Reducing DRM

While I’m nowhere even close to being an Apple® fanboy, I do use iTunes for a significant portion of downloading. (particularly when I also use eMusic, which I believe is now owned by iTunes) As such, I’m pleased to see that they’ve announced that iTunes is going to be DRM-free, with 8 million of its 10 million tracks now available without any DRM, and the rest over the next few months.

DRM is (basically) copy protection – it’s the media industry’s way of saying “You can buy our stuff, but we’ll still tell you how you can – and can’t – use it”. It’s horrifically flawed, and something I’m fairly passionately anti at the best of times.

As a perfect example of this, we’ve both recently bought new Sony MP3 players and wanted to put music bought on iTunes onto them. Only because of DRM, you can’t. Well, you can if you burn an audio CD of the downloaded files, re-import them into [Music player of choice] as MP3s, and then put them on the player, but that’s circumvention of the DRM, and thus naughty. You’re using a file you’ve bought and paid for, but in a way that the music industry doesn’t like. They want you to buy it on iTunes and use it through that, but if you want it to go on another MP3 player, you should buy another copy of the same file that’s authorised for use on your MP3 player. Oh, and you shouldn’t be buying the album on CD and then ripping it to MP3 so you can listen to it on your player either.

It’s the same with other download services (and things like BBC iPlayer etc. too) which have historically been only available through Internet Explorer, so that they can use the Windows Media Player DRM – which is also why so many MP3 players etc. insist on using WMP 11, which has the latest/’greatest’ DRM modules on it.

So to me it’s a sign that perhaps the music studios and media producers are finally beginning to see some sense if they’ll allow iTunes to finally sell music without DRM on it.