Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iTS, iTunes
Cory Doctorow on Steve's 'Thoughts on Music'
We all know that Cory Doctorow, of BoingBoing fame, hates DRM with the red hot passion of a thousand suns. Most people aren't fans of DRM, but view it as a necessary evil in a world where it is very easy for one person to copy and distribute your 'product' without one red cent going into your pocket. Steve's open letter heard 'round the web was seen by some as a rallying cry to rid the world of DRM (audio only, I mean no one wants to see pirated copies of 'A Bug's Life' popping up everywhere), however, Mr. Doctorow makes a case (that's a Salon article, so you either need have a Salon membership, or sit through a short ad to read it) that Steve was merely posturing. Furthermore, Doctorow thinks the letter was a clever way to shift blame from Apple to the record labels and hide the fact that the iTunes/iPod combo is a 'roach motel'.Cory is a good writer (I have enjoyed a few of his novels greatly), however, I think he is really over selling the FUD here. Sure, FairPlay is lame. I hate DRM as much as the next guy (well, unless I am standing next to Cory that is) but FairPlay is ridiculously easy to get around, even without breaking the letter of the law. Simply burn an audio CD of your purchased iTunes tracks and like magic you can do whatever you want with that CD (though this only works if you burn an audio CD). You can put it in a Walkman, you can toss it out the window, you can make thousands of copies of it (from the CD, iTunes does limit you to 7 burns of a playlist with FairPlay, though you can get around that too since the limit is based on the order of the songs), or you can even re-import the music on the CD into any format you like (Ogg anyone?).
That solves the iTunes Store lock in problem, because if you are really that passionate about moving from iTunes you'll figure this trick out. So we now know you can rid all of your iTunes audio purchases of DRM with a little time and effort but what about Cory's assertion that 'once you put music on your iPod, you can't get it off again without Apple's software?' While that is what Apple would like you to believe, once again this limitation is laughably easy to get around. There are a boatload of apps that will move stuff off of your iPod and onto your Mac (I'm a big fan of iPodRip) which are all able to function because the music folder on your iPod is simply hidden, and not really 'locked down'. Furthermore, if you're comfortable using some rudimentary Terminal commands you can even navigate to the music folder yourself and get at your music that way without spending a cent (though, I suppose in that case you would technically be using Apple's software in the form of OS X).
Cory's point, even though it is obfuscated by a slight tint of overreaction, remains valid: DRM treats consumers like thieves and really serves as nothing more than a point of contention between those willing to buy their music legally and the companies that want to sell it. The only way that we will know for certain if Steve really meant what he wrote in that letter is to wait and see. Here's hoping that the future of the iTunes Store is DRM free.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
jon said 11:48AM on 2-23-2007
You know, think what you will. But, Jobs says in no uncertain terms that we'd be better off without DRM. I don't care what motives are suspected, or how you want to slice it, but that's what he says.
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walkerjs said 11:50AM on 2-23-2007
My fav: If you can hear it, you can record it. I'll leave it up to the reader to figure out what method is best.
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jason said 11:49AM on 2-23-2007
Steve wants the iTunes store to be DRM free so he can sell more music, not everyone uses an iPod. If he could sell music to anyone regardless of what music player they had, I am sure he would sell more music.
Unless I am missing something glaringly obvious, which may be the case, I am no expert on this stuff.
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Nick said 11:55AM on 2-23-2007
"Doctorow thinks the letter was a clever way to shift blame from Apple to the record labels and hide the fact that the iTunes/iPod combo is a 'roach motel'."
Well, I think Doctorow is a roach, but would I say so?
The trouble is he likes the sounds of his own (highly immature) voice.
This is nonsense. What you call "the iTunes/iPod combo" is totally opt-in as regards DRM. You can own an iPod and, like me and many others, never buy any content from the iTunes store. Ever heard of ripping a CD?
I think Peter Guttman was right in surmising that Microsoft, whatever it tries to imply, wants DRM. That's the way it has always worked: cornering markets and making sure you have nowhere else to go. Here's the paper:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
To his credit, this isn't Jobs' way and never has been: he actually tries to make and sell people beautiful technology that they'll really want. I think he meant exactly what he said in the essay. Without DRM he'd have got no content. And at bottom, I don't think he cares too much about selling content: it's the hardware he wants to sell and the iTunes Store is just another incentive help sell iPods for people who want to buy content that way.
It's also worth noting that insofar as the iTMS has been successful it's because Jobs has only agreed to a fairly civilized form of DRM. Others haven't--see MS's former ventures and Sony's ATRAC to see what I mean--and this is why they have been shunned by the public.
Even more important, has Apple ever put DRM on your own music? No! But you know who has.
Apple has also made a lot of free and unprotected content available through the iTMS in the form of podcasts. Not being an ungrateful sort, I appreciate that.
Roach Motel! I think Doctorow should crawl back under the cooker and feast on the crumbs that've been spilled there.
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David Butler said 12:19PM on 2-23-2007
The burning to CD and reimporting method doesnt work very well, especially if you appreciate any kind of sound quality in your music. When you burn a song from itunes you're burning a compressed file. Re-import that and you've got a doublely compressed file, which has serious sound quality issues.
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pts said 12:40PM on 2-23-2007
I think it's a bit disingenuous to wave off FairPlay as fairly benign because you can burn tracks to disc to get around it. Yeah, you can do that, but you're gonna lose quality. And don't tell me that nobody can tell--the iTunes tracks are at the very bottom of what I'm willing to pay for to begin with, in terms of quality, and adding DRM to the mix pretty much nixes the deal.
The obvious response is that the quality is good enough for "most people." Is it? I'm no audiophile, and transcoded iTMS songs grate on me. Plus, are "most people" going to even know or understand what they're accomplishing by burning, then ripping? I don't think so, except when they notice the quality degradation. And what do you do then, keep two copies of every song? It's just not a good solution by any metric.
Being able to burn to standard audio CD to get around DRM is not a real argument in FairPlay's favor. If it were really a workable way to get "clean" versions of the tracks, they wouldn't let us do it in the first place.
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PXLated said 12:33PM on 2-23-2007
Good comment Nick.
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Christopher L. Williams said 12:33PM on 2-23-2007
@5
Agreed. Saying that burning a CD to get rid of the DRM as an acceptable way to circumvent it is ridiculous. How's that Kool-Aid taste?
Sure, you may rid yourself of the DRM, but you also shred the audio file while you're at it.
Please stop using the "you can burn and then rip a CD to get rid of FairPlay" as an excuse to show how "fair" Apple's DRM is. Although it "works," it is an unacceptable way to handle the issue.
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Jon said 12:35PM on 2-23-2007
#5: If someone cared for sound quality, I doubt they'd be buying songs from iTS in the first place.
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Radiantmatrix said 1:07PM on 2-23-2007
I think you misread the article. Cory says "you can't get it off again *with* Apple's software." (emphasis mine), not "without Apple's software". In other words, he's making the point that Apple hasn't provided tools to pull your music back off your iPod.
He's using that point to make a larger one: namely that Apple's actions don't line up with Steve's apparent dislike for DRM and lock-in.
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justelise said 1:07PM on 2-23-2007
Cory Doctorow is an over-reactor of epic proportions. Not only that but he is a bandwagon jumper and likes to make a big to do about his preferences in technology (first his iBook, then Ubuntu, etc..) to get attention for it.
Steve Jobs got some of the big record labels to tighten the noose around their own necks. When no one had a good digital music store and no one was offering a large catalog of downloads of full albums (that weren't indie, classical, or obscure) for a reasonable price, he went to the record execs and got them to sign up for it. The success of the iTunes music store showed the record giants that they did indeed have a market for digital music and the slipping sales of CDs had little to do with piracy and more to do with people wanting more options for how (and when) they bought their music.
Other music services that hold the music hostage and use a rental scheme rather than a purchase and download scheme have not seen the success of the iTunes Store even if their catalogs are bigger. People aren't stupid. They don't want to rent their music, and they do want to take it with them.
DRM and rental systems both hold the users hostage, and Steve Jobs is painfully aware of this. He told the record companies what they needed to hear because he's the guy who got them to try the experiment in the first place -- who better than him to wake them to the reality of the results. People want digital music and they don't want to be tethered to a specific service or device. What he's saying would benefit all of the digital music stores and mp3 player manufacturers if DRM would be wiped away and mp3s could be the digital music file of choice. Sure it would allow more people to shop at the iTunes music store, but it would also allow people to buy their music elsewhere and use the mp3 player of their choice. Everyone wins.
Cory with all of his posturing and whining about the message behind Steve's message is doing nothing but blowing hot air and driving traffic to his site and to BoingBoing. This whole tirade he's on is just a textbook lesson in Search Engine Optimization. The more noise he generates the more of his own product he will sell.
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Brian said 1:13PM on 2-23-2007
Why, oh why, does anyone bother linking to anything Cory Doctorow has to say about DRM? I mean, he's a smart guy, but he's rapidly turning into Johnny One-Note on this issue.
As Doctorow sees things, there is only good and evil. There are no shades of grey, and no middle ground. Doctorow is the George Bush of the DRM debate.
Worse still, he is completely up his own a$$. He rabbits on and on when he could easily summarize his argument in a couple of paragraphs. In fact, he did summarize his argument in a couple of paragraphs.
About six months ago.
Since which time, his argument has not changed a whit. The only change has been the volume at which he makes it.
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Scott McNulty said 1:16PM on 2-23-2007
I merely mentioned the CD trick as a way to get around FairPlay, and frankly it is a point for FairPlay in regards to usability. The very fact that you can get that DRM'ed music out of iTunes in a format that'll play on almost any CD player doesn't sound like lock in to me.
Sure, the sound will suffer, but that isn't some conspiracy by Apple to keep you locked in, it is just a limit of the technology (or more specifically a limit in the original quality of the iTunes track).
It is my opinion that Apple should sell DRM free music at a much higher bitrate, but until that happens one must live in the world of FairPlay if one wants to buy music from iTunes.
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Mr Stimulation said 1:29PM on 2-23-2007
IS there anyway to burn an audio DVD and reimport your songs from there? Is that possible?
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Victor Agreda Jr said 1:39PM on 2-23-2007
Some people have challenged the numbers Steve presented, saying he kept them artificially low. The idea being this "proves" an Apple monopoly if more than 3% of your music comes from Apple's iTunes Store. That's crap. Consider an iPod with 4 GB, loaded to the gills. If it is 50% full of iTS songs, at 4 MB per song you're talking about around $500 in purchases. I've been using iTunes since the DAY it was launched, and iTS since it launched, and I've only bought about 200 songs. I haven't used p2p in ages either. FUDdy duddys indeed.
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jh said 2:31PM on 2-23-2007
Umm.. excuse me..
The Burn and Rip method is NOT within the letter of the law. It is a Circumvention of Copyright protection methodologies, and thus is a direct violation of the DMCA.
It's illegal, and it's CRIMINAL.
Stop pretending that the "burn and rip" method is a legit way around fairplay. It's not. It is a way that WORKS. It is EASY. But it's NOT legal.
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walkerjs said 2:55PM on 2-23-2007
What about playing the tune and recording it with, say, a mic in front of the speakers? Or maybe with a virtual mic straight off the sound card? What about playing an encrypted tune and recording it with a cassette recorder? What about singing along with the song while the song is playing?
Is all that a violation of the DMCA? Or is it an example of Fair Use?
Hint: one law is stupid.
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Zettaichan said 3:15PM on 2-23-2007
I think you're giving your readers a poor idea of the article's contents.
Doctorow makes it clear that DRM doesn't represent a significant technical barrier for the determined copier. DRM is significant for its legal effects.
Here's the crucial section: "DRM's principal effect is legal, not technical. Since the passage of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's been illegal to break DRMs in this country. It doesn't matter if DRM restricts access to something you have every right to use (for example, a DRM that region-locks a movie you've bought so that it won't play in the U.S.). You're not allowed to break DRM... So if you shellac a one-atom-thick layer of DRM over a product, you get the full power of the American legal system as a weapon to use against competitors. Apple may have created a successful "Switch" campaign by reverse-engineering Microsoft products like PowerPoint to make Keynote, an Apple program that lets you run old PowerPoint decks on your Mac, but Microsoft can't create a "Switch to the Zune" campaign that offers you the ability to play your iTunes Store songs on a Zune, Microsoft's latest abortive iPod-killer."
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jh said 3:20PM on 2-23-2007
Walkerjs:
Oh, I agree, the DMCA IS stupid. So is DRM.
But, the fact is the author of this blog post said that Fairplay was easily and leaglly circumventable. The law says , basically, you cannot legally circumvent a DRM. At all. EVER.
It doesn't matter how "easy" it is to get around. It's NOT LEGAL. That's the PROBLEM.
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Kevin Crossman said 4:12PM on 2-23-2007
Can someone tell me how this statement of Doctorow's makes any logical sense?
>Although Apple's DRM is wholly ineffective at preventing copying,
>it does manage to raise the cost of switching from an iPod to a
>competing device.
If it is ineffective at preventing copying how in the world does it raise the cost of switching?
It's like saying "you're not locked in, but because you're locked in..." Ridiculous!
Apple is not the bad guy. A month ago you could argue that Apple wanted lock in but after Steve's letter you cannot. They're okay with using an open standard. Check. Now go after the other players in this game -- the record companies.
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