Extremely Lame

DRM stands for Digital Rights Mangagement, but what it really is is a draconian method of copy protection.  It is supposed to prevent people from copying it and distributing it to everyone willy-nilly, but it unfortunately goes a lot further than that in its agressive war against consumers. Basically it hinders a consumer’s ability to take something they’ve purchased and make a backup of it (entirely legal, by the way) or convert it to some form that they can use elsewhere, like taking music bought from iTunes and converting it so it will play on something other than an Apple product or taking something they recorded on their TiVO and putting it on a portable video player.

The reason everyone hates it so isn’t because everyone is a crook and they want to steal music, it’s because for starters, it assumes that every consumer is a crook, but also because DRM doesn’t even slow down the people who make a living selling pirated content on a large scale. Within weeks they can get around even the most stringent copy protection. It only makes things hard for the honest people who aren’t doing anything wrong in the first place and makes criminals out of them in the process.

Here are a couple annoyances I’ve discovered with regard to DRM.

XBox 360 downloadable content is half tied to the console (not the hard drive) and half tied to the XBox live account. This means that if your console gives you the Red Ring of Death, to use that downloadable content from then on, you’ll have to be connected to XBox Live. Internet for game consoles isn’t quite ubiquitous yet. If I took my console with me to my parent’s house in Florida, I couldn’t get online. This tying the content to the console (and to the account) can be a minor annoyance in the case of things like map files for first person shooters, a major annoyance if you have, for example, $200 worth of downloaded songs for Guitar Hero and Rock Band that you can no longer use, and downright catastrophic in the case of content that effects save files because it will make those save files unplayable. This rant goes into far more detail if you’re interested.

A couple weeks ago, Ars Technica reported that Microsoft is getting rid of the servers they use to authenticate music purchased through MSN Music, a now orphaned music download program that Microsoft used before they released the Zune. What this means is that pretty much the next time you upgrade your computer to a new operating system, have to replace a hard drive, or do anything substantial to the computer after August 31st, 2008, any music you bought through MSN Music will be completely unplayable.

This could easily happen to the iTunes store several years down the line. Until last year, all their music had DRM, and most of it still does. You can now get some DRM free music on iTunes, EMI being the most notable. But if iTunes ever went away and you switched computers or hard drives, bye bye music!

While copy protection for video is still going strong, it seems we’re finally seeing the beginning of the end for it in music. Amazon sells DRM free mp3s of many songs at a high bitrate (256 kbps) to compete with iTunes. CD Baby, a warehouse store that deals only with independent artists, sells their mp3s DRM free as well. CD Baby’s good stuff. 90% of mp3 sales go directly to the artist, with the remaining going to pay for bandwidth. I recommend Jonathan Coulton and Freezepop.