An Open Letter to Steve Jobs and Mitch Bainwol prompted by their recent statements regarding the role of DRM.
Posted by Bennett Lincoff
Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple Inc.) says that Digital Rights Management (DRM) cannot effectively protect recorded music when it is transmitted digitally. He is right. The music industry’s many experiments with DRM have all met with effective technological countermeasures. Moreover, news of each successful hack quickly found its way to everyone who cared. There is no reason to believe that the results will be different next time, or ever. For his part, Mitch Bainwol (Chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America – RIAA) insists that DRM is essential to the music industry’s survival in the digital age. The problem is that the Internet is fundamentally incompatible with the music industry’s traditional sales-based revenue model. Through the Internet, the market for sale of individual recordings can be saturated in a moment’s time and without payment of any royalties to songwriters, music publishers, recording artists or record labels. Neither law, nor technology, nor moral suasion will change this fact.
Mr. Jobs suggests, and I agree, that DRM should be abandoned as a tool for the protection of recorded music. However, before Mr. Jobs can implement his DRM-free utopia, the music industry must have a viable alternative business model by which it can continue to thrive. Mr. Jobs has not suggested one. Mr. Bainwol denies that one is needed; intending, instead, to continue efforts to preserve the industry’s sales-based revenue model. In any event, in the absence of an alternative business model suited for digital transmissions of recorded music, Mr. Bainwol cannot even begin to discuss the possible elimination of DRM.
Mine is a comprehensive approach to rights licensing and rights management that does not depend on the efficacy of exclusionary DRM technology for its success. A solution that simultaneously protects the integrity of copyright, promotes technological innovation, facilitates the growth of all manner of licensed digital audio services (including P2P), and meets consumer demand. In the aggregate, music industry rights holders would do no less well financially under my proposal than they do now under the system that my proposal would replace.
With this alternative business model in hand (which includes a plan for its implementation), there can be no further justification for the music industry’s failure to respond constructively to the changed circumstances imposed on it by emergence of the global digital communications network.
Mr. Lincoff is an intellectual property law attorney, consultant and writer with more than twenty years experience in music licensing. The purpose of his work and of his writing is to assist creators, rights owners, intermediaries and end users to maximize the benefit they derive from protected content. Mr. Lincoff can be reached at BennettLincoff@aol.com or through his web site at BennettLincoff.com.
