F OR CASUAL USERS, ITUNES DRM will never stop selling songs for use with i Tunes. doesn’t look so bad, and for many of them, Apple controls the iPod, and uses that control to it’s a pretty loose set of chains. A lot of info- lock Rhapsody and Napster songs out of the most civilians don’t own more than five CPUs (the limit popular portable player on the market. The music on the number of boxes an i Tune can play on), and industry can’t afford to blow them off. i Tunes is new enough that not many of us have had The entertainment industry, having accidentally the opportunity to sink a big investment in the tech- created cozy monopolies for the likes of Apple, nology and try to take it with us to a new vendor. Microsoft, and Macrovision, is now busily trying to
For the recording industry, i Tunes represents a put itself back in charge of its own destiny. Next-chance to charge more for less. An i Tune can’t be generation crippleware DVD standards, like Blu-Ray sold on as a used good, something that we can do and DVD-HD, are being defined by studio-crafted, with our CDs. You can’t turn an i Tune into a ring- fragile alliances of bitter competitors from the tone, nor make other uses that the record compa- technology industry, companies that will be hard-nies might want to charge us money for. It’s a neat pressed to present a unified front when it comes and easy way to gouge us for the stuff we used to time to negotiate terms with Hollywood. get gratis.
But for Apple, i Tunes is a great way to lock us into using its products. No one is allowed to make a compatible i Tunes player without Apple’s permission (when RealNetworks tried to make a Real player that ran on the iPod, Apple threatened a lawsuit under the DMCA).
Apple doesn’t really care how many CPUs you listen to a track on. Apple doesn’t really care how many people you stream a song to. That’s just a sop to the record industry. Apple cares about you While monopolists rearrange the deck chairs on sinking an investment into an integrated chain of their sinking superliners, we makers are busily build-technologies (iPods, CPUs, i Tunes metadata) and ing, acquiring, and using open technologies and file media (songs) that will raise the switching costs if formats that let us move our media freely from one you decide to give your business to someone else. device to another, keeping us from being locked into
From the recording industry’s perspective, this is an entertainment company or a DRM vendor. a disaster. Once Apple controls the relationship with Let the dinosaurs go for each other’s throats — we music listeners, Apple can name its price and set its can see the tar rising around their feet. terms for selling music. The record companies are trying desperately to raise the cost of some tracks and lower the cost of others because they believe they’ll sell more that way, and Apple has basically laughed them off. Why? The record companies
Once Apple controls the relationship with music listeners, Apple can name its price and set its terms for selling music.
Cory Doctorow ( craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing ( boingboing.net), and a contributor to Wired, Popular Science, and The New York Times.
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