iTunes and DRM

I’ve been very good, and I’m more than halfway through marking my enormous pile of exams. I can mark forever as long as I have nothing else to do (which isn’t true) and as long as I have music listen to (which I do).

I was recently given an iTunes card, which I thought was great. I usually buy real CD’s because I like the shiny discs. But I thought it would be a good way to get individual songs from artists I was embarrassed to listen to. And that’s good, because iTunes has a lot of stuff I would be embarrassed to listen to. Also, it was a good chance to ‘go legal’ and buy songs I’d downloaded and enjoyed for years. The bitrate is a paltry 128, but it was a small price for peace of mind.

Only when I tried to play the iTunes files at work did I discover the wonderful world of Digital Rights Management, or DRM.

DRM exists because of the unique problem of digital media: if I buy something normal like a broom, and give it to you, I no longer have it. If I own a computer file, and I give it to you, I can still keep a copy. And so owners of digital media try to find ways to prevent this.

Most methods are ineffective and annoying to the customer. Exhibit A is the hateful Copy Control method which is encoded in discs from EMI. Even the logo is ugly. Looks like something radioactive. Copy Controlled discs don’t work in computers and some really good CD players because they purposely introduce errors into the disc. Your ordinary CD player has no problem because it just blasts right through the errors, but a computer demands a bit more precision, and gets hung up if you try to play or rip the files. (Or at least, used to get hung up — now CD rippers can compensate.) It gets even worse. Your disc will get scratched with time, and those scratches when combined with the in-built errors may just max out your CD player’s ability to cope, and you’ll get skipping even with minor disc wear. For this reason, Copy Control discs are not Compact Discs. You won’t see the distinctive ‘disc’ logo on any of your Copy Controlled discs — they’re not allowed to carry the logo because the discs aren’t Red Book compliant. Giving customers flawed discs and treating them like criminals is a crappy business model, especially when it doesn’t actually stop duplication.

Apple’s iTunes Music Store has a different approach: in order to play the sound files, you need to Authorise The Computer. Seems there’s something evil in an iTunes file: it remembers your iTunes username, and when you play the file, it checks to see if the computer is one of potentially five you have ‘authorised’. If you don’t want to use more than 5 computers, or you don’t want to listen to the files outside of iTunes (say in your car mp3 player), or you just aren’t particularly bothered by the intrusion, you’ll probably suffer no undue anxiety. Otherwise, you’ll have to navigate some tricky technical issues. Convert the file to mp3 and lose the lock? No dice — the file is an m4p file that resists attempts to encode it. Just burn it to disc? Fine, but you’ll lose quality.

Although I understand the record companies’ point of view, I detest DRM. The idea that someone can dictate how I get to use an item that I have paid for really mucks with my sense of ownership. I advocate three courses of action:

Thwart. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the now-dead immigration debate in the USA, it’s this: Show me a 50-foot wall, and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder. There are hacks to get around DRM, and you can google ‘hymn project’ or ‘m4p’ to find those.

Boycott. Don’t buy Copy Controlled discs, and buy music online from companies that don’t use DRM. Bleep.com is very nice, but I haven’t yet tried Magnatune, Mindawn, or Audio Lunchbox.

Bitch about it on your blog like it’s the biggest problem in the world today.

I am personally implementing all of the three.