[A2k] Financial Times editorial: Song of freedom

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

Song of freedom

Published: April 3 2007 03:00 | Last updated: April 3 2007 03:00

EMI has taken the plunge. While other music companies remain fearful of
selling music without copy protection to avoid piracy, the British one
is risking it. It yesterday announced a deal with Apple to sell
higher-quality downloads free of digital rights management (DRM) on
iTunes at a higher price.

The decision is a big one for the industry and EMI deserves praise for
its willingness to offer what many consumers want. While piracy remains
a problem, many fans are irritated and confused by DRM restrictions,
fearing that they prevent, or will prevent, them from exercising their
rights over music for which they have paid.

It may also get Apple out of a tight spot in Europe, where it is under
investigation by the European Commission - and is being pressured by
Norway and other countries - for making it impossible to play music
downloaded from iTunes on players other than iPods. Steve Jobs, Apple's
chief executive, expects more than half of the iTunes catalogue to be
available in DRM-free form by the end of the year.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with music companies selling their
songs in copy-protected form - as EMI will keep doing for standard
downloads. A generation has grown up thinking that free is an
entitlement rather than a breach of copyright and the industry
naturally wants some barriers to widespread file-sharing.

In practice, however, the horse has long since left the stable. The
main form of distribution for music is the compact disc, which lacks
any copy protection. A pirate can, therefore, simply scan the music
files from a CD before distributing them online in MP3 format. No
amount of copy protection for legal downloads will solve this breach of
security.

Some in the industry still hope to obviate this difficulty by phasing
out CDs in favour of a new copy-protected form of distribution, similar
to DVDs. But that will not happen in the near future and could face
consumer resistance when and if music companies change discs. The
industry might prefer not to start from its current position, but that
is where it is.

Distributing music free of DRM need not be an admission of weakness.
The existence of copy protection not only puts consumers off but it
makes it far harder for music companies to distribute their music
widely. EMI can now not only offer DRM-free downloads to all online
retailers but can sell its songs through the entire ecosystem of blogs
and recommendation sites.

Crucially, no one can now accuse EMI of selling its music in
unfairly-restricted form. A lot of people, encouraged by the digital
militants of Silicon Valley, have justified their own piracy by blaming
music companies for selling music with too many embedded technological
traps. Now that EMI has brought itself indisputably up to date, it is
entitled to demand that consumers fulfil their side of the bargain.

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Thiru Balasubramaniam
Geneva Representative
Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)
voice +41.22.791.6727
fax +41.22.723.2988
mobile +41 76 508 0997
thiru@keionline.org