Radio Exile | Beating the Drum — CES/Macworld Special

Beating the Drum — CES/Macworld Special

By Greg Wind - August 23, 2007 | Email the author

I usually use my Thursday regular posting to alternately touch on DRM and the stuff that goes into our love for music. This morning I re-ran my love letter to Boston’s musical influence citing regionalism as a thing we can love about music, so this afternoon I’m posting one of my favorite DRM related posts from the past year.

Back in January, when “Thoughts on Music” was still just a draft on Steven Jobs’ PC (sorry… Mac), the biggest consumer electronics shows on the planet were introducing us to the new tech freshman class. Macworld, with its iPhone, may have won the PR war, but for actual content nothing beat a panel at CES called “Copyright versus Consumers: Where to Draw the Line?” where industry types openly asked “why DRM?” In a pre-thoughts on music world, that was a pretty big deal. It’s like a group of storm troopers on the death star had a meeting to discuss the merits of the rebel alliance (insert your own non-geeky reference if that means nothing to you — then again, who am I kidding? I know my audience).

See you next week.

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The Consumer Electronics Expo in Las Vegas is the epicenter of the digital music world this week, unless of course you care about Apple, in which case it’s San Francisco and MacWorld. (In case you missed it Apple, Inc. spent a handful of lawyer bucks to drop the “Computers” from its name â€“ highlighting the fact that the company is firmly into TV set top boxes, music devices, mobile telephony and other stuff with hard drives we don’t think of as computers. This from a company that has called itself “Apple” to the extent the Beatles would let it anyway.)

This is the time of year companies try to convince analysts and reporters that consumers (you ‘n’ me) are becoming acclimated to whatever DRM hoops we have to jump through to use last year’s products and introduce new products they expect will be so achingly cool we’ll jump through the new, more restrictive hoops. To give Apple its bright shining moment, the new Apple TV box streams content from your computers or iPod, and performs other slick tricks. Jobs also introduced the iPhone, an iPod/smartphone which is also very smooth and apparently easy to use. Buying in to an Apple content provisioning system has never had such far-ranging effects — or put another way, Apple’s DRM has never had such reach.

I am not slamming Apple or painting a grim DRM future, because I don’t think Apple will ever have the kind of market share required to impose its will on a user base the way a utility can. When iTunes is federally regulated, color me worried. My concern is that product fetish is the “face” of DRM. It’s the hot lead singer of the so-so band. The iPhone and its Vegas cousins need DRM to appease the labels, and the technology is so satisfying you’ll follow the rules just to play with the accelerometer, which knows how you’re holding the device and switches from portrait to landscape accordingly. Take away the cool features and you’re left with a dumpy rhythm section and a guitarist that doesn’t know all the chords. You might be able to live with it, but you wouldn’t like it much. That’s why last year’s cool gadget is all of a sudden disposable every January 15th.

I am a gadget-phile. I know how it works, and that’s why I was not surprised to see that CES had a panel called Copyright versus Consumers: Where to Draw the Line? It’s hard to get a clearer view of the zero-sum mind set of the CE vendor community than that. There is a battle for a fixed set of dollars, and we can fight and win but maybe destroy our market, give it up and hope the consumer has pity on us, or negotiate knowing most of the bargaining power is on our side of the table.

The funny thing is, it didn’t go down like that. From published reports it actually looks like it took a completely different slant. The RIAA had a guy on the panel and it sounds like he had the usual positions, but someone actually said 2007 would be the year DRM dies and the moderator said that “Copyright versus Consumers” was a dangerous title. Encouraging that CES, the mothership of all electronics companies not named Apple, is giving airtime to these ideas, even if they aren’t particularly revelatory. It’s enough that it was said at that venue. It’s almost like they believe we can all have more by striking the right balance, wherever that balance is. It isn’t zero-sum.

So in the spirit of fair play, here are a few things to keep in mind about DRM when you start to get swept up in the “DRM is Satan’s binary” rhetoric:

1) DRM does allow some cool device-to-device features. Embedded in there is some stuff that greases the skids as you move content around from the CD to your computer, to the portable digital music device to the set top box and other equipment. It’s not all about limiting your options. Sometimes it’s about extending your options. It’s why iTunes works better than Windows Media Player, which has to work from the lowest common denominator.

2) There is no DRM on the planet that is outrageously bad, nor will there ever be. I still believe DRM-based restrictions are generally dumb, but I’ve yet to meet a really nefarious one.

3) The cool technology we get from electronics companies is the reason for DRM. If it wasn’t for devices that let us keep thousands of songs in our pockets, we wouldn’t have DRM to kick around. You decide what’s better: a world with no devices and no DRM or the current state of things.

4) As leery as I am of the iPhone and the potential for Apple to dominate another category with inferior technology in a cool wrapper (read the blogs â€“ it isn’t even 3G, which means my last phone is better as a phone, it has less than half the storage of my current MP3 player and it doesn’t allow you to expand its functionality) the ability to use iTunes on a phone is a vast improvement on the DRM served up by any mobile service provider on current phones. Mobile operators come closer than anyone, other than maybe DVD producers, to the “Satan’s own binary” scenario.

5) At any second, the companies could publish their DRM schemes and all of the restrictions would be gone, and you know they would love to not have the headache. If the dabbling in selling unprotected MP3′s goes unexpectedly well and the labels are satisfied, we could see this happen in the not too distant future.

6) DRM will not go away. The restrictions on use might (don’t hold your breath) but something will stick around to make the privacy experts nervous so we know who’s downloading what and where it came from. This much seems not only assured, but fair. [EDIT: There was another session today at CES and the discussion at the second DRM related panel in two days seems to support this idea.]

On the other side, don’t let anyone dealing in DRM hold your wallet.