Personally, I have no problem at all with the idea of DRM, or any other form of copyright/copyright-protection. The people who produce the content should surely have the ultimate control over the prices and terms under which their efforts are sold/distributed - anything else is pure socialism.

To my way of thinking the function of us technologists is to provide a form of DRM which is so easy to use that consumers don't notice that it is there - but which protects the rights of the content-providers from wanton unrecompensed copying. When this is the case it's cheaper for a customer to pay the artist/publisher their creative dues than to indulge in any kind of DRM-circumvention efforts. A win-win solution.

To my way of thinking the function of us technologists is to provide a form of DRM which is so easy to use that consumers don't notice that it is there - but which protects the rights of the content-providers from wanton unrecompensed copying.

Maybe. On the other hand, remember all of the noise about deCSS a decade ago? It didn't prevent people from copying DVDs and sharing with all of their friends. It did, however, prevent me from watching the DVDs[1] on my computer. (I'm one of those nasty linux people, you see. I'm sure the disks would have worked just find on a machine with software from Doctor Evil's House of Software, near Seattle.)

I believe that "property rights" is shorthand for "I bought it and paid for it, and so I get to use it as I see fit. If they didn't want me to use it, they shouldn't have sold it to me."

If you think you can come up with a system that will allow material to be copied into RAM and viewed, but prevent copying onto another disk, go for it. I have my doubts.

[1] the ones that I paid for, that is.

The music industry has enjoyed a rare period (in historical terms) over the last half century in which thetechnology enabled them to earn untold riches. Technology moved on, and so did the market. As the music industry -finally- were dragged by the ear into the internet age, they maintained a pricing structure ($1 per song? seriously?) based on the assumption that could still earn the same per song that they earned with earlier more restrictive technology. The market has dictated otherwise. In fact, the market value for an mp3 of a song is closer to $0 than $1. Yet, the market for live performances has increased robustly; in the last 10 years, I feel like the average price for concert tickets has more than doubled (any largely popular act is now $100+ for good seats, and over $30 for general-admission-nosebleed). So the dynamics of the "music industry", and how that industry creates wealth, have evolved; those who were rich off the old system will try to cling to their old ways, and fail (the imminently-failing DRM is a nice microcosm for the broader phenomenon at play).

I have little sympathy for the music industry because they shot themselves in the foot by not pre-empting the file sharing explosion; they could have, circa 1998, offered unrestricted mp3s (at reduced bitrate, say 128kbps) for sale online for something like $0.10 or $0.20. "Premium albums", at full CD quality with requisite artwork, booklets, etc. could be offered at the "full price" for those willing to pay it. But they got greedy and complacent and the market passed them by. Their loss.

The music industry has enjoyed a rare period (in historical terms) over the last half century in which the technology enabled them to earn untold riches. Technology moved on, and so did the market. As the music industry -finally- were dragged by the ear into the internet age, they maintained a pricing structure ($1 per song? seriously?) based on the assumption that could still earn the same per song that they earned with earlier more restrictive technology. The market has dictated otherwise. In fact, the apparent market value for an mp3 of a song is much closer to $0 than it is to $1.

[aside: Yet, the market for live performances has increased robustly; in the last 10 years, I feel like the average price for concert tickets has more than doubled (any largely popular act is now $100+ for good seats, and over $30 for general-admission-nosebleed)].

So the dynamics of the "music industry", and how that industry creates wealth, have evolved; those who were rich off the old system will try to cling to their old ways, and fail (the imminently-failing DRM is a nice microcosm for the broader phenomenon at play).

I have little sympathy for the music industry because they shot themselves in the foot by not pre-empting the file sharing explosion; they could have, circa 1998, offered unrestricted mp3s (at reduced bitrate, say 128kbps) for sale online for something like $0.10 or $0.20. "Premium albums", at full CD quality with requisite artwork, booklets, etc. could be offered at the "full price" for those willing to pay it. They could have earlier connected with streaming services such as Rhapsody that allow unlimited streaming playback of any song desired for a low monthly fee (e.g. $10-20).

But they got greedy and complacent, and the market passed them by. Their loss.

Personally, I have no problem at all with the idea of DRM, or any other form of copyright/copyright-protection. The people who produce the content should surely have the ultimate control over the prices and terms under which their efforts are sold/distributed - anything else is pure socialism.

To my way of thinking the function of us technologists is to provide a form of DRM which is so easy to use that consumers don't notice that it is there - but which protects the rights of the content-providers from wanton unrecompensed copying. When this is the case it's cheaper for a customer to pay the artist/publisher their creative dues than to indulge in any kind of DRM-circumvention efforts.

DRM is foolish because it is a monopoly action to inflate prices above market in an industry with elastic demand that is hardly a monopoly, with countless existing music labels and relatively low barriers-to-entry.

It may be too late now (see my previous post), but they way the music industry could have avoided this was with 1) realstic pricing and 2) timely entry into digital distribution

The people who produce the content should surely have the ultimate control over the prices and terms under which their efforts are sold/distributed - anything else is pure socialism.

Socialism? Amazon, Wal-Mart, et al are calling for something and that is socialism? How does that work exactly?

It is not the state which has spoken regarding DRM, it is the market. We, the paying public, really hate it. It damages our computers and limits the devices we can use to listen/watch the things we have paid for. That is what is killing off DRM.

I'll say it again, the music industry didn't realize what its product was.

In the peak years of the music industry, the product wasn't the music but the packaging, artistic album covers, lyrics, other goodies.
Determined souls could always record albums onto tape and/or distribute those to friends. But most didn't because owning the original packaging was an integral part of the experience. Even the less extravagantly packaged material benefited from the existence of more worthy efforts.
Once the recording industry began down the road of packaging on the cheap, they destroyed the incentive for owning original product, what was left was the music itself, which was ridiculously overpriced.

DRM makes life difficult for the paying consumer, not the pirate.

It's a common problem where you have some product that costs to produce, is a benefit to everyone, but for which it is hard to control access, leading to a problem of free riders. How do you pay for it to be produced, if you cannot ensure people pay to use it? Music is one, but so are technical inventions, as is infrastructure for transport, and waste disposal for a clean environment. Many answers have been tried over the years.

The most obvious is not to supply it. If there is no way to make money from it, you don't do it. You lose a fair amount as a society by doing that, but you gain in liberty. It's a trade-off.

You can try to control it anyway. Toll roads, patent lawyers, and DRM are attempts down this road. They're inefficient, impractical, annoying, ultimately counter-productive. You have to build a huge machinery to chase people into every corner of their lives to make sure they're not cheating. Effective measures are massively expensive, affordable measures discredit the system and create a lucrative market for organised cheaters. And it requires a major cost in liberty.

Instead or coercing the demand end of the market, you can coerce supply. Make people supply the service without return. This can include forced labour (community service is sometimes used as a judicial punishment), imposing regulations (from restaurant hygiene to making people sort their recyclable rubbish), and withholding other services from those who don't comply. It imposes major costs for enforcement, is correspondingly inefficient (although usually not as inefficient as coercing the customers, since there are usually fewer suppliers), and a likewise massive imposition on liberty.

You can pay for it with taxes. You have one centralised collection that people are forced to pay, and then all those services that are beneficial to everyone (or at least, many people) but would otherwise not happen because making people pay isn't practical, get done relatively efficiently. The problems you know: there's no market incentive to improve efficiency or reduce cost, there's no definite relationship between how much people pay and how much they use, centralised planning is bad at controlling supply and demand, and it is too easy for people running it to manipulate the system to pay for their own ideologically or personally motivated schemes using other people's money. (There are also a variety of hybrid solutions that fall under this heading involving smaller cooperatives, but these require both the pervasive security to keep outsiders out, and a degree of coercion to ensure uncooperative members pay their way. They have advantages over taxes, but do not entirely escape their flaws.) There's a loss of liberty, but not as much as with the total control solution.

You can also supply it for free. If you can't make money out of it, don't try. Make money some other way, and spend it on producing services for the common good. Philanthropy, charity, open source development, community relations and good PR. Good for liberty, but it relies on people's goodwill and independent means, which is limited. It works for relatively cheap products, but anything requiring really significant resources tends to be excluded. This solution also includes nominally charging, but not chasing up cheaters (like shareware). This then becomes a combination of charity by parts of both supply and demand sides. I suspect something like this is the most likely to happen in the long run - as technology makes production cheaper, there will be a lot more open source amateur production, distributed direct from artist to consumer, and funding will be arranged only indirectly. The big companies will go out of business.

To some degree, the music/movie industry is just annoyed that their market has disappeared, as markets are wont to do when technology moves on. They have lost their stranglehold on distribution. But production is still a moderately expensive process, so if as a society we want music and films to be supplied, some other approach is needed. I don't think any of the above would truly replace our current entertainment industry in the short term, and I'm unaware of any other approaches. If anyone can suggest anything else I haven't thought of, I'd be interested to hear about it.

It's important, not so much because of the music business specifically, but because of all the other things we want but we can't make money out of making. An alternative model might mean an end to things like taxes and regulations, which is surely a product desired by all.

A few months ago, Linux Format magazine ran an article by Jeremy Allison, a senior Google employee and leading member of the Samba project, his line being that DRM is simply snake oil. It cannot, ultimately, work. You're encrypting data, giving people the key to decrypt it, and trusting that they won't misuse that key to share the data. Sure, you can make it very difficult - or illegal - for them to do it (thus annoying your very customers in the process), but unlike public key encryption, decryption of DRM "protected" data must be possible by the public.

So yes, DRM will die, sooner rather than later.

Lest we forget about the viciousness of DRM remember this.

Yeah, the music industry lost the plot long ago. There have been some good points made about packaging and that was certainly a factor in the LP age. But where the music industry really got complacent was the (highly successful) introduction of the CD in '85. Home taping had been an issue since at least the audio cassette (God knows when) but the CD promised to nix that by offering convenience and higher quality* in a format which couldn't be replicated at home... Until it could be. They weren't planning on that were they? I vaguely recall the music/movie industries demanding a while back in the US restrictions on CD/DVD recorders and or a levy on blank disks (details anyone?) which got kicked to touch for the very simple reason that the PC trade in the USA is considerably larger than their combined businesses and the likes of Dell really didn't like it.

Oh, and I can't forgive the music industry for (in the UK at least) maintaining a price point of GBP15 for a new CD for years - considerably more than an LP or tape - even after CD production costs had dropped below costs for a tape or vinyl record. They are currently reaping just what they sowed.

Live performances are the way forward (amazingly counter-intuitive isn't it?) and they can cry all the way to the bank over those. David, no idea where you're living but $100! Last time Madonna played Manchester MEN Arena it was GBP175 per ticket and it sold-out very, very rapidly.

The music industry's product is either a very easily copyable series of 1s and 0s or an experience. I see the later as a much easier marketing challenge.

For the record, I am not a Madonna fan. I like the earlier stuff but...

*Yeah, I know a mint LP on a top rig sounds better but the fact is that most people prefer sub-CD MP3 convenience to spending a grand+ on a top audio rig. Hence the complete no show for the uber-format of DVD-audio.

Now that the EU commission gets involved it is sure as hell that the whole thing goes down - after producing costs of some millions ...

But what about DRM for video. HDMI is a pain in the butt as it can lock in rights control IIRC.

Component output on a Blu-ray player, anyone?§

§ I have a Sony Trinitron CRT 1080i on the way (one of the very last) and it does not have HDMI.

I'm surprised that no-one has pointed this out yet but we are talking about the music industry, not the artists. Artists should be able to profit from their work, why should desk jockeys and accountants make just as much (if not more) without picking up an instument?

Trent Reznor, frontman of the Nine Inch Nails, said at a concert recently something along the lines of "This album has been out for a while now and it has not dropped in price, steal it, give it to your friends, copy it. I'd rather my music was free than lining the pockets of parasites."

... why should desk jockeys and accountants make just as much (if not more) without picking up an instument?

Good point. Of course, as long as they're required for the widespread distribution of music, negotiating with pressing plants, record stores and what-not, why shouldn't they? But they aren't any more.

All this does have the air of a dying industry desperately trying to justify its continued existence. Candlemakers fighting gaslight.

OK, this will probably sound naive, but I have a "bottom line" question: when I download a song or a movie through e-mule, am I stealing or am I not?

Alisa:
No.
You're not stealing music.
Theft is when some measurable, unlawful transfer of property occurs.

If you broke into someone's house and stole a CD, that would be "stealing music".

All you're guilty of is disrupting the state-protected business model of an obsolete industry.

Trent Reznor, frontman of the Nine Inch Nails, said at a concert recently something along the lines of "This album has been out for a while now and it has not dropped in price, steal it, give it to your friends, copy it. I'd rather my music was free than lining the pockets of parasites."

And yet he signed a contract with the "parasites." And why? Because it is their distribution and advertising system as much as his music that makes him a superstar.

I agree with the sentiment of mandrill's comment, and I do think the music industry in its current form is doomed. But I also think that if musicians feel this way there are much more constructive things that they could do to fight it. Like, oh, say, coming up with their own alternative distribution system and encouraging their fans to support it? You can see this process starting with things like Radiohead's latest "release." I don't know what Mr. Renzor's current contractual obligations are, but at some point in his life he will be free to put his money where his mouth is on this issue. I'm betting he .... doesn't.

@Joshua: He has, at least according to Wikipedia(Link):

In 2007, Trent Reznor announced that Nine Inch Nails split from its contractual obligations with Interscope Records, and will distribute its next major album independently.