Philip

Roughly Drafted has written a good article about the FairPlay DRM here which discusses it quite in depth. In other news EMI has backed out of discussions about dropping DRM altogether.

From what I can tell EMI is basically asking for a bucketload of “insurance” money to lose DRM on the off chance that people somehow get the idea that paying for music then pirating it will cause them to lose more money than someone ripping a CD and dumping it onto the Internet P2P systems. Apparently Apple and Microsoft aren’t really keen on being [ab]used and the majority of astute people figure that EMI is being pretty silly. Read about it from Ars Technica here.

The simple solution from my point of view is to make DRM apply to rental situations only to restrict playback beyond the set number of times or time and date, while content that is owned is digitally watermarked sans DRM so the user can transcode, copy, backup or otherwise do what they like with it. Leaked copies on the Internet or P2P systems could then be tracked to a user who takes responsibility (if possible) for it. Streamburst was looking into something like that here.