The video industry just doesn’t get it

Macworld - As a consumer of audio and video in many forms -- CDs, DVDs and online purchases -- I find it interesting to watch as the various media businesses adjust to life in a digital world. On the music side of the world, it seems that slowly but surely they're starting to "get it." Consumers don't like to be hassled by digital rights management (DRM), they want to pay a fair price, and they want to use their music on devices they own without worrying about format, rights or permissions issues.

For the longest time, the music industry insisted on copy protection for online music sales, even though higher-quality CD versions of that same music were generally shipped without any form of copy protection.

So at first, everything you bought from the then iTunes Music Store was protected by FairPlay, Apple's generous (but still restrictive) DRM solution.

In June 2007, though, the first chinks in the DRM armor appeared, with Apple and EMI announcing iTunes Plus, DRM-free music at higher bit rates for $1.29 per song, versus the 99 cents per song for the FairPlay-protected versions.

Then, in September 2007, Amazon launched its own MP3 download service. Unlike the iTunes Store at the time, music in the Amazon MP3 store was (and remains) completely free of DRM. As a consumer, I was intrigued, and tried it out. While the Amazon MP3 store can't rival the rich experience you get in the iTunes Store, it's not a bad solution, and its download tool automatically adds my purchases to iTunes.

Finally, to put the proverbial nail in the DRM coffin, Phil Schiller announced at this year's Macworld Expo that the iTunes Store was going DRM free -- at the expense of Apple's one-price-fits-all strategy. Over the next few months, the entire 10-million-strong iTunes Store music catalog will migrate to DRM-free versions at higher bit rates -- Apple claims that more than 80% of iTunes music is available now in iTunes Plus format.

As a music consumer, I'm thrilled with this -- no more do I need to carefully manage my authorizations for music playback amongst the various machines I use. I can burn anything I want, back up my songs without having to re-rip them and generally not think about what happens to my music if the iTunes Store ever vanishes. With one click of a button, I can upgrade my entire library and be done with DRM ... in theory, at least. (Of course, there are some issues with the upgrade plan, but it's still better than DRM-encoded music.)

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