The Economist has come out against DRM in a tell-it-like-it-is editorial that explains why anti-copying technology is bad for the entertainment industry.
The movie industry, which nowadays depends as much on DVD sales as on box-office receipts, still seems to think that making life difficult for its customers is a recipe for success.
After likewise shooting itself in the foot for ages, the record industry is now falling over itself to abandon DRM (digital rights management) on CDs. A number of online music stores such as eMusic, Audio Lunchbox and Anthology have given up using DRM altogether. In a recent survey by Jupiter Research, two out of three music industry executives in Europe reckoned that dropping DRM would improve sales.
The editorial goes on to promote AudibleMagic's "audio fingerprinting" scheme as an answer, citing YouTube's proposal to use software to catch infringe ing user-generated content. This idea isn't totally bankrupt (though swallowing the self-interested claims of firms like AudibleMagic is pretty credulous of the Economist), but only if the technology is used to figure out how to pay artists — not to stop music from flowing on the Internet.
A blanket licensing scheme — you pay a collecting society, they pay artists, you get the right to file-share using any protocol, file-format and software — needs a bunch of ways to figure out who gets paid what. There are a lot of ways to measure the popularity of music online, including audio fingerprinting, Neilsen-style sample families, and anonymous monitoring of P2P networks. Some weighting scheme agreed upon by all the stakeholders could ensure that artists get paid when their music gets shared.
But systems like AudibleMagic are no good when it comes to enforcing a ban on file-sharing. These systems can't detect all infringement, can't tell the difference between infringement and fair use, and sometimes block non-infringing works.
In other words, audio fingerprinting is useful as part of a system to allow file-sharing, but useless as part of a system to stop file-sharing.
(Thanks, John!)
