Issue 4: Spotlight on Technology
By Dr. Roger Korby

Digital Rights Management or User Experience Takes One Up the Backside

What is DRM?
A quick and dirty definition of Digital Rights Management (DRM) would be: software that limits what a person can do with content files. One place you can find DRM is in music files bought online from stores such as the iTunes Music Store. The companies that own the content you are purchasing (record labels in the case of iTunes music files) are very concerned about piracy. They use DRM to limit the number of computers and devices you can play their files on (read: you can not just send copies of DRMed files to all your friends and expect them to work). To simplify things, I will be referring to DRMed music in this article, but the same arguments could be applied to any other type of file (movies, books, etc.)

What is the problem with DRM?
I see three main problems with DRM: 1) it sucks for the consumer 2) ultimately, it doesn’t work and 3) it breaks fair use.

DRM sucks for the consumer
My favorite quote about DRM comes from Cory Doctorow (author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and previous spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.) He says, “No customer wants DRM. No one woke up this morning and said, ‘Damn, I wish there was a way to do less with my books, movies and music.’” This is exactly what you get when you are dealing with DRM. There are no benefits for the user and, for those who do not realize what they are getting into, potentially a lot of pain.

When you buy a DRMed music file, you are agreeing to let the music industry decide how many and on which kinds of devices you can use that file. One of the greatest things about digital music is that you can easily change the format the music is in or do other cool things to the files (such as apply filters to change the sound). When music was analog (such as on vinyl and tape) everything worked in real time. It would take a while to make copies. DRM takes our cool technology and tries to turn back the clock on it.

Even on authorized computers DRM can show some annoying side effects. I used to use Napster’s subscription service (which used DRMed WMA files), and there was a noticeable delay before the songs would start playing as Napster checked with the server to make sure I was allowed to use the file. This quickly became very irritating.

DRM ultimately does not work
My main argument against DRM has always been that when I buy a CD I can get the music off of this CD into an open, non-DRMed file very easily. The RIAA has made several attempts to “lock down” the music on audio CDs but none of these attempts has been very successful. Mostly they depend on Window’s Autoplay feature to keep people from ripping music off CDs but you can turn off Autoplay or easily bypass it by simply holding down the shift key while putting the CD in the computer. Last year Sony tried to introduce a new way of locking down CDs, but it was an even more miserable failure than the Autoplay approach. Sony included a “rootkit” in some of their CDs. A rootkit is basically a program that installs itself deep down in Windows and is virtually invisible to the user, even to computer-savvy users. There are not a lot of good, legitimate uses for a rootkit. In Sony’s case it was a rootkit installed by a third party on an innocent and oblivious home user’s computer, which is just downright shady.

Once a rootkit is installed, you can do all kinds of cool/evil things, like monitor computer activity without the user’s knowledge or permission. Sony was going to use this rootkit to keep people from ripping songs into iTunes. Their rootkit turned out to be really easy to exploit, so anyone who had listened to one of these Sony CD’s on a computer had a gaping security hole in their system. When news of this rootkit hit the internets all hell broke loose. Sony ate it big time and eventually replaced the CD’s with non-rootkit versions and even went so far as to send out plain old MP3’s of the music to those that bought the rootkit CDs.

I subscribe to Yahoo Music Unlimited (YMU). It’s similar to iTunes, but instead of “buying” songs, you pay a monthly fee and have download access to a ton of songs. It costs around $7 a month. You can play them on your PC and on a few supported devices (notably excluding Apple’s iPod). As an aside… I find it really interesting that for all the lawsuits and noise the RIAA makes, through these subscription services they reveal to the world that all they want out of each of us is $7 a month. I used to buy 2-3 CD’s a month. That’s easily $20-30 a month. Now I only buy the occasional album that is not on YMU or albums that I really like a lot and want in uncompressed quality and the RIAA ends up getting a lot less money from me.

Back to how DRM does not work. There are some really easy ways to convert Yahoo’s DRM music into unprotected mp3’s. The key to this is that as long as the RIAA lets us actually hear the music with our ears, there is a way to unprotect the file. There are some programs available for around $20 that will take DRMed WMAs and spit out MP3’s. The way they work is pretty much the modern equivalent of holding a mic up to your friend’s stereo to record your friend’s music. These convert the songs in real time (a 5 minute song takes 5 minutes to convert) so it’s not the most efficient approach, but it works. One program uses some special tricks to play up to 5 songs at a time on “virtual soundcards”, thus taking 1/5 the time to process all the songs.

DRM breaks fair use
I haven’t gone to the trouble of actually researching the legalese regarding “fair use”, but it seems pretty straightforward that if you buy a product you should be able to do what you want with that product in your own home as long as you are not hurting anyone or making a copy of that product to give to other people. If I buy a CD, I should be able to (guilt-free) convert it to MP3’s to play on my iPod. If I legally have access to a file (be it a song, movie, or book), I should be able to use it on any device I want. DRMed files work only on the devices approved by the industry, which would not equate to “fair use.”

I do not have any solutions for the problem of DRM. I wonder what would really happen if Apple convinced the RIAA to let them sell music as unprotected MP3s. Would their sales drop off? Would people start rampantly sharing MP3’s with their friends and stop buying music altogether? I really don’t think we would see a huge change in sales. It’s already a cinch to burn copies of music CDs (which people do all the time) and yet the music industry does not consider this their worst threat. A move to unDRMed MP3’s would surely seem crazy to a music industry executive, but I think it might just be crazy and revolutionary enough to work.