Digital Rights Management

Digital Rights Management, or DRM for short, is just a fancy way of limiting what you can do with media like music or movies in digital form. The general idea is that copyright law doesn't allow you to share music with your friends. So if I download a song, I can't give you a copy. It wasn't ever legal for me to give you a copy, but back in the days of cassette tapes, it was pretty easy for me to buy a blank tape and stick it in my dual-deck boombox, and make a copy. Some boomboxes even had a high-speed copy mode so that you could make copies faster. Even though this wasn't legal, it was really hard to enforce, so what the music industry did is it went to congress and got itself a tax placed on every blank media (think: cassette tape, vhs tape, blank CD) which went to the industry, to help "offset" the losses in music and media sales from copying.

Today, however, even though that tax still exists, with digital media DRM comes into play. Basically the content is encrypted, and when you buy a copy, your computer gets a license to play it, which is really a decryption key for the content. It's specific to your computer or your iPod, so if you share it with another person, their computer or iPod can't play it. There are many different types of encryption so there are many different types of DRM. Microsoft has one called Plays4Sure, which ironically doesn't work on the Zune. Apple calls theirs FairPlay and that's what iPod and iTunes use.

Of course, because your iPod knows how to decrypt the music, some smart people have broken pretty much every DRM scheme that there is. But to prevent this, the media industry went to congress in 2000 and passed the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) which says that if someone tries to put DRM on their content, it's illegal for you to try and break it (it's also illegal for you to break it). One of the many problems with the DMCA is that it doesn't have any sort of strength threshold for the DRM being used. So if I use an "encryption" scheme of flipping the first bit of each media file, unflipping that bit is just as illegal as cracking a state-of-the-art RSA encryption scheme. So just because some DRM is very weak and easy to break, it's still illegal to break it.

Another problem is that copyright law allows you, once you have bought some content, to make a copy of it as long as you don't share it. The idea behind this is that you might lose your CD, but you already paid for it, so you should be allowed to have a backup copy. Copyright law also allows you to take an excerpt of that CD and play it on your talk show as part of a review of that CD -- as long as your excerpt is not a significant chunk of the CD. Most DRM doesn't let you do this (though some companies, like Apple, will allow you to copy your music on up to N devices. In apple's case, you can authorize 5 computers if I am not mistaken).

The biggest problem behind DRM isn't that my iPod can't play your Zune songs, and your Zune can't play mine. It's that my iPod can't play the songs I bought from Rhapsody, thus buying an mp3 player has locked me into one DRM scheme (so I have to buy from iTunes). Of course, the iPod can play DRM-free music (like just plain mp3s) but if my iPod breaks and I decide I want a Sansa music player instead, I'll have to re-purchase all the songs I already own from Rhapsody, since the Sansa music player doesn't play the iTunes songs.

I think eventually two things will happen. First, although it's illegal, utilities to remove various DRM schemes will become more common and user-friendly, which will allow more users to switch DRM schemes and music players without having to re-purchase all their music. Second, small-time iTunes competitors are already coming out and selling DRM-free songs. As soon as a major record label allows their music to be sold DRM free, the party's over and everyone else will follow suit. It's just too much of a competetive advantage for others not to do so.

Fundamentally DRM will eventually fade out because people want to watch their media on multiple devices, not just the one supported by the store you bought your media from.