Valhalla Island

The latest Daring Fireball article, Command, Option, Control, pulls the arms and legs off the argument for DRM in a few paragraphs.

In fact, he [Steve Jobs] explicitly pointed out the opposite, that DRM in general has had no effect on music piracy whatsoever, because 90 percent of music ships on DRM-free CDs.

For me, this is the single reason DRM is a ridiculous waste of time that hurts users with no advantage to the music companies. A massive majority of music purchased is DRM-free anyway, why should it be different for music sold online? Imagine if buying a T-Shirt online meant you could only wear it under certain circumstances.

It’s also for this reason that DRM has never affected me, I buy music on physical CD which I can then rip to my computer and copy to a music device of my choice.

The reason the music companies are unpopular is that their actions and stated policies make people unhappy. The reason Apple is popular is that its actions and stated policies (including Jobs’s “Thoughts on Music”) make people happy.

and

Likewise, Microsoft’s deep institutional devotion to DRM is not about making their customers happy; it’s about making the entertainment industry happy even though it makes customers unhappy.

This rings so true. The RIAA (and Microsoft) are so hell bent on trying to wipe piracy off the face of the planet that they’re hurting their genuine, full-paying customers without thinking twice about what they’re doing to them.

Two billion songs have been sold on the iTunes Music Store since it’s launch, two billion songs that anyone can download for free via a P2P network, yet they were legally purchased. Gruber continues

If iTunes were to switch to DRM-free music, would it stop anyone who is already buying music from iTunes? No. And, more importantly, are there people who have refused to buy songs from iTunes because the songs are encoded with DRM? Yes!

Yet the big 4 won’t settle for anything less than a world where everyone pays for every piece of music anyone will ever listen to. They’re spending all energy trying to force pirates to pay for their music, which they will never do, instead of treating honest, paying customers with the highest regard. Make people think “paying for music might actually be worth it” instead of “why should I pay for music that’s crippled with DRM when I can download DRM-free music for free?”