DRM isn't about piracy at all. Multiple
ars technica articles have discussed this to no uncertain end.
The underlying problem is that the RIAA and MPAA are rarely the ones adding the value, but still want a slice of the fee increase from the increased value. At this point in time, value is generated easiest by increased
content quality,
portability,
a la carte purchasing,
medium durability, and the
on-demand factor. Since many of these have topped out, the whole concept behind DRM is to take away rights and options, particularly in these areas, and then sell them back at a premium. The music industry perfectly portrays this, so let's take a look.
..:: Content Quality
When I mention content quality, I mean objective quantitative value. How much data is in that file? How awful Kevin Federline or AFI are has nothing to do with objective content quality. That's subjective and it changes from person to person. This is all about data. In the music industry, the early 90s were about ushering in CDs that grossly increased the quality of music. Music sounds better on CDs than it does on radio, and it sounds much better than it does on cassettes. There is much less hissing and popping with CDs. The problem here that the music industry now faces is that the average person cannot tell the difference between a 192 kbps MP3 and a CD. Remember music-dvds? You probably don't because they flopped horrendously. Very few consumers ran out to buy the incredibly high quality music-dvds because most people seriously just can't tell the difference. The human ear is not receptive enough, especially for those with an untrained ear. Adding objective numeric content quality in music yields no new profits, and growth in the music industry seriously slows. This front-runner for value has topped out. Increasing objective content quality will never bring in new profits until doctors find some way to add cybernetic spectrum enhancers to our ears, and unfortunately for the music industry, I think that is far away.
..:: Portability
Now, some ridiculous percentage of people have either an iPod, a basic MP3 player, or for the technogeeks among us, a handheld that plays MP3s. The music industry completely missed this wave of ingenuity. MP3s were brought about by some geeks in a garage. The hardware industry jumped on this, with players like Creative, Samsung, Sony, and Apple leaping on this factor. MP3 players don't skip, and carrying around a CD case is just unnecessary. The music industry was completely late to the scene. To make a profit off of this factor, DRM had to be introduced. As noted above, DRM essentially takes away one of the rights previously held, and then charges a premium for it. The music industry wants you to believe that only by paying a premium may you fill up your device and take it anywhere.
..:: A La Carte Purchasing
Apparently, some people don't even know what this means. When you buy a CD, you're buying anywhere from 10-18 songs at one price. When you go on iTunes, you buy only the songs that you want. This is similar to the olden days when you walk into a cafeteria and only pay for the food that you want. If you don't want some meatloaf, and that's the only entree available today, you don't have to pay for it. Essentially, when you buy 10 songs at $15, you pay for all of them regardless of whether you like them or not. Up until about 2001, the music industry charged anywhere from $3-5 for a single. Not a single person can say they haven't purchased a CD only to go through it to find that there's only one good song and the rest of the CD is just worthless boring filler. Piracy destroyed this underhanded business tactic. FTP sites were allowing singles downloads since the mid 90s at least, and Napster just made it easier. Apple's iTunes never became a real competitor until at least 2005. When this concept was left solely to the music industry, many albums could only be purchased in full, and not as singles, while they charged the hefty premium for singles. The music industry didn't exactly miss this era of value adding, but completely failed to exploit it. Now that they're behind, they're using DRM to take this back. The only major online distributor that does not use DRM is eMusic, and eMusic refuses to sell music a la carte. The music industry did not invent the download of the single, so they're using DRM to get this value back.
..:: Medium Durability
Cassettes broke, or became de-magnetized, or the tape kinked. CDs were nicer because they were much easier to take care of. Just keep them in their case when not using them, and they won't get scratched. Many CDs even tout 100+ years of data retention (whether they actually will get that high is another question, but it's definitely conceivable). Discs also take up ridiculously less space than their plastic winding counterparts. The problem with the music industry was that they completely missed the jump from Disc to digital. The keepers of our media are now Western Digital, IBM, Plextor, Memorex, and more. We are getting less from the media companies when we buy digital formats as they need not pay for packaging, distribution, storage, and materials, and they don't pass this cost on to us anymore, as it doesn't exist. This factor which once created value no longer exists, and the music industry has no control over the quality of our hard drives.
..:: On Demand
Do you remember listening to cassettes? Fast forwarding around to listen to a single song was completely unwieldy. If you told someone now that they'd have to listen to 10 MP3s just to get to the 11th, they'd laugh at you like you're a moron. Thus, CDs brought about a significant value via the skip button. However, when the digital era came in, the music industry was still preaching the skip button. The CD era requires one to labor through a binder full of albums, while the digital era lists every single song and allows instant searching. The music industry was late to the scene to embrace the whole file based music experience, and didn't offer downloads literally until Napster2 (but Kazaa and many of the gen2 p2p apps were already mainstream by then), and even then, Napster2 used incredibly gimped DRM infested files. iTunes still remains one of the few online media distributors that allows you to listen to your music after your subscription expires (because iTunes doesn't use a subscription). Sony even tried to cut back the consumer's ability to rip songs from a CD and use them as files by creating the rootkit. The music industry did not add the On-Demand value, so they're trying to use DRM to take it.
..:: Overall
These are the greatest factors in increasing value that the content industry has ever used. Content quality, and medium durability have been completely eliminated in the music industry. Portability, the on-demand experience, and obtaining media a la carte happened entirely without the music industry. All of a sudden, DRM is necessary for the industry to cut back on the consumer rights to generate profits from these facets.
Take a look at the zune. MS is paying Universal $1 per zune sold. Without digital media files, the zune is a junky piece of plastic and metal and it has absolutely no value. However, the innovation behind the zune came in no part to the efforts of the music industry. If MS was smart, they would have told universal to fuck off. Next thing you know, PC game manufacturers are going to start telling dell, ATI, and nvidia that they want a cut of all computers and high end graphics cards sold, because these cards have their value played up mostly through pirated computer games.
Apparently, the Candian Music Industry wants to impose an entire
Apple Tax. What the music industry cronies fail to mention is that because of Apple, they're still selling the digital product without having to pay for distribution, manufacture, storage, and handling of cds, booklets, and jewel cases, which is clearly one of the most expensive parts of an album's cost. Here, the music industry is trying to use legal mongering to carve out a right which never existed. The grocery store doesn't get money from your plate and cup manufacturers. However, the plates and cups are worth nothing without food. The water company doesn't make any money from soap or toilet paper companies despite the fact that soap and toilet paper are 100% useless without water. This legal mongering is necessary because the industry has hit rock bottom and growth is no longer possible without incredibly substantial innovation, and that's something that might only happen once in a hundred years.
..:: These Five Factors and the Movie Industry
The movie industry has not yet been racked by advances in these aspects, but the beating is on the horizon. Dealing with video is a little more difficult than dealing with audio. Audio has a bitrate and an encoding type. Video has both of those for both audio and video, in addition to resolution/aspect ratio, and tons more data about the source which it was ripped from. Further, movie files are typically huge, especially compared to music files. However, the applications for handling video files are astronomically better than they were 5 years ago, and bandwidth is a joke now. Current theatre releases or fresh DVDs can be downloaded from torrent networks in less than an hour. The movie industry already missed out with on-demand video and obtaining files a-la carte because so many users just download their video from torrent sites. None of these users will ever go back to an inferior method of consuming media. Medium durability hasn't changed with HD/BR-DVDs as most DVD-R companies have already been double coating their DVDs with plastic to keep up the durability. This is standard practice and the movie industry can't claim they increase value by doing it. Portability happened under the movie industry's nose with the iPod, zune, laptops, and tons of other media devices. Mythtv makes an even bigger joke out of this entire ordeal in regards to on-demand video, medium durability, and portability (because you can have it automatically encode different formats for different devices).
The last remaining aspect for video is actual data quality, and the impending doom of this facet is clearly on the horizon. After everyone has on-demand HDTV, there will be no more room for expansion in content quality. I doubt the growth will stop at 54 inches at 1080p, but at some point the growth of the industry will stop particularly because human visual acuity is not good enough. It's already happening now. As it stands now, very few can tell the difference between HD and standard def on a TV below 30 inches. Of course, both the TV studios and the MPAA are fully aware of the death of content quality profit. At some point, consumers will have very little desire to put some 120 inch TV screen in their home or apartment. I find roughly 70 inches in a home setting to be my maximum desired size. What happens when the resolution of mainstream video gets to the point where at 70 inches, I can no longer tell the difference between two content resolutions? This argument is already slightly moot as many users will take lossy Xvid or Divx encoded video because "it's acceptable". Maybe 70 inches warrants 1400p resolution (I'm just guessing but the resolution is considerably foreseeable) where the eye can no longer tell the difference. At that point, the other four facets will have already been abused and exploited, or eliminated entirely.
Therefore, the movie industry understands that they must also use DRM to stake out whatever remaining rights they can. Look at HD/BR-DVD. The content producers wouldn't license the formats to Microsoft unless MS went to great lengths to add ridiculous
Vista DRM. The content industry is specifically adding roadblocks to hang onto a tired antiquated business model.
..:: Conclusion
DRM is not at all about piracy. It's about profit protection. Growth in the music industry has stalled as the profit generators are actually disappearing. It's already game over for the music industry because piracy of tiny music files is so rampant and easy. The movie industry is next, and they're trying to cut out what rights they can so that they can charge more money for them. However, many of us have already had a taste of high powered
mythtv media centers, and we're not going back.
Opportunities for profit from innovation are incredibly harder to come by now, and the content industry missed this entire generation. DRM and legal mongering have apparently become the new profit engine.
Post Last Updated: Feb 10, 2007 8:59 pm
