Apple's Demand For A State-Sponsored Monopoly Shows That DRM Aims To Stop Competition, Not Piracy
Companies touting DRM
technology claim it's intended to protect data from
unauthorized copying. But Apple's angry response to a French plan for iTunes interoperability has let the truth slip out: DRM is
designed to lock in customers, not lock down data.
Companies touting DRM
technology claim it's intended to protect data from
unauthorized copying. But Apple's angry response to a French plan for iTunes interoperability has let the truth slip out: DRM is
designed to lock in customers, not lock down data.
Apple accuses France of "state-sponsored piracy" because a copyright bill currently going through the French
parliament would require DRM vendors to open their technology to
competitors. In reality, France is just trying to
avoid the situation in the U.S., where the lobbyist-written Digital
Millennium Copyright Act has made interoperability illegal. That
isn't just the opinion of the French or the EFF. Earlier this
week, the Cato Institute published a report that describes how the
DMCA is anti-competitive and hurts innovation.
Despite some work by Sun, all DRM technologies so far are proprietary. If you buy a song
from iTunes, it's encrypted using Apple DRM, so you can only
copy it to an iPod--not a standard MP3 player. Similarly,
Napster and MusicMatch sell songs encrypted using Microsoft DRM, so
they can only be copied to players that include Microsoft software.
(As in the PC market, Microsoft is content to monopolize only
software and services, while Apple wants to monopolize hardware, too.)
To interoperate with the Apple or Microsoft formats, other vendors
need to license Apple or Microsoft DRM, and neither will license to a
competitor.
Even when a vendor does let others license its DRM, it can charge as much as it wants and impose onerous conditions. For example, DVDs are
encrypted using DRM from a cartel called the DVD
Copy Control Association. To make a DVD player, hardware
manufacturers need to license the DRM. And to license the DRM, the
manufacturers must agree to restrict what their customers can do.
(The agreements have real teeth. Last month, a group of movie
studios even sued
Samsung for accidentally making a DVD player that gave users too
much control.) That's why DVD players sold in the U.S. can't
legally skip through the FBI warning, play DVDs from most other
countries, or copy a DVD to a laptop's hard disk.
The traditional route to interoperability is through
reverse-engineering. However, the DMCA makes reverse-engineering of
DRM a felony
punishable by 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine. It's
only a U.S. law, so programs to remove DRM from iTunes purchases and
DVDs are freely available on Web sites hosted in other countries.
(Most of them seem to be written by the same person, Jon Johansen.) I
wish I could link to them, but even that is illegal
under the DMCA.
This isn't just a consumer concern. Microsoft and others are
pushing DRM systems for businesses. They're usually rebranded
as something else ("Information
Rights Management" or "Document
Control"), but that's just
PR. All are just as proprietary as consumer DRM. Customers who fall for the sales pitch
could find themselves unable to access their own data without either
agreeing to the DRM vendor's licensing conditions (which can
change at any time) or relocating to France.
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