The Digitial Music weblog passes along this tidbit from ThinkSecret. Apparently, in addition to offering feature length content and expanded TV offerings, Apple will be announcing a new content delivery system in January at the annual MacWorld conference.
In an effort to appease media companies wary of the security of digital rights management technology, Apple's new technology will deliver content such that it never actually resides on the user's hard drive. Content purchased will be automatically made available on a user's iDisk, which Front Row 2.0 will tap into. When the user wishes to play the content, robust caching technology -- for which Apple previously received a patent -- will serve it to the user's computer as fast as their Internet connection can handle. The system will also likely support downloading the video content to supported iPods but at no time will it ever actually be stored on a computer's hard drive.
I'm not sure why this should appease the media companies. Unless they plan on delivering the content over the air (and I haven't seen iPods yet with EVDO or XM Radio), the file is physically stored on the iPod. And even if it's just streamed, I can capture it at either end - the data while streaming or the output from my sound card. Given Apple's track record for implementing DRM, well, maybe it's an improvement. Yet, as ThinkSecret points out, this doesn't yet address the scenarios where users don't have broadband and/or a permanent connection. I've said it before and I'll say it again: TPM / DRM is not the answer.
Just a general observation, but it seems we're implicating the reproduction right a lot here, and yet the price hasn't changed. Does this suggest, perhaps, that the reproduction right isn't as significant in the digital context?
I also wonder how this affects the ownership model. If the phonorecord is first fixed on the caching server, does this enable First Sale in the digital context - being that I can transfer ownership not subject to the reproduction right?
