Intellectual Property: The Current State of Digital Rights Management

The following are six articles from ars technica on the current state of digital rights management:

"Oops: MPAA admits college piracy numbers grossly inflated"

Yes, college students need to rein in the file-sharing. We get it. Artists need to eat. But while the MPAA has been busy lecturing universities about the way they run their IT operations, perhaps the universities have something to say to the motion picture business about how it buys and releases its research. Back to school, MPAA.

"A brave new world: the music biz at the dawn of 2008"

So, in conclusion:

• Indies gaining market share
• Digital downloads up 45 percent in one year
• Well-known artists going indie
• DRM-free downloads from all major labels
• Major label revenues declining
• CD sales in a death spiral

Those don't suggest that the music business is dying so much as changing, and the center of gravity is shifting to individual artists and to smaller, more focused operations. There will always be a role for what are still called the "major labels"; who would put out all those American Idol and Hannah Montana albums, for instance?

"Why Last.fm's free music won't replace your music collection"

Can music companies compete against "free"? Sure they can; it's an issue I addressed in yesterday's feature on the changing nature of the music business, and confirmation came today from the oldest of old-guard sources, CBS. The company, which owns Last.fm, announced today that Last.fm will now offer on-demand streaming of millions of tracks from all four major labels and a huge host of indies. For free.

"Long-time DRM foe Yahoo Music planning DRM-free MP3 store"

When it comes to opening new online music stores, DRM-free is the name of the game. Now that all of the Big Four music labels have either completely dropped or are in the process of dropping copy protection requirements from their music, online retailers are rushing to sell the newly-freed songs faster than a Mac user gravitates to an iPhone. Although Amazon has now made a name for itself as the first (and currently, the only) MP3 store to offer DRM-free tracks from all of the Big Four labels, Yahoo now plans to throw its hat into the ring later this year.

"P2P defendant: RIAA identified an IP address, not a person"

Of course, once it is in possession of an IP address, the RIAA files a John Doe lawsuit and then obtains an ex parte subpoena to discover the name and address of the person who was assigned that IP address. (And sometimes, that person played no role whatsoever in the alleged infringement.) But the complaints used by the RIAA don't reflect that. The RIAA's investigators didn't identify an individual in Atlantic v. Njuguna, as the complaint says, merely the IP address of a piece of Internet-facing hardware like a cable or DSL modem. They may also be able to get the IP address of the device directly connected to the hardware, which could be a PC, laptop, wireless router, or something else. Either way, it's not an individual, and the RIAA's lack of precision in its complaints is troubling.

"IFPI fantasy: 2008 the year ISP filtering "becomes reality""

In fact, the IFPI's own numbers show that in the US, for instance, 17.6 percent of all Internet users regularly share files. If 30 percent of those users buy less music, that means that file-swapping only leads 5.9 percent of all US Internet users to buy less music. The number is even lower if we take the US population as a whole.

Forgive us if we're skeptical here, but implementing a draconian solution like deep packet inspection of all Internet traffic in order to get a few percent of the population to buy more music doesn't sound much like progress, or even rationality.