Comments on: What if Apple stopped issuing DRM keys?

Sure, it's highly unlikely now, but what about 5 or 10 years from now? The fact is, consumers of DRM-laden music are at the mercy of whoever holds their encryption keys.

[unknown unknown]

The inevitable prospect makea me glad I stripped the DRM from the few DRMed tracks I did buy.

[SlimGem]

Typical FUD.

[Jonathan]

Typical brown noseing fanboi.

[spoonman522]

"Tennant says he doesn't want to sound unsympathetic but reminds digital-music buyers that CD owners don't demand a refund from stores when they lose their discs." That is very true, but the key here is that if the cd owners lose their discs, thats the owner's fault for being careless and what not. However why should the consumer lose all their music when its the provider's fault for not wanting to support a certain DRM format anymore?

[drigulch]

i say that if any company sells a song, a movie, a book, or any other product with DRM attached to it and they quit supporting it, they have intensionally sold me a defective product and they; and the people behind them forcing the DRM to begin with, owe need to compensate me. i buy electronic music with the reasonable expectation that it will outlast cassette tapes, vinyl records, CDS and all that has come before it. The people selling this stuff are making a killing, they are out very little in the manufacture and distribution of the music compared to the old days. Previously, they could have punched out a zillion copies of a record or CD and so on and if the music did not sell, somebody was out a lot of dough. Now some dud song can sit on a server someplace taking up a few megabytes of disk space until somebody comes along and snatches up enough copies to cover it and there is no big loss. Then of course on the songs that are moving the money machine is turning and the overhead is nil. The RIAA and the distributors like apple are using my hard disk as their media and i am paying for that so the media belongs to me, the zero-s and ones may be their's but if they sold me something that is expected to last as long as the media it is written on then they better make it useable to me as long as i can make the media go or they have knowingly sold me a faulty product in my view.

[imacpwr]

Just another reason why I have NEVER and will NEVER buy music online..!! Big business has ripped off the artists AND the listeners long enough..!!! The music lovers should only buy music DIRECTLY from the artists or continue to support p2p till it breaks the back of ever member of the RIAA..!!!!

[SixVodkas]

Nice.

You've come to the conclusion that by "not paying the artists for their work" (that's exactly what p2p does), you're somehow supporting artists.

Thieves can rationalize ANYTHING, I guess!

[Gary Treible]

Huh, what? You can burn iTunes music to a CD and rip the CD back into iTunes. I'll never lose a single song I've bought to DRM

[DrtyDogg]

That works for MSN and Yahoo too, it's the hassle of it that is the problem.

[AppleSuxLeo]

Mr Whipple did say "there is one born every second"

[SixVodkas]

And one only needs to read your typical, mindless drivel to realize that maxim applies best to you!

[Lerianis]

It's about time that we had a couple of lawsuits against Apple because of **** like this. Frankly, Apple, Yahoo, WHOEVER should be required, when they stop supporting a form of DRM, to MAKE A TOOL THAT STRIPS YOUR LEGALLY BOUGHT FILES OF SAID DRM, turning them into unprotected AAC files or whatever format you have.

[SixVodkas]

Don't you mean "sue Yahoo"?

While I realize that it's your blind hatred of Apple making you say "sue Apple", you also said "when they stop supporting a form of DRM".

Apple hasn't stopped supporting the DRM requirements imposed on iTunes by the record labels, so you make no sense whatsoever when you're contradicting yourself.

Remember, kiddies- Hate makes you stupid!

[johnqh]

Just buy them to the CD. No big deal.

And with a software burner emulator like Phantom Burner, you don't even need to buy blank CDs.

[helroth]

You're being very manipulative (and disingenuous) in this article. Unless you just don't know what you're talking about.

Apple was the first to offer DRM-free tracks, but EMI was the only music label that would allow it (independent labels then followed). The other 3 major labels (Warners, Universal and Sony) will not allow Apple to sell DRM-free tracks, even though they allow Amazon to, at the same price as the DRM tracks on iTunes.

Why won't the major labels allow Apple to sell DRM-free tracks? They were worried Apple had too much power over the music business, as Apple was moving to become the largest retailer of recorded music, which it now is. The labels were mad that Apple wouldn't increase prices at the labels' whim, so they helped Amazon set up a rival service.

Apple doesn't want to sell DRM tracks, they are forced to by those three major labels.

[SixVodkas]

Apple's iTunes does not employ a "subscription" based sales model.

Songs purchased through iTunes, unlike those you "rent" through other services, do not disappear when a digital "key" isn't reissued.

This story is FUD, in its worst form, and people should be angered by it.

[DrtyDogg]

Bzzzzzt check your facts, try again.

[Jonathan]

Umm if I need to redo my Mac or PC for any reason I'm pretty much up crap creek if I can't reauthenticate. What then fanboi? What then? People like you make me sick. If this was MS you'd be ripping them a new hole.

[iBuzz]

Look, this is going to happen one day.

Do you think that Apple is still going to be running its DRM licensing servers in 100 years? I think most would agree not. OK... what about in 50 years? Probably not? What about in 25 years? Maybe not. What about in 15 years? See what I'm getting at? It's not a matter of "if" but 'when."

But then again, perhaps it's not that big of a deal. I mean, if you listened to a $0.99 song for 15 years, I think you probably got your money's worth. None of the cassette tapes that I bought in the 1980s are really playable anymore. And I'm sure the labels don't want your music to last forever (heck, they've made a business of selling you the same songs over and over in different formats: vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, MP3...).

That being said... I don't why anyone would buy music in a DRM-format. It's just really inconvenient. Having to worry about which computers and devices are activated, having to worry about how many activations you have left on your account, trying to deal with a situation where you might have multiple accounts with the same store, but they only let you associate a device with one (and then trying to figure out which one it is), having to deal with buggy software, corrupted licenses, and having to relicense tracks, etc. Why would you do that to yourself?

[iBuzz]

> Songs purchased through iTunes, unlike those you "rent" through other services,
> do not disappear when a digital "key" isn't reissued.

But they do "disappear" if you move them to a new computer.

Songs protected with DRM are encrypted and require a license key to decrypt them to pull out the music. As long as the license exists on your computer with the song, you are fine. But when you eventually buy another computer and copy the song (and its license) over, the software will no longer be able to decrypt your music because the license is tied to the identity of your old computer that you originally downloaded it to and cannot be used on the new one. In that case, you will need a new license. But if the DRM servers are turned off, you won't be able to get that license, and so while your song file will still exist on your hard drive, without the DRM license to decrypt it, it will just be a collection of garbled bits which might as well be garbage at that point.

People seem to have a hard time understanding this. And they will usually say something like... that's not true, I copied my iTunes song to another computer and it played fine. But the reason it did is because, behind the scenes, it realized that your song wasn't licensed on your second computer and pulled down a license for it from Apple's DRM servers (without you even realizing it). And that's the point. If Apple pulls the plug on the DRM servers, you won't be able to transfer your songs to any new computers.

[hstephen64]

Tennant makes a fine case for gutting this pernicious and mortally wounded industry. Desperate entities do desperate things. Apple needs to get off the fence already, while it can, and begin to buy out, stamp out, and out compete these guys, deal directly with artists, and make their own drm choices, hopefully the right ones. Under our agreed upon basic concepts of personal ownership, we should own the songs we buy, for our own use, forever. The record business deserves what it is now getting. It is sad how many artists and good people in the industry have to suffer during these changes, but there is no life without death. As some with a more progressive, forward looking way of selling music have prospered, and moral consumers have proven they'd pay for, in iTunes, what they could have for free because it's the right thing to do, there is hope for a new music business. But if the RIAA and guys like Tennant have their way, the legal consumer will be screwed out of their property every 5 years or so, and everyone else will pirate everything. The lawyers make out like bandits too, while the artists and the consumer will suffer. Come on Apple, think of the future. Being the worlds largest retailer of music should be a good start.

[oneoclock]

There are utilities which remove the DRM, at least on MacOSX I have seen such utilities. If the iTunes store ever shuts down, more likely than not, such utilities would become very popular and widely used.

But then again, the majority of music sold online today is fast food music anyway, that is to say, most of the music sold in these online stores are of the kind that people no longer listen to or even remember after several years.

Music collectors are rather unlikely to purchase DRM'ed tracks or albums, they will buy CDs or even LPs still.

If you are a music collector, buy physical media, very simple.

[JimMcDrop]

Hmm, wouldnt affect me at all, I dont you a MAC? LOL

JT
www.Ultimate-Anonymity.com

[ewelch]

Considering Apple and Steve Jobs has said over and over again that people want to own music, and not rent, it, the user agreement won't have any teeth. Apple will have to do something.

Apple does not want DRM. They are forced by music labels to use DRM. If they could tomorrow they would drop it and let people download non-DRM versions. That's what they did when EMI allowed them to. At first, the charged 39 cents more, but later dropped the price to the same 99 cents.

But the bottom line is I buy most of my music as used CDs. Why? Because it's a way to protest the way music labels treat us. If they were more reasonable, I'd probably buy most of my music that's available as new that way.

Until then, they are going to encourage people to buy used and steal music, because we're not as stupid as people think.

[DrtyDogg]

wow you've been hitting the kool-aid a little hard if you believe that. Apple does not want to get rid of DRM. That is what is tying their purchased music to their devices. I guess you never wondered why when they put EMI's music up DRM free they charged 1.39 per song while most other music distributors had most or all of their catalog DRM free @ .99. If you are waiting for DRM free music to be available online, stop waiting and check out Amazon, Napster, or Zune Marketplace.

[digiprod--2008]

Clearly, the major record company strategy of allowing for entire DRM-free music stores to compete against the monster of iTunes has failed. Apple and Steve Jobs have made quite a few statements against DRM on music tracks and started offering DRM free tracks. But it is really up to the music labels to allow DRM to go away!

DRM has not stopped or even slowed sharing.

[OompahLoompah108]

"(Yes, the workaround is to burn the music to CDs, but then some sound quality is lost.) ... Apple conceivably could strip DRM from its songs. From a technological standpoint, it wouldn't be hard to do .... Software packages such as PlayFair and QTFairUse already do this."

CNET, PlayFair and QTFairUse are obsolete - they don't work with current versions of iTunes. Have you heard of Requeim 1.7.3? This strips the DRM from BOTH music and videos (rentals are exempt, being that will be blatantly illegal) - and get this, it will work with current versions of iTunes.

Greg Sandoval, I would recommend you to try it, and then update your article by putting Requiem in the list (as well as the version so it will be easier to Google). Anyway, I'd like to put in the hyperlink, but that might come across as advertising, so if you want to strip off the DRM, Google Requiem 1.7.3 and click on the first link. That's the best option for now.

Cheers! :)

[streamOG]

Greg,

I am glad you are using my Blog for ideas for stories. I would appreciate a credit or footnote please. That is customary courtesy in the literary world.

Regards,

Christopher