02-07-2007, 12:27 AM
[quote Seacrest]To the labels, DRM is not really about piracy.
It's about control.
Record company losses to "piracy" are minuscule compared to the death of their long term business prospects if they can't charge for the same content over and over and over ad nauseum in perpetuity forever.
That's why they feared the mp3 players and why secretly they loathe the iPod (although they want a piece of its 'action').
Same old same old! The entertainment media industry has been doing the same thing for decades. They were all up in arms over recording tape in the 1970s and 1980s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping...ling_Music , they sued to try and stop the production of VCRs, they sued the founders of ReplayTV out of existence and have forced makers/distributors of subsequent DVRs to produce feature-stripped crappy devices, and they are now doing the same with mp3 music and trying very hard to make all HDTV-level video much more restrictive than previous generations.
What Steve says is essentially correct...most music is distributed in digital format without DRM (CDs). It's crazy to think that most people aren't dumping that stuff straight into their computers. Why is it that a fraction of the music in the sector with the highest possible growth (mp3 players) has to have DRM? It makes no sense.
It's about control.
Record company losses to "piracy" are minuscule compared to the death of their long term business prospects if they can't charge for the same content over and over and over ad nauseum in perpetuity forever.
That's why they feared the mp3 players and why secretly they loathe the iPod (although they want a piece of its 'action').
Same old same old! The entertainment media industry has been doing the same thing for decades. They were all up in arms over recording tape in the 1970s and 1980s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping...ling_Music , they sued to try and stop the production of VCRs, they sued the founders of ReplayTV out of existence and have forced makers/distributors of subsequent DVRs to produce feature-stripped crappy devices, and they are now doing the same with mp3 music and trying very hard to make all HDTV-level video much more restrictive than previous generations.
What Steve says is essentially correct...most music is distributed in digital format without DRM (CDs). It's crazy to think that most people aren't dumping that stuff straight into their computers. Why is it that a fraction of the music in the sector with the highest possible growth (mp3 players) has to have DRM? It makes no sense.