Today is sort of an anti-DRM day here, so it was some pleasure that I just saw Ernie Miller’s post at Copyfight regarding Hilary Rosen, the former head of the RIAA. She’s complaining about the DRM Apple uses with its music store and iPod. She says:

I spent 17 years in the music business the last several of which were all about pushing and prodding the painful development of legitimate on-line music.

But, of course, neither she nor any of the big music stepped up to the music download table without demanding DRM to “protect” their content.

I can talk out both sides of my mouth, but it’s usually not this funny.

Some might say that she’s only complaining about the proprietary DRM used by Apple, not DRM in general. But, how is Microsoft’s DRM any less proprietary? As Ernie says:

The only reason that the other companies mentioned aren’t ["proprietary"] is because they are struggling to gain marketshare. Were they the dominant players in the market, they would be doing the same thing as Apple.

That, and it seems pretty clear that the music industry is hoping to capitalize on technical incompatibility to force customers to re-buy their music just like they replaced their LPs with CDs.

Posted May 9, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Copyrights & Intellectual Property. .

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