This letter from a former customer further illustrates how the music industry is alienating its customers.

This letter from a former customer further illustrates how the music industry is alienating its customers.

I have news for you.  People like Bill Gates DO love DRM.  Of course they say they don't -- they know users themselves hate it, so they play the part of the poor innocent company forced to support something they don't really want.  However, they love DRM as much as people like the RIAA do and they ultimately will try to control our every program in the end.  Don't take my word for it, actually read up a bit about what they've been doing lately.  I think probably the most damning evidence against them is that they patented a concept called "Palladium" originally (essentially what has evolved into Vista now.)  Repeatedly in the patent application it refers to itself as a "Digital Rights Management Operating System" -- a DRMOS in other words.  If they hate DRM so very much, why would they integrate it deep into computers like this?  But, even before Vista they started making a few more efforts towards this sort of goal by adding the "Windows Genuine Advantage" thing into the automatic update system so that people around the world would get it without realizing what they were getting and by the time they found out, it would already be installed and it's not normally removable either (I suppose it can be removed, but, not so directly as most updates.)  As with all DRM methods, it has its imperfections and has been known to claim many legal copies were illegal and many illegal copies were legal, but MS doesn't really care about this enough to remove it, only try to update it so that it's a better "DRM" than it was before.

This is only the tip of the iceberg.  People like MS, Apple, and so on will all give you stories about how much they just hate DRM and how they could just make so much more money if people weren't forcing them to use DRM, but, frankly it's just PR statements to users.  I mean, realistically speaking, CAN you even believe them?  DRM put Apple's iPod on the map.  Thanks to their early adoption of a proprietary DRM, the RIAA was willing to deal with Apple and thus they get the music you'll never find on a site like eMusic.  DRM also means people are more or less locked in to the iPod/iTunes combination if they care at all about maintaining decent quality because the music is already at low enough quality to begin with when you buy it, but since it's in a proprietary form that only works with iPods/iTunes, any conversions will have to either be huge (even with help from FLAC) and no better quality, which means it's hard to fit nearly so much on a target player, or they must be transcoded from one lossy compression to another lossy compression.  Not to mention the sheer work involved in doing it either way since you have to waste a bunch of CDRs burning all your music to them, then extract those CDRs right back to your PC just so you can remove the DRM and get the music into a standard format.  The fact is, their DRM is helping Apple stay in business these days as their PC sales aren't turning the best of profits, nor are most of their other departments, but their iPod/iTunes combo has been insanely profitable for years now.  How convenient for them that to the ordinary user, they'll find it insanely hard to switch to another player, and since they'll do one lossy compression to another, the user may well even believe the other player to be of a lower quality due to the worse sounding music.  No, people like these can CLAIM that they hate DRM all they like, and they can say that it hurts them, but the fact of the matter is, it's an outright lie just to try to make users a little less unhappy with them.

You might say that it shouldn't work because people who know better would stay away, but this isn't true unfortunately.  Even a lot of more educated people will still often get an iPod and willingly submit themselves to allowing iTunes to convert their music into a format that won't work on any other player (even though it now actually has an option to use the MP3 format, a lot still don't realize this, and it of course defaults to using Apple's preferred format that they know won't work on other players.)  Less advanced users don't know any better at all and just try to do what they're told by the official tech support when they have a problem -- they don't know that they could just avoid the whole matter to begin with by staying away from DRM in the first place.  More advanced users still fall for this claim that they want to support a world with no DRM and think "well, they can't be all bad, they hate DRM too" so are willing to put up with the crap thinking it's just temporary.  I've known someone putting up with this "temporary" crap for enough years that by now he has no excuse for it, but then once you've fooled yourself once, you really don't want to admit that it's too late to undo the damage and start all over...

And, btw, as a little addendum, I should point out that there's a LOT more than I'm not covering here.  Apple has done a ton of other stuff and MS's Vista is only one of the many ways they've tried to integrate DRM deeply into the OS.  In fact, they even plan to create a fully modular system where they can use DRM to control what software and OS features you can use so that they can sell a minimal nearly useless OS and then have people buy the components.  They officially mean to do this for third world countries and such where people can't afford things like Vista at their current rip-off prices so that they can just cut out features and quality to reduce price rather than just simply offering it at a reasonable price instead.  For such a hatred of DRM, they sure are embracing the concept as wholy as is possible...

Anyway, sorry for the whole rant, I'm just really sick of people buying into this whole "we don't like DRM, really!" PR crap.  Especially I just cannot understand how someone can buy into it when spoken from the mouths of people behind some of the most obvious DRM out there, just because they think to add "but we're forced to support DRM by the evil big companies" as if they were the underdogs.  After all, MS could have sold Vista without DRM and it would have been even more popular than it currently is, but then they couldn't control what people do with their software as much.  Apple could have long ago made their player use the more universal Windows Media Audio or even open sourced their DRM scheme (they can do this, they just have to fix it if someone completely breaks the DRM scheme) so that by now all players would be able to play their music, but then they'd loose the lock-in to iPods they currently enjoy and would have to compete purely by quality -- a competition that they currently would loose, though they could eventually catch up at the cost of loosing a lot of their profits on their players as they release better players with more features but at the same sort of pricerange they currently enjoy (seriously, those iPods only cost that much because they want them to.  A similarly priced alternative player offers a lot more features for the price.  Apple doesn't charge so much because the iPods are great, they charge so much because they can.)  We can wish it all we want, but I think a world completely free of DRM will never happen.  The only question is what happens to the DRM schemes themselves.

As Mike Arrington put it, April 2nd was "the day DRM died". The big news yesterday was that EMI will

As Mike Arrington put it, April 2nd was "the day DRM died". The big news yesterday was that EMI will

Some people have tried to paint the recent announcement by Apple as example of Apple innovating and Microsoft

Some people have tried to paint the recent announcement by Apple as example of Apple innovating and Microsoft