Gentlemen, The tug of war between consumers and music companies is quite simple really.
Music companies (because of their excessive overheads) try to apply downstream price-discrimination. DRM is a way to apply price discrimination and segment the market. The problem is, the good that is being sold, the digital song/piece of music, is inherently replicable ad infinitum. As simple as that. There is no way, given the technology available, to enforce the desired market segmentation by forcing the consumer to have only 1 copy of their music. This was attempted, and in its worst form, lead to the SONY rootkit scandal. As an example of the difficulty to enforce the current pricing model, consider the following. You can subscribe to Napster for about 15 dollars a month (Napster To Go), and download as much DRM music (in wma format) as you want. You then download a re-recording software, such as MuvAudio (www.muvaudio.com), which makes bit per bit copies of your original music (at up to 10x the speed, you can easily leave a machine on overnight). You now have a perfectly legal copy of your original DRM'd piece, but in another format of your choice. The question at this point is quality. I think there is a good rationale for companies to charge the consumer on the margin for his choice of quality. So if you want lossless, you will have to pay a little more. You have to price music by size (www.allofmp3.com, for all of its illegality, used this pricing scheme). I have no issues with THIS kind of price discrimination. But this is a kind of "local" price discrimination which is acceptable. "Global" price discrimination, that is, to treat (or better, to FORCE the users to accept) each copy of their music as an unicum - i.e. more copies more money, is simply a fallacious attempt by the music industry to muddle the issue and buy more time, until they agree on a new and more correct pricing strategy. The gates are open now, because DRM, as a tool of global price discrimination, is dead, and starting to smell. Giacomo -- gbruzzo ------------------------------------------------------------------------ gbruzzo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3633 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=34928 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
