MacUser: What if…Apple sold DRM-free music?
Most of my time writing over at MacUser and Gadgetbox is focused on short posts, often news or current events, but every once in a while—when the mood strikes me—I get to open the floodgates and work in the long form. Today, the subject that captured my fancy was the idea of the online music market, and its insistence on Digital Rights Management.
What does the music industry fear from DRM-free downloads? They fear file-sharing, of course—piracy. But that’s silly, because piracy is well-established by this point; we’ve had almost a solid decade of high volume media piracy. I’d say that the vast majority of the songs that you can find on iTunes and the other services are available through file-sharing networks, if you know where to look. Meanwhile, destroying piracy has proved to be emblematic of a phenomenon I like to call the “hydratic equation”—for every service you take out, two more sprout up in its place.
That’s just an excerpt, of course. The full piece is a bit longer. I hope to do a few more of these “What If?” pieces in the future, as long as I don’t get sued by Marvel.
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[...] To quote Jason: “Sweet Moses on a pogo stick!” I came back from a run to the grocery store to find my boss at Macworld had done “a Moren mash-up” (his term, not mine) and posted my anti-DRM piece, smushed together with my post on Steve Jobs’s open letter on DRM as one big essay on Macworld. Crazy. [...]
By doombot » A DRM-free world… on 02.06.07 8:15 pm
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