DRM technology and policy

[bear]

I just want to chime in with a datapoint on DRM.

My favorite bands don't tend to have big labels behind them.  Every CD
but one that I've bought in the last six years, I've bought at a live
performance. The one that wasn't a live performance was put together
by a guy with a MIDI synthesizer over the course of fifteen weeks of
work, alone.

So far many schemes for DRM I've seen rely on people not having access
to the technologies available to major labels, or create marketplaces
restricted to songs owned by the major labels with DRM stuff built
into them.  Now, my favorite artists are already frozen out of the
major streams of the business by the consolidation of radio and their
consequent inability to get played on the airwaves.  I really *really*
don't want to move forward into a future where the keys they'd need to
put out CD's in a "standard" format that the market expects and that
music stores will have to keep track of differently if they sell it,
cost more than they make in a year.

I'll admit to being something of a copyright extremist; I think that
copyrights are fundamentally not as important as general purpose
computers that can do anything with any data, including copying it,
and I don't want anybody else telling me what I can do with bits I've
bought or what platforms I can play them on.  But as a music fan, I'm
also looking at a bunch of copyright schemes that would freeze my
favorite bands out of the market entirely.

Despite the fact that it's *technologically* possible in most cases
for them to go on making their own CD's, they wouldn't be on an equal
footing or subject to the same policy in record stores as the
major-label offerings, and most store managers are going to pull them
instead of trying to keep minimum-wage employees trained on more than
one procedure.  And new markets where downloadable music is kept
online are going to have massive legal liabilities if non-DRM'd stuff
is downloaded; you think they'll risk carrying something from bands
that can't afford an "authenticated" key?  These bands already have a
marginal existence; if major marketplaces that they can't get into at
all become the business standard, I don't know if they'll still be
around at all.

This is the same thing that happened with DeCSS, except from the
band's side of it instead of the Operating System's.  There's no good
reason why it ought to be illegal to play DVD's that you own on a
Linux box, but there wasn't some entity that stood to make its money
back on a million-dollar key investment, so it is.  Linux got frozen
out of the "legitimate" DVD player arena.  Now we're looking at a lot
of systems that run the risk of creating standard channels for the
music market which will freeze out all the small bands.  I don't want
that.

			Bear


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