At its final annual Macworld keynote today, Apple announced that all songs in the iTunes store will be DRM-free by the end of March. Up until now much of the iTunes Music Store’s content was crippled with digital rights management technology that prevented users from copying files or playing them on unauthorized playback devices.
Customers who previously purchased copy-protected tracks from the iTunes Music Store will have the option of converting their songs to DRM-free with one click for the price of 30 cents per track — roughly 30% of the original cost.
Recently Apple has faced competition from the Amazon.com MP3 Store, whose entire inventory is free from Digital Rights Management.
Digital Rights Management technology, or DRM, tries to prevent piracy by placing restrictions on how customers may use the music they purchase. Apple’s FairPlay DRM technology requires a customer to authorize his or her computer to play purchased tracks, and only allows a limited number of computers to be authorized.
As is apparent by the critical manner in which I often write about DRM, I do not believe the concept works and see its very basis as a violation of a consumer’s fair use rights — people should be able to time-shift and space-shift their music in order to keep backup copies, make tracks compatible with the multitude of playback devices that are available and convert that content to new and emerging formats as old ones become obsolete.
The history of DRM is littered with accounts of its failure. In 2005 a copy protection system used by Sony BMG caused a serious breach in security for their customers. In April ’07 copy protection used by Sony prevented some DVDs from playing in Sony’s own DVD players. When companies switch DRM providers or decide to shut down their licensing servers, customers are threatened with having all of the audio and video content they have previously purchased be rendered useless. Such situations were faced by Major League Baseball, the MSN Music Store, and the Yahoo! Music Store. In most of these situations the companies were forced to do right by their customers and either provide refunds, keep the servers online, or allow them to make DRM-free backup copies.
Apple began the march towards a DRM-free iTunes Music Store in April of 2007 when it announced that tracks from EMI’s catalog would be DRM-free, and today’s announcement that the entire inventory will be stripped of its copy protection brings that journey to a happy ending.
Update: In “The Price of Going Free: Apple’s Hidden $1.8 Billion Music Tax” Erick Schnofeld of TechCrunch points out that if everyone who bought music from iTunes upgraded their entire library to be DRM-free Apple would be able to squeeze a $1.8 billion “tax” out of their customer base by getting them to open up their wallets for music they’ve already purchased. Of course Apple will make some money off the DRM-free upgrade fees, just as course 100% of their customers aren’t going to upgrade 100% of their music libraries. Plus I am quite sure more than a few enterprising souls will figure out how to remove DRM from their iTMS purchases for free… if they haven’t already. But in the end the message is loud and clear: DRM is dead.
