MPEG king responds to Jobs

There's been a few interesting responses to Steve Jobs' pledge to axe DRM if the labels would only let him. One of the latest has come from Leonardo Chiariglione, whose views are worth weighing because of his role overseeing the MPEG project, making him, in effect, the grandpa of the mp3 format. He also chaired the Secure Digital Music Initiative - popularly seen as little more than an attempt by the music industry to find a way of transferring their cartel from the physical to the digital world. You might recall the SDMI were the people who offered its super secret watermarking algorithm up with a prize for cracking it, only do discover its watermark was about as secure as unlocked Punto in a poorly-lit Morrisons car park overnight.

So, what does Chiariglione have to say, then?

There's a lot of pedantic "what do we mean by DRM" business, which smells a little of those essays you write in GCSE history which begin "to fully understand the second world war, we must first consider the origins of the Boer War, on the grounds that's what I revised...", and then makes a fairly fatal slip:

The iPod is one such device that plays protected music tracks sold by the iTunes online music service run by Apple. Other music players also exist that can only play music from specific online services, such as Zune and Connect. None of these are capable of playing music purchased from competing services.

Erm, except of course, for competing services like eMusic which sell their tracks unprotected.

Steve Jobs makes a bold proposal: let’s get rid of DRM altogether for digital music. Here is where the DRM management/protection ambiguity affects the message because while it makes sense to claim, based on empirical evidence, that protected music does not sell, it remains to be demonstrated that managed music does not. That would be like saying that the Creative Commons movement is a hollow shell. Indeed there is a whole range of business models that can be based on pure DRM (management) technologies and once you start with management...

His point, of course, is that it should be possible to manage what people do with the music without protecting it.

What he doesn't seem to get, though, is that people want to manage the music they've paid for - not to have it managed for them.

Knowing that his proposition may not find all the receptive ears it deserves Steve Jobs does address the message coming from his protesting customers. He recognises that a DRM (protection) system that is transparent to the user would be an advantage to them. After all the DVD’s CSS does exactly that, were it not for the unfortunate “region code”.

I suppose we should be thankful he recognises the region code is a pain in the ass, but in what way is the "transparent" DVD CSS an "advantage" to me as a consumer? If I pay twenty quid for a movie on disc, I can't copy it onto my hard drive to watch on a trip. I can't even copy it onto another disc, so I could take the spare on the trip with me and not have to worry about losing the original. Its copy protection offers me no advantages at all.

With this as the background, Chiariglione proposes that instead of abandoning DRM, we should merely embrace another sort - GSM. Yes, like on phones. It's to phones that Chiariglione points to prove his case: on phones, the use of GSM has been enforced, and it offers a positive benefit to the consumer, as it prevents eavesdropping on communications (that's except for if Rupert Murdoch is underwriting a private detective to listen in, of course.) But while that's fine in a phone context - I can see where making a phone call with DRM helps me, and so I'm happy to pay for it there - it still neglects to explain why I should be paying for DRM on music I buy.

The real question here is not 'what sort of DRM should we have', but 'why do we need DRM'? If we were able to buy music from any store, and still not be able to do with it as I wish, we wouldn't be any further forward. Just because all the tracks were being hobbled in the same way doesn't make it better.