02-07-2007, 01:26 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').
I've often said the same thing, but that's always an important thing to emphasize. If downloading or some other format ever becomes more popular than CDs, as consumers we're sunk.
They took this to an (illogical) end with SACD --- here was a format promising high resolution, but you aren't allowed to manufacture a player with a digital output. Audiophiles --- the target audience --- wouldn't want to be locked into just the analog outputs. Not because they wanted to make identical copies (and who would be ripping disks up to 4.7GB back in the mid 1990s?) , but because they didn't want to be locked into whatever D/A converter is in the box.
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').
I've often said the same thing, but that's always an important thing to emphasize. If downloading or some other format ever becomes more popular than CDs, as consumers we're sunk.
They took this to an (illogical) end with SACD --- here was a format promising high resolution, but you aren't allowed to manufacture a player with a digital output. Audiophiles --- the target audience --- wouldn't want to be locked into just the analog outputs. Not because they wanted to make identical copies (and who would be ripping disks up to 4.7GB back in the mid 1990s?) , but because they didn't want to be locked into whatever D/A converter is in the box.