Hard to lower pirate flag while legal alternatives still lacking

Hard to lower pirate flag while legal alternatives still lacking
There's a fun little back and forth going on between Apple and a group of programmers. Apple runs the iTunes music service, where you can download any of a gazillion songs for a buck or so.
But those songs come with restrictions on where you can play them. So Jon Johansen, Cody Brocious, and crew (Johansen is the Norwegian who cracked the encryption on DVDs several years ago) created PyMusique — software that lets you access iTunes, pay for music, and download it without the built-in digital rights management (DRM) restrictions.
Apple responded by closing the "hole" PyMusique exploited, and requiring all iTunes users to upgrade to the latest version of the software.
Johansen and the PyMusique folks responded by "reopening the door" with a new version. (I am writing this on Wednesday. By the time you read this things may have changed.)
To be fair, the PyMusique group said they weren't interested in stripping the DRM, only in making iTunes available for Linux users. But the restrictions aren't in the songs — they are added by Apple's software. Johansen and crew simply decided not to add that feature.
Who can blame them? By adding restrictions to music, Apple is going against decades of an understanding between music makers and music buyers.
Imagine buying a music CD at the mall, bringing it home, and playing it on your stereo. Then you play it on your car's CD player driving to work. But when you get there and pop it into the little player on your desk, you hear a voice say, "We're sorry, but you are only authorized to play this disk on up to two CD players. You have now exceeded that. Thank you."
That's exactly how iTunes and most of the other legal online music service work. When you pay for and download a song, it comes with various built-in restrictions. Maybe you can only pay it while you're subscribed to the service. Maybe you're limited to playing it on certain machines. Maybe you can't copy it to other media (say, a CD to play in your car).
And people wonder why music piracy is so rampant.
It's not just "cheap people want something for free," although that's likely part of it. It is, instead, because the music industry, led by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), forgot a key phrase of capitalism: What the traffic will bear.
Clearly the market didn't bear $15 CDs with one or two good songs. As soon as an alternative was available, people jumped. That it happened to be a free alternative only helped, and that it happened to be an illegal alternative didn't matter.
The industry was incredibly slow to catch up, but finally embraced — in a tentative, distant-cousin-at-the-wedding sort of way — services such as iTunes and Napster (v.2.0).
Both are doing well, but neither is doing as well as the peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, even though music from those is likely pirated, and downloaders are likely lawbreakers.
Those P2P services (I talked about them last week) are doing gangbusters for several reasons. Of course, there are always people who want something free. And there are always people who only want a handful of songs a year and don't want to bother installing software to get it.
But the biggest reason is this: The legal downloading services were started as alternatives to buying a CD. The mindset should have been that they're a legal alternative to P2P networks.
That's the competition now. P2P networks and software are simple to install and easy to use. They have a dedicated user base, and a huge "library" of downloadables.
You can be grabbing (in the worst sense of the word) music, movies, software, what-have-you in minutes. (Although you'd be a fool not to be sure your anti-virus software was up to date.)
And the music you download illegally comes restriction free.
"If there were any such service where you could download a song for a buck and do what you want with it, I'd pay for that in a second," said a friend of mine. But the idea of paying for something and then having to keep track of how and where you use it is too annoying — especially when Grokster beckons from the sidelines.
It's true that when you buy a CD you don't own the music — you own the disk and the right to play that music. No argument.
But, well, the folks at DRM Blog put it best: "I can basically do whatever I want with a CD. When I am done with said CD, I can give it to a friend and he can do with it as he pleases. This is the way it has been for 80 years. Phonographs, 8-tracks, cassettes and compact discs have all worked this way. You went to a store, you bought a piece of plastic, and you took it home."
The music industry seems clueless, or at best stuck in the 1980s. They seem unaware of what the traffic will actually bear. They are suing their users. (Yes, they're suing pirates. But those pirates are also the people who support their artists, buying everything from T-shirts to concert tickets, and yes, music.)
The RIAA's empty-headed, heavy-handed approach to business continues, and consumers will continue to get the shaft. Adding insult to injury, Orrin Hatch, the Utah senator who once suggested remotely destroying the computers of people suspected of pirating music (due process, schmue process) is now head of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Intellectual Property.
Fox. Henhouse. Chomp.
Hatch's appointment, and his oft-demonstrated industry bias, means you can expect more restrictions on how you can use the music and movies you buy — a continued erosion of copyright at the expense of listeners and viewers, thanks to a Congress that seems to have lost track that they're supposed to be the representatives of the people.
The result won't be less piracy, it will be more.
Because that's what happens when consumers realize they're getting the shaft — they find ways around the system. That's why P2P networks have grown so much and so fast.
And if the music or movie industries think they'll come up with a technological solution to fix things, they've got their collective heads in the sand. Because every time — every time — some new scheme comes out to deny consumers their rights under current copyright law, some programmer finds a way around it.
Maybe it's the instruction to "hold down the Shift key." Or a small program you have to run. Or using a magic marker to draw on a CD. (These are all real examples.) Somehow, someone will find a way to break the copy protection.
This is a losing battle being fought. Unfortunately, it's a battle everyone is losing. Music sales are falling. Teenagers are facing jail. Music lovers are stuck with either restrictive licenses or taking the pirate's way out.
But until the RIAA wakes up — as well as their brethren at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) — this is what we're stuck with.
Yo-ho-ho.