[A2k] Congress moots mandatory DRM scheme

[Michelle Childs]

Congress moots mandatory DRM scheme
By Tony Smith
Published Thursday 7th April 2005 13:05 GMT The Register.com
The US Congress is pondering laws to force digital music companies to use
a single, unified DRM system, in order to allow songs purchased from any
download service to run on any hardware.

The House of Representatives' intellectual property sub-committee met
yesterday to discuss such a move, proposed by Lamar Smith, a Texas
Republican, and Howard Berman, a Democrat from California.

Their beef is the ongoing incompatibility between, say, Napster's download
service and Apple's iPod. The shiny white music player will happily handle
songs downloaded from Apple's iTunes Music Store and protected with
Apple's FairPlay DRM system, but not DRM'd Windows Media Audio files, for
example.

"This interoperability issue is of concern to me since consumers who
bought legal copies of music from Real could not play them on an iPod,"
Smith said at the hearing, Internet News reports.

Apple apparently wasn't there to add its two cents to the debate - Smith
described its failure to appear as a "mistake" - but other industry
players, including Napster CTO William Pence, along with consumer groups
and public policy bodies, were present to tell the Congressmen to leave
the emerging digital music market alone.

Essentially, opponents argue that it should be for the market to decide
which services - and thus which DRM systems - dominate.

"Marketplace forces will continue to drive innovation in the DRM arena
with attendant consumer benefits - new ways to enjoy digital music at a
variety of different price points - while gradually solving the
interoperability problem," said Pence, for example.

In short, when the business needs interoperability, we'll get it. And, it
has to be said, right now consumers seem keener on lower prices than
compatibility between digital music services. Real Networks' attempt at
bridging its own Rhapsody download offering and FairPlay doesn't appear to
have boosted the company's sales significantly. Indeed, its move last
summer to slash prices for a three-week period probably did more to build
Rhapsody's customer base than the launch of the DRM translation tool,
Harmony. =AE



--
Michelle Childs -Head of European Affairs
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