" != inaliable rights as laid down by the U.S. Constitution and liberal political theory. Lets be clear here, the two have absolutely NOTHING to do with each other. Digital rights management is essentially a technology mechanism to enforce (or hinder the breaking of) contract law. The only thing it flies in the face of is consumer convenience. DRM certainly annoys me as a consumer, but I think things like no-knock warrants, the drug war, idefinite detention without trial, and asset forfeiture laws fly in the face of the Constitution, the ideals of the Founding Fathers just a tad more.
Re:Why didn't everyday people speak out? (Score:4, Insightful)
What really upsets me is DRMed hardware. DRMed media is bad enough, but I can choose not to purchase it. At the rate things are going, soon we'll only be able to purchase locked-down hardware that's both more expensive due to DRM and less flexible. A bought and paid for tangible device that restricts what I can do according to arbitrary rules devised by companies that treat their customers like thieves is unacceptable to me.
This is hypocritical! (Score:3, Insightful)
Read what you said:
"Pirates who want to breach the OSX EULA and run OSX on non-Apple hardware. That's the only real DRM contained within OSX to my knowledge (You can safely remove iTunes, and plenty of other apps as well). As much as we hate their decision, it is part of their license."
Well, if music has no DRM then it will have a license agreement as well. That means that it is up to the consumer to respect the EULA. So why can Jobs not do the same thing? Oh yeah I forgot, Jobs wants to make sure that he can sell overpriced hardware! Just like the Music producers want to make sure that they sell multiple copies of their music! There is no difference between DRM'd music and DRM'd OSX. The only difference is "who's getting the advantage perspective."
I own my own phone (Score:1, Insightful)
Erm, dude, you can't legally sell a phone locked to a service in Belgium, it always has to be unlocked by law. The contract & sim are sold separately.
Handsets sell very well, phone companies make lots of money, everyone is happy.
Re:jobs against drm? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How politic of him (Score:4, Insightful)
The day after Jobs' Blog Post, the Wall Street Journal had two front page stories above the crease about it. That introduced this issue to probably a hundred thousand people who weren't previously aware of it, and they're overwhelmingly the important, moneyed, influential movers and shakers who it's most important to make aware of it. I was visiting my mother the next weekend, and that WSJ was lying around, and she asked me what it was all about. It was the first she'd heard of any of it. She only had a rudimentary idea of what a Media Player is. I'd tried to tell her about DRM before, but she never listened. Now she knows.
Jobs' Blog Post may be the event that precipitates an interest in this issue that will eventually lead to change. The backroom deals are the conclusion of the change process, not the origin. You're right that won't happen in "the tech press," but for the first time I've seen, this story was just blown a mile outside the tech press.
Re:And the RIAA won't listen to him EITHER. (Score:3, Insightful)
Revenues come from licensing (merchandise), concerts (lots of high-margin revenue), as well as the song marketing themselves. The lyrics and sheet music, coupled with just about everything associated with a 'brand' is revenue production. The RIAA isn't about to let a heavy piece of that go away, even if their cost-of-goods in digital dissemination looks very tasty-- it's the rest of it that then seems to slip away, too.
The mentality of this group (the RIAA) is gruesome, and they have the law on their side in the US, such as the law is (rife with burden of proof mishaps, invasiveness, and other abrogations of common law and even US constitutional twists).
I applaud what indies try to do. It's very very tough for them. Artists aren't good money managers, traditionally, and the vagueries of royalites, copyright law, and the other facets of management and licensing relationships have become truly horrid to manage.
Re:Good news but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, if you look at it from their perspective, it's entirely rational. Their model is built around maximizing revenue on a per-album basis (see monopoly price setting). Selling _more_ albums means selling more varied albums, which in turn dilutes the efficiency of marketing, fractures the market, spreads more money to the producing segments like artists and composers, entails more risk, and which all have to share play time on the radio.
As each album and song is its own little monopoly, and they all 'compete' (see monopolistic competition) for more or less the same dollar in the pocket of the consumer, even with the other albums in the labels catalogue, they maximize their profits if there was only one album (minimizing per-unit production costs) and it cost all the dollars available for spending on entertainment. Of course, even the media corps cant quite accomplish that, nor control peoples taste to that extent, so we got the best they could do in the form of a grossly limited and tightly controlled 'pop' culture.
Of course, no matter what they do, they're doomed. Social music network sites are vastly superior in mediating music fitting personalized taste, with in turn will utterly fracture the market, destroying that model, drm or no drm.
Re:As predicted (Score:3, Insightful)
as with many things, Apple isn't the first with this, but they create a big impact to get the ball rolling: mouse, GUI, ethernet, CD-ROM, USB, MP3 player, online media store...
Here's an alternative answer... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you live in a universe where there is only one widely known operating system, then you have an expectation that everything else will work the same way and zero tolerance for anything different. Switch operating systems suddenly and, after any initial "wow factor" the next response will always be frustration and disorientation.
Now, if you've just dropped $2000 for a new Mac, you have a pretty strong incentive (plus a dose of new-computer-smell intoxication) to get over that hump.
If, however, Joe User has acquired a copy of OSX "have a go with" then - even assuming it runs reliably on a 3-year-old Dell - he is likely to "have a go" for ten minutes, get frustrated (which includes discovering that - oh noes - the Finder sucks a bit) and dismiss Apple entirely. At least with DRM that copy will have to be an obviously hacked DVD-R.
Now, if there was free competition in the desktop OS market then maybe:
...meaning that someone like Apple could sell an operating system that would run reliably on all "PCs" and actually stand a ghost of a chance of getting some market share. As it is, well, BeOS is dead for practical purposes, Linux - successful in a few niches, but crap marketshare considering its free, then there's NextStep, which showed what happened last time Steve Jobs tried selling a stand-alone operating system.
For pitys sake, even Windows Version N can't compete with Windows Version N-1 without breaking a sweat...
Re:How the heck is parent insightful? (Score:3, Insightful)
It is a little like the US Constitution. If there were no one who would ever want to keep us from exercising our inalienable rights, the Constitution would be completely meaningless.
This American does speak out. (Score:5, Insightful)
Americans use a lot of non-free operating systems and software (which digital restrictions require), but if you take the time to teach them to value their freedom they'll listen and learn. On my radio program, I found it interesting to take a wide angle—people found it interesting to discuss how copyright and patent issues intersect with their everyday lives.
It's critical to not give up the freedom talk and not give into the people who would have you compromise your values in order to placate proprietors. There is a deep thirst for substantive talk and action about issues that matter.
What does it take to please... (Score:5, Insightful)
Over the last five years, not a week has gone by that there hasn't been an anti-DRM screed posted to this forum. Yet, when finally some industry leaders come out publicly against DRM, the mostly highly modded posts are those claiming it's nothing but a cynical ploy.
You know, I'm just as cynical as the next guy when it comes to proclamations from the CEOs of giant multinational corporations. But, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes a statement isn't some carefully crafted strategic move based on hidden motives. DRM is a big pain in the butt to online music distributers and equipment manufacturers. The leaders of these industries are now making public statements on this matter. That's a good thing. If you are reading more into it than that, you've got too much time on your hands.
How many people need to repeat..... (Score:3, Insightful)
They will sell only on fully DRM crippled shops.
They are not stupid, they use their cartel power in order to ensure a product with a clear competitive advantage does not share any "shelf" space with their wares.
Re:As predicted (Score:3, Insightful)
Digital Restrictions Mechanism (Score:2, Insightful)
Not exactly, as there is usually no binding contract involved.
Should be:
"DRM is essentially a technology to enforce restrictions of use."
The restrictions do not align with the law (DRM knows nothing of fair use, or copyright limits).
The DRM restrictions do not align to some contract either.
These restrictions are a mis-place effort to increase sales from an ill-conceived notion that controlling use and clamping down on copying would increase interest and sales.
Digital Restrictions Mechanism
A 90+ year publishing monopoly, enforced with $500,000 FBI threats is already too much of a restriction.
More restrictions are obviously not necessary.
It is really not possible to show how DRM is necessary on legal grounds, starting with the constitutional purpose of copyright.
It is really not possible to show how DRM is necessary on moral grounds, showing how it helps the advancement of society.
Unture assertions and faulty comparisons. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is just not true--at least not anymore. The price of any Apple Computer is completely in line with an equivalently equipped Dell, Gateway, etc. Sometimes, the price of the "PC" is even higher. True, Apple does not have a computer that competes with a $300-something dollar Dell price-wise; however, Dell's computers that do compete with Apple's computers feature wise are often more expensive than the Mac offering. Sometime ago, Apple sold hardware that could reasonably be called overpriced. Now it's just a troll to say so.
The rest of your argument is fallacious as well. Apple does not force consumers to buy a new Mac to run a new version of OS X. The most recent version of OS X runs just fine on Macs that are 5+ years old. Conversely, the RIAA want you to re-buy all of your music every 5-10 years when it becomes available in a different format. What Apple does is not even comparable.
Re:jobs against drm? (Score:3, Insightful)
They already store unprotected files on the server that are accessible from certain clients [wikipedia.org]. I'm sure they probably thought of the eventuality that they could sell unprotected music someday, and if they have any sense they already have something designed and implemented. It is definitely a business decision and not technical limitations that are holding them back.
I never said he was in love with DRM. The simple fact is that Apple does not sell songs without DRM, even though they have the ability and many independent labels have requested to have their music sold unshackled. If Steve was anti-DRM, then why does iTunes not have the ability to sell unrestricted music from those labels that want it? The answer is that they can make a whole shitload of money while still appearing to be fighting the good fight. They can strengthen their market share slightly by continuing to sell songs that are locked into the iPod and claim it was the big bad record companies that made them do it.
I have no doubt, if the majors agreed to it, that within a few weeks iTunes would be selling unprotected AAC or MP3 files. But the fact of the matter is that Apple already has the opportunity to sell unrestricted songs and they don't. Actions speak louder than words.
I never said it was the artists. I said it was the labels. And for indie labels, there is a much closer relationship between artist and label. They often have very similar opinions. It's pretty obvious by the amount of artists listed on emusic that there are plenty of labels out there willing to sell unprotected music.
I understand why Apple doesn't want to go through the process of arranging contracts with each small label that puts music on iTunes. It's a perfectly valid reason. That doesn't mean that they couldn't do it if they wanted to. But then the argument from Apple is "DRM is easier and more convenient for us". That's a far cry from "we would do it if the big, bad record labels would let us." Which one sounds better in a press release?
Please, he is not some goddamn crusader for your rights. He's selling you a music player. If he wanted to do something to actually change the situation, he would let Apple sell unrestricted files. Like I said earlier, actions speak louder than words. Until he actually does something this is just empty rhetoric.
Steve Jobs does not care about you. He isn't interested in fighting for consumer rights against the evil record companies. He wants to sell you things
Re:How the heck is parent insightful? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How politic of him (Score:3, Insightful)
If a deal to drop DRM is ever to be worked out, it will be through backroom deals, not in the tech press.
I disagree. If a deal to drop DRM is ever worked out it will be because the governments of the world stepped in and passed laws when they realized they could portray media companies as evil and greedy and get votes by mandating that DRM goes away.
I think we all know DRM doesn't work well and is a pain...
You're mistaken. DRM works very well and is a pain because the purpose of DRM is not to stop copyright infringement it is to introduce artificial incompatibility as a way to make sure purchased copies eventually "break" and to motivate more sales.
No DRM, no product to sell. It's that simple.
Jobs and company speaking up is about pressuring the RIAA and their ilk to change that, or the government and populace to make them change that.