The whole issue of DRM or not DRM for music files was being taken far too seriously this week with Microsoft saying that it is negotiating some level of service on the Zune with DRM free music, just like EMI’s announcement of last week alongside Apple, and another innovator Weedshare falling foul of nothing other than Microsoft’s new DRM version.
Perhaps we’ve been around DRM technology businesses too long, but we cannot see how DRM free music will ever work out. The personal piracy genie is out of the bottle and there’s very little to be used, other than brute force, to put it back in. If people cannot hack music files, then they cannot pirate them.
So while we’re happy to give such initiatives a few lines, we don’t expect them to become the standard music model for doing business any time soon. If there’s no lock in, then no-one wins the market, which might be good for consumers, but technology and content players are not going to welcome that.
But the Weedshare issue is quite interesting. It appears that founder John Beezer was trying to offer a music superdistribution service which used DRM protection and at the same time allowed any protected music file to be played three times on a new device. This will rely on the decryption key being available to that new device, but also requires storage of the purchase information, and where it can be bought, to which customers are directed after the three plays.
Beezer in the past has managed to convince a number of partners and 10,000 unsigned bands contributing 100,000 of their own tracks, to try this system out in the US and Canada. The purchasing information was made available on some kind of special tag inside Windows Media DRM and the system is used to protect AAC, Flash, MP3 and Windows media files.
Beezeer has told partners that he has a joint ‘patent’ with Microsoft to do this, and Microsoft introduced a similar, though not identical idea on its Zune music player. We’re pretty sure that what Beezer really meant was the had had a free license to a Microsoft patent, that was granted while he worked for Microsoft.
The subtle difference between the systems appears to be that the Weedshare system made sure that the artist, Weedshare and the person that distributed the file all got part of the payment. The Microsoft version omits part of the tag and doesn’t hold information on the distribution chain.
So when Windows Media DRM 11 came out suddenly the writing of these special tags was deemed by the system to be an ‘infringement,’ and the software refused to work with the Weedshare system.
After trying technical workarounds Weedshare began to find it could not service clients, and people involved were left thinking that Microsoft had made the change maliciously, supporting its own business model and slamming the door on a similar rival.
Weedshare was operated by Beezer’s Shared Media which said it would offer transaction tracking, royalty distribution and reporting, micropayments, customer relationship management, and P2P-based distribution.
Shared Media says it will resurrect its business with something less reliant on Microsoft software, and funnily enough, rooting around in our archives we can tell them that specialist Digital Containers would welcome them, because they have patents on this very approach, which were granted back in 2004 when the while P2P thing was in its heyday. Try http://www.digitalcontainers.com/
We asked one person involved why not use DRM free distribution, and he said, ‘Then we’d never get paid,’ and he’s got a point.