Music on the move: music downloads and DRM

 

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By Alun Williams

Posted on 12 Aug 2005 at 17:27

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a way of monitoring and regulating the use of a music track that has been paid for and downloaded. Most paid-for music downloads are copy protected with some form of DRM to prevent them being shared in an unauthorised way between people or even between devices owned by the same person.

But how many users of legitimate download services - all of which implement in some form, and to varying degrees, a form of digital control - are aware of such possible constraints on the content they are purchasing?

The worrying indication is that a sizeable minority of users - as much as a quarter - are not fully aware of DRM issues. Over 17 per cent declared they were unaware of such possible copy protection restrictions on the product they were paying money for, with a further 10 per cent not being sure on the issue.

This suggests that a large body of consumers could become dissatisfied when they encounter the restrictions and limitations - the small print of the licence, if you will - surrounding the content that they have paid for. Almost half of these had used the iTunes service, with a quarter using the Napster paid-for download service.

The key term is licence and the specific terms of a contract that it implies - the digital content is not actually bought outright, as is the case with a physical equivalent, such as a CD. Contract law supersedes copyright law in these matters, and the terms and conditions of the transaction will include an important DRM element.

Another problem for service providers to cope with is that when content has long been freely available, by one means or another - such as P2P networks - any attempts to control access can be seen as an imposition. We asked: Has a DRM system ever frustrated your legitimate attempts to use a service? One fifth of respondent said 'Yes', which represents a considerable amount of customer dissatisfaction.

Napster and MSN Music clubs were particular targets of wrath, but iTunes got plenty of name checks, too. Lets take a few, more or less typical, experiences.

One Napster user, for example, reported that the service would not allow them to play the paid-for files on their particular mp3 player. 'My Iriver iFP-899 has DRM inbuilt but its not on Napster's "approved" list of MP3 players,' they reported. 'When a CD is purchased it can be used in any CD player. 'The same should be true for purchased music down loads regardless of format,' they point out, not unreasonably.

For MSN Music Club, one frustrated user typically reported: 'They restrict the number of licenses issued. I've had several changes of hardware over the past coupled of years and some of the changes have meant that I needed to download the tracks again and get the license re-issued. I was angry and frustrated when I was unable to obtain a license for music I had paid for just because I wasn't able to back up the license I received in the first place.'

Such examples of DRM implementations frustrating normal use can only lead to one outcome: unhappy customers. 'As soon as I've spent the credit I have available I won't be using MSN Music again unless they change their license policy,' the user commented.

(At this point it is worth mentioning, Microsoft's www.playsforsure.com website, which attempts to dispel some of the confusion in this area - the plethora of players and music stores that rely on Microsoft's Windows Media technology but that have problems when it comes to talking to each other.)