In a rare alliance among tech rivals, Microsoft and Nokia recently announced that starting next year they will begin shipping Nokia’s high-end S60 and Series 40 handsets with new digital rights management (DRM) technology.
DRM is a system that digitally prevents copyright music from being shared, by encrypting or 'marking' the data so it can only be used by authorised users – usually whoever has purchased the music, movie, or whatever.
The idea behind “PlayReady,” as the Microsoft-developed DRM software is to be known, is to permit consumers to transfer the digital downloads they have purchased from one device to a second. With PlayReady, a music download purchased on, say, a Nokia S60 phone could then be copied onto the owner’s computer or onto a portable music player as well.
Until now, the general idea behind DRM has been to restrict use, locking consumers into listening to music, playing a video game or reading an e-book solely on the device used to obtain the purchase. Imagine if such a restriction were placed on non-digital media? What if you couldn’t lend your newspaper to a friend after you’ve finished reading it? Under such a draconian clamp-down, the public library would cease to exist because you could never check out a book.
The permissiveness of PlayReady is viewed as something of a compromise, acknowledging that consumers want to enjoy their content whenever and wherever they please, and that they don’t want it to be restricted to a single device. And yet, it still puts a tether on consumers, allowing media companies to determine how often and to which devices their customers can transfer their own digital purchases.
The reason this expensive game of technology restrictiveness persists, of course, is piracy. The software, music, film and video games industries claim to lose billions in lost sales from unauthorised copies of their works currently in circulation. As a result, no new device or content offering that hits the market these days comes without some version of DRM technology built in.
Not surprisingly, DRM has triggered the tech world’s biggest debate over consumer rights. Is it fair to punish all consumers with restrictive DRM technology if just a percentage are giving in to piracy? Worse still, is DRM technology actually driving some to buy black market music or software - turning ordinary law abiding consumers into outlaws?
Read page two.
Published on 14 Sept 2007
