Why DRM is Bad for You and Me
I’ve been using Apple’s iTunes Music Store (iTMS) for over two and a half years, in which time I have amassed a sizable music library. The interface of the iTMS offers the ability to browse and explore music in a way that the brick and mortar stores simply cannot compare with. I can quickly preview albums and artists that I’d have never discovered had it not been for the way the interface affords browsing. The iTMS has completely changed the way I search for music.
But, here’s the rub: every time I purchase music from Apple, I feel guilty. That’s right. When I legally purchase music, I feel guilty. Not out of guilt at having broken a law, but a guilt out of having been a poor consumer. The guilt of knowing that I have betrayed the interests of all of my fellow music consumers. How have I betrayed you, my fellow music enthusiast? I have contributed to a business model that is fundamentally bad for you and for me.
As has been covered in many places, each and every song downloaded from the iTMS is encoded with Digital Rights Management (DRM) software. In Apple’s case, that software is called FairPlay. The DRM scrambles the music data, so that it is meaningless gibberish without an authorization key, which is associated with the account used to purchase the music. Thus, without the authorization key provided by Apple, the music won’t play. Furthermore, Apple only grants iTunes and the iPod access to that authorization key. As a result, any music purchased through the iTunes Music Store will play only through iTunes and the iPod.
When iTunes or your iPod plays the music, the software has to decode the music and send the un-scrambled form to the speakers. At this point, anyone can extract the data and create a perfect copy of the music, without any of the DRM protections. In fact, this is basically what iTunes does when it lets you copy your music to a CD (without actually involving the speakers in the process). If one can so easily get a pristine copy of the original music, but without any of the DRM embedded, what’s to prevent anyone from copying such music with reckless abandon?
To understand the problem, we need to know a little bit about audio compression. I promise not to get too technical here. Raw audio data such as you find on an audio CD is large. For example, a typical audio CD holds approximately 680 MB worth of uncompressed data. Even with today’s large hard drives, that’s a lot of data for a single album. As a result, when we distribute music on the Internet or store it on our computers, we typically compress the data. There are two sorts of compression: lossless and lossy. Both approaches work by finding redundancy in the original data and representing it in a less redundant fashion. Lossless compression techniques let one recreate an exact copy of the original data, as when I write “pi” to represent 3.14159…. Lossy compression throws away some of the data to create a good-enough representation of the original, as when I write 22/7 to approximate pi. Formats such as MP3 or AAC (the format used by the iTMS) exemplify these smaller approximations of the original music. They’re so good that most people won’t be able to tell the difference between them and the CD quality data they encode.
When iTunes burns your music to a CD, it decodes the compressed audio and writes the raw audio to the disc. This audio is a perfect (uncompressed) copy of the audio compressed into the MP3 or AAC file. But now, if you wanted to put that music on the computer in your office, you would want to re-compress the music to a manageable size. Since the compression techniques are lossy, you now must create an imperfect copy of your original data, which is already an imperfect copy of the original CD. The imperfections of the encoding compound themselves with each generation, creating noticeable audio artifacts (pops, hisses, scratches, and the like). Thus, if you wanted to use the music that you legally purchased through iTunes on your non-iPod MP3 player, or use it in your MP3-capable car stereo, you would have to create a lossy, degraded copy of your music.
What such restrictions do is limit your choice as a consumer. When you purchase music through the iTunes Music Store, you lock yourself in to using Apple’s products. You cannot migrate your music away under Apple’s DRM scheme; you would have to re-purchase your music. If, at some point in the future, Apple should get out of the music business and your copy of iTunes could no longer phone home to Apple to authorize itself to play your music, then all those songs you’ve downloaded would be nothing more than scrambled bits.
There are, however, alternatives to the iTunes Music Store. My favorites are purchasing CDs and eMusic. The first approach suffers from a lack of instant gratification, but, if the music’s been published, you are most likely to find it on CD. And with the Amazon Marketplace, you can usually find a good, used copy for cheaper than you could download it from iTunes.
Alternately, eMusic is the second largest online retailer of legally downloadable music. They use a different model from iTunes, where you pay a flat monthly fee for a fixed number of downloads. When you download a song, you own it, just as with the iTMS. Instead of getting a song that is locked to your account, however, you get a standard MP3 file, playable on just about any digital music player or computer on the market. The major record companies have not bought into that model, however, so most of what you’ll find on eMusic is limited to the indie market. Nonetheless, I’ve found many gems that I would never have otherwise discovered by browsing through their catalog. And at 25 cents per track, it’s hard to complain.
As we purchase more and more of our music online, we need to know what we’re getting ourselves into. The iTMS creates an artificial lock-in and restrictions on what we can do with our legally purchased music. Alternatives that protect our rights exist, but we, as consumers, need to exercise those rights by voting with our wallets. Am I saying that you should not use the iTunes Music Store? That’s up to you, but you should know what you’re getting yourself in to when you do.