A View from the Other Side of the DRM Barricade

    In late February in New York, in a building with excellent views of the Statue of Liberty, the Digital Music Forum conference was held. The main topic of the meeting of senior executives from the largest companies, one way or another working in the digital music market, was the growing public rejection of the systems used in the industry to protect the content being sold from illegal copying. More precisely, the public’s reluctance to continue to participate as experimental in not very successful experiments on the introduction of raw technologies.

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    The problem of public misunderstanding of the areas of activity of record companies and their commercial partners on the Internet, which should ultimately create convenient mechanisms for trading music on the Web for everyone, has become a real stumbling block in the development of the industry.

    Even despite the seemingly impressive growth rate of sales of digital music - 131% over the past year - they still do not cover the losses that copyright holders suffer due to falling demand for CDs. Their sales over the past 6 years have fallen by 23%. As a result, the entire industry saw a 4% drop in profits in 2006.

    In this situation, as the majority of speakers at the forum said, it is more important than ever that all participants in the chain leading from artists to the public rallied in an effort to quickly develop the right strategy for further work. Therefore, the head of Apple Steve Jobs, who turned against his former allies, fell a waterfall of anger and reproaches of betrayal and reactionism.

    In addition, few expressed doubts about the sincerity of the rebellious Jobs, who literally changed his position to the opposite (after all, a month ago he was in the forefront of RIAA supporters). If he is ready to abandon DRM, then probably in the near future sales of unprotected films of the Disney studio, which is controlled by Apple, will start, one of the participants in the conference sarcastically jokes.

    In general, the topic of abandoning DRM has been at the seminars of the forum. However, the majority nevertheless agreed that in one form or another such systems are simply necessary. Although, it should be noted, representatives of small independent labels and stores did not share this opinion.

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