Let me start off with some assumptions. Monday’s announcement by EMI that they will be selling music without DRM is excellent news. I think Steve Jobs has done more for the cause with his business sense and reasoned arguments that Cory Doctorow has with his wailing and gnashing of teeth. Do I worry about prices creeping up now that the $0.99 barrier has been broken? Yes. Do I think Jobs will roll over and let people charge more for “hits”? No.
Enough people have written about why this is good and wonderful and so forth.
There are some negative nellies who say this doesn’t go far enough, it should be MP3 instead of AAC, the price should be lower, etc etc but for the most part people seem to realize this is a huge positive step for music.
But just for music.
The immediate question then became: “What about video?”
Using here’s the Q and A when it got to that point:
Q: I take it then that you are going to advocate taking the DRM off of the videos you sell on iTunes. Any particular [inaudible] you could do that with the Disney company? A [Jobs]: You know, video, uh… I knew I’d get that question today. Video is pretty different than music right now because the video industry does not distribute 90 percent of their content DRM free; never has, and so I think they are in a pretty different situation and so I wouldn’t hold the two in parallel at all.
This is the PR version of “These are not the droids you’re looking for” but some apparently agree with Steve’s assessment:
The Macalope has said this time and time again. He does not agree with disconnect between music and video, but they are treated differently because the industry managed to get their hooks in the DVD specs. The landscape is totally different and you simply cannot argue both at the same time. Well, you can try, but you’re only going to waste your time and look like a jackass in the process. ()
Ok, well, at the risk of looking like a jackass, I have to disagree with my hoofed friend.
Just because Steve wouldn’t hold them in parallel, doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t.
Not just Parallel but nearly Identical
The landscape may be different in a legal sense, but in a technical sense and plain-ol’-common-sense… err, sense, they are really quite similar.
Let me simplify, some will say oversimplify, the reality of the situation as it stands in April 2007:
1) I buy music in stores on little discs. I can stick the disc in my computer and copy the music off of it.
2) I buy movies in stores on little discs. I can (theoretically) stick the disc in my computer and copy the video off of it. 1
The difference between the two? The US law says that I am prohibited from doing it.
But prohibition is an interesting thing. In this country, (in a legal sense) was the idea that if you told people it wasn’t legal to drink alcohol, then they would stop. So they passed not just a law, but an entire Constitutional Amendment telling Americans “You may not drink alcohol.”
So people stopped drinking alcohol, and we all lived happily ever after.
Well… except for the part about not drinking alcohol. Eventually the amendment was amended and the prohibition was lifted.
Now we have the which says “You are not allowed to copy the DVDs that you have bought and paid for.”
So nobody does that. Except for the ones who do.
Steve Jobs points to the fact that the DRM from the iTunes store is fairly easy to get around (rip to a CD, then import again). In the past 3 days I’ve heard him make this point several times, although before Monday I don’t think I ever heard him highlight that “feature” before. It also takes time and you lose some of the quality (which he didn’t mention).
He goes on to say that 90% of music is sold without DRM (i.e. on CDs) and attempts to add DRM to CDs has gone very, very badly ().
All of that he uses as fodder for the argument that music ought to be sold online without DRM.
He is 100% correct that the lack of DRM for CDs lead to the need for lack of DRM for music sold online. But to borrow a phrase from people much smarter than me, I think he has confused .
Or, to put it another way: if every CD ever sold had DRM on it, people would still want music online without DRM. DRM for CDs would have heightened the need for piracy. If Apple had started selling iPods and you needed to either a) buy from iTunes to get music on there or b) download “cracked” DRM-free music from the Internet, there would have been much more piracy.
What’s the Problem?
When EMI made their announcement about dropping DRM, they had some which highlighted several things:
- Value for money
- Choice
- Ease of use
- Interoperability: 84% of digital consumers stated that they agreed, fully or somewhat, with the statement ‘it is important to be able to transfer files between devices’ 2
Now, please tell me which of those 4 points apply to music but not to movies.
I’ll wait.
Let me guess, you couldn’t come up with any? Me neither.
Now consider this snippet of conversation from :
I think the other record labels are not going to get on board with this [selling DRM-free music] before they see the results. I really do think that the executives at the other labels really do believe in DRM. They really think “The reason our sales are down industry-wide is that these filthy pirates are stealing all of our music and if we could just sell everything with DRM so that no one could pirate it [then] our sales would go right back up and we could have all the cocaine and Lamborghinis we want [laughter]. The [19]80s are going to be back.” … The golden era of the record industry was when everybody went out and replaced the albums they had already bought with CDs. They spent $18-19 to buy all the music they already owned. That’s what they want everyone to do again. And that’s not going to happen. (from the about 20 minutes in. is the speaker.)
And if you think the music industry likes cocaine and Lamborghinis, just wait until you meet the .
How Did We Get Here?
Let me ask you this: Why are so many people willing to share music (legally or not) without really worrying too much about it?
I believe that part of it is a long standing belief that we (those who bought albums/tapes and then CDs) had been screwed by the record companies for years. I can’t be the only person who remembers that tapes used to cost $7-10 and when CDs came out they cost more ($12-15). At the time we were told that the increase was because it was new technology. Have CD prices ever come down? I believe that the was even an investigation into whether or not the record labels had colluded to keep CD prices artificially high, to which I thought “Of course they did.”
Now the record companies would have you believe that there are no excesses in the music industry, and that all of their profit goes to developing new talent. And none of them do drugs.
On top of that, we were sold many a CD which had 3 good songs and 9 crappy ones (that was Sony’s formula, according to the MacBreak Weekly podcast linked above). They knew that 3 songs was enough to sell a CD.
Well the music industry had it good for awhile, but never better than the albums/tapes to CD era. Unfortunately (for them) music quality on CDs is at or above the levels of human distinction. There’s no “High Definition” CD that they can now charge us for.
So they want to charge us for digital versions. And using a song for a ringtone on your phone. And for singing in the shower. And for humming in public.
Unfortunately (for them) we came up with a way to take those silver discs and turn them into digital versions without them.
To be fair, we went a bit overboard with our new found freedom, sharing music online with wild abandon. We were like kids who grew up under oppressive parents and finally went off to college, only to overindulged in our new found freedom. We rebelled.
Of course we did. We have a long tradition of rebelling.
We Hate You and You Hate Us
The movie industry has had one golden era already: the switch from VHS to DVD. The good news, for them, was that they got to “double dip” in our wallets as some of us bought the DVD version of movies we already had on VHS.
The movie industry had cleverly started adding copy protection to VHS tapes, so you might not have been able to copy that VHS tape to DVD, even though there was no real technical reason why you couldn’t have done so. Sure the picture wouldn’t have been as good, but it would last a lot longer.
DVDs were developed with some technical protections for copying (DRM), but these have been broken early and often. Even the new HD-DVD and Blu-Ray DVDs which have huge, complex, expensive DRM systems are already being cracked. The DRM is there, but hardly stopping anyone who wants to get around it.
What is the main difference between the music and movie business with regard to DRM?
… the video industry hasn’t yet had its Napster moment — most regular people haven’t yet bootlegged any movies or TV shows. When that starts happening, the video industry will start feeling the pressure to drop DRM to compete with P2P networks in terms of convenience.
The movie business is in for a tougher time because of the DRM which is already in there in DVDs. As soon as popularity of things like video iPods and other players take off, it will face the exact same situation that the music business did (customers who are unconcerned with downloading their product)…with one difference:
Customers already hate DVDs.
Except for the crappy songs that served to fill them, customers didn’t hate CDs. Most of us loved them.
I’m sure this will come as a shock to you, and if you asked someone on the street if they liked DVDs, they’d probably say yes. But go to their house and sit down to watch a movie with them, and you’ll learn that they really don’t.
They don’t like the fact that they can’t just sit down and watch a movie, they have to sit through long stretches of crap they have no interest in.
For example, one great early selling point of DVDs was that you could skip through the 10 minutes of previews that had come onto most VHS tapes.
So what is the movie industry trying to do? <a href=”“http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4196/is_20061001/ai_n16759234”>The movie industry is trying to force you to watch previews on DVDs. People may have learned to grudgingly accept it, but they resent it.
That’s ok though, but it turns out that the movie industry hates us too. Either that or they just think we’re idiots.
They have resisted anything and everything which consumers have wanted, the most famous being the VCR:
“I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” (Jack Valenti, then President of the US trade body the Motion Picture Association of America)
What I love about that quote is that Valenti doesn’t stop at saying “This will hurt our business” he goes on to say that the VCR is a threat to the American public. You’d have to ask him to explain why he thinks it is a threat to let us watch movies at home.
What was Valenti really afraid of? 3
Over time, the MPAA has figured out that they can make a lot of money off those VCRs and DVD players. But they want full control.
Don’t believe me?
Ask yourself why there isn’t a DVD player which remembers which DVDs have already displayed the FBI/Interpol warnings and then don’t show it again.
Why? Because the MPAA wants to force you to watch that warning.
Try to skip it next time. Guess what? You can’t. Why? Because they control the approval of DVD players, and they won’t approve any which don’t act how they want them to act. Not what the customer wants, what they want.
Think of the FBI warning and those previews as the 9 crappy songs on those CDs you used to buy. But at least your CD would start playing your music right away. Imagine if you had put in your CD and heard “Your music will begin in a few moments, but first, here’s a sample from the latest album by Sanjaya Malakar”
As soon as an alternative comes along, what will people do? They’ll flock to it like Napster. As the restrictions on DVDs get tighter and tighter, more and more people will seek alternatives. The situation for DVDs is already worse than CDs.
For example: Let me describe the process of putting a DVD on for my son in my wife’s car.
1) Lean back and put in disc 2) Fish around the car for the remote because the DVD player only has Stop/Eject, Play, FF, Rewind, and Power buttons, and 98.73% of all DVDs require you to do something else to get the movie to play 3) Press the menu button on the remote to get to the main menu rather than sitting through the previews 4) Wait for the FBI warning to go away 5) Use the up/down arrows to get to the menu option for PLAY 6) Press play
It’s even worse with the battery operated player which has to spin and churn while all of that is going on, wasting precious battery life.
Does this make me love and admire the movie companies, and make me more loyal to them?
No, I promise you that every single time this happens I think to myself “When is someone going to make it so that I can stick a DVD in and just watch the bloody movie?!?!?!?!”
You are nothing but a wallet
Let me make this clear: the MPAA sees you as a nothing but a wallet (or, in the case of some of you, a purse).
They enjoyed the VHS to DVD transition, but they aren’t going to be satisfied with that. After all, they have complete control, so they are going to try to sell you the same content as often as possible:
- Widescreen
- Fullscreen
- iPod format
- Zune format
- PSP format
They want to make you choose which of those you want and buy that one. Have an iPod and a PSP? They’d like you to buy 2 copies.
Oh, and that DVD you bought? It’s locked to the region of the world where you live. Why? Because they hate everything about you except for your money.
This idea is called “If Value, Then Right” as in “If something has any value, then there must be a right to sell it.” (For more on this, see or, for a somewhat easier and less technical understanding, try .) They would probably like to be able to charge you for inviting a friend over to watch the movie with you or (shudder) if you let them borrow your DVD (the horror….).
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not as if the record business wouldn’t like to do the same thing. If the RIAA could sue you for the mix tapes you sent your high-school girlfriend, they would. The (even after they said it was). The fact that you can do this is only because they weren’t able to get a law passed saying that you couldn’t before everyone already was. If they could change that, they would.
They want to sell you digital copies of the music you already own, but that’s not going to happen.
The movie industry is going down the same path and will ultimately meet the same end: they will either face widespread piracy or adopt better pricing schemes.
What do I want?
So, dear movie industry person who is currently fuming while reading this, let me tell you what customers want… or at least here’s what I want, and what I suspect others want:
1) I want to be able to watch the movies they buy without being forced to sit through a bunch of previews and other nonsense like your FBI/CIA/etc warning. Let me. (You do realize that Interpol has better things to do than chase down people who copy little silver discs, right? That little warning means nothing to anyone who is going to pirate your movies, so why don’t you stop annoying your paying customers?)
2) I want to be able to buy the same movie and watch it wherever they are on whatever player they have (DVD player, AppleTV, iPod, PSP, even a Zune I suppose). If I have the software to do it, let me.
3) I want to be able to make a backup of their DVDs because accidents happen. If I can make a copy of ToyStory and let my son use the copy, let me.
4) I want to buy one DVD and have the fullscreen and widescreen on the DVD. Why? Maybe because on my TV in the living room, the widescreen looks better, but on the portable DVD player, the fullscreen looks better. or maybe I like Widescreen and my wife prefers Fullscreen. And don’t you dare try telling me that there isn’t room on the DVD, because A) when DVDs first came out it was quite common to find two sided DVDs which you could flip over and B) you are putting gigabytes and gigabytes of crap I don’t want on to the disc. I remember reading on the that one DVD was found to have something like 5GB worth of wasted space on it (mostly in an effort to try to confuse programs which allow people to rip DVDs to a hard drive).
You might, just might, find that you can charge a little bit more if you were to sell me a DVD which had the movie already in those various formats. If I could stick the DVD in my computer and find an iPod format and a PSP format, etc. then it will save me the time of doing the conversion myself.
Again, don’t tell me you don’t have the room, because you know for 99% of the DVDs, that’s a lie. If you have to “Delete the previews I don’t want to watch anyway” that will be just fine.
Just let me watch the movie where I want, how I want.
I know you don’t want to, but let me.
- Yes, there’s also VHS, but no one cares about VHS. ↩
- One can only assume that 16% didn’t really understand the question. ↩
- Ironically the movie industry shot themselves in the foot with the VCR anyway. By keeping prices high (I remember Hunt for Red October was $100 on VHS when it first came out) they inadvertently opened the door to movie rental stores like Blockbuster which not only let me rent a movie for a short amount of time without owning it, but they also sell used DVDs, which must just kill the MPAA folks. ↩
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