Today Apple and EMI announced that starting in May the iTunes music store will sell more expensive, higher quality, DRM-free songs. Most analysts have focused just on the fact that by releasing its music catalog with no DRM, EMI and Apple are signaling the beginning of the end for digitally protected media. They herald this fact as an important win for consumers and everyone seems to applaud the move.
I think that most analysts are missing the point. While I dislike DRM as much as the next guy, I really believe that DRM-free music is not as important to consumers as many seem to believe.
Today, a customers who buys songs from Apple can play the music on up to five computers and on a single iPod. That seems fair to me and I have not found myself so far in a situation where I felt limited by those restrictions.
DRM-free does not mean free to share with an unlimited number of friends. It just means that you can move it around with no restrictions, as long as you remain within the limits of what is allowed by the EULA. Since neither Apple nor EMI have indicated what the EULA will look like, everyone is assuming that the terms EULA will be similar to what you get today with Fairplay, but that may or may not be the case.
During an interview today Steve Jobs stated that “Our point of view has been that we’re not offering customers anything here today that they can’t get on every CD that’s shipped. Right? They get DRM-free music on every CD that is shipped today. So, we’re not offering anything online that they can’t get on a CD today”. That is true, but there are serious limitations to what you can do with a CD.
For example, making multiple copies of that CD to allow multiple family members to listen to it simultaneously would probably fall outside of the fair-use provision. In some countries, ripping a CD to listen to the music on a portable device could still be illegal today (Australia had this problem). Those examples clearly demonstrate that DRM free music does not equal to more rights for the end user. In fact, CD owners today have clearly less rights than iTunes music store customers. That means that legal music buyers should wait for the EMI EULA before rejoicing.
There are many examples of extremely restrictive EULAs. Microsoft provides great examples. For example, even though Vista Home does work in a virtualized environment, such as Parallels or VMware, this is forbidden by the EULA. Also, Windows licences cannot be installed on multiple machines or transferred from one machine to another. So, should the EMI EULA be written by MS (or the RIAA) lawyers, we could be in for a major disappointment.
Today is a great day for those not concerned by the legal restrictions that come attached to the licensing of digital media. For those of us who try to abide by the law, things may not look as good as they appear.