PerthNorg

DRM or Bust

An important date in the timeline of Internet Radio has just passed in the US - July 16 2007 was the date that Internet radio stations would have started paying much higher royalty fees, which would have effectively push all but the largest players out of the market.

I should have been the date, but in a suprise move, SoundExchange, the company who is in-charge of collecting the licensing fee in the US , decided to postpone the new charges indefinately as they negotiate with the Internet radio industry further.

It would seem that the deal they are coming to is going to make DRM a requirement of streaming music over the internet to avoid "streamripping", or recording the streams to ones hard drive for playback later.

DRM has in the past been a near-failure with very high-profile systems being cracked. Recently encryption keys for HD-DVD's were published allowing users to make exact digital copies and both the iTunes encryption system and Windows Media encryption system have been circumnavigated.

One of the biggest criticisms of DRM is product lock-in. Locking down system with DRM limits the number of devices that will be able to play the content, which can be a nightmare if you are running alternative operating system, or non-standard setup.