This press release is copyrighted by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. IEEE). Its use is granted only to journalists and news media.
While the courts have Napster safely in a cage, the large media companies have been scrambling to put all music under lock and key. In the short term, simple copy protection is being added to music CDs, but their long-term hopes lie in a far-reaching scheme to turn media purchases into managed rights to subscription and pay-per-view services. The net result could be inconvenience at best, and diminished privacy and security as well.
These schemes fall under the general term "digital rights management" and include largely proprietary content formats, copy protection schemes, and hooks into Internet-based payment systems. They will dictate the terms under which we can listen to, watch, and read digital media on a variety of new media playing devices, including PCs, portable MP3 players, DVDs, and even next-generation cellphones and PDAs. Even our ability to move something purchased on one device to another will be managed by this new software.
Sadly, these different elements of digital rights management are often conflated in the general press, making it difficult to discuss privacy and other policy implications. As the article in the October issue of IEEE Spectrum makes clear, digital rights management systems become funnels into broad databases. They collect our purchasing patterns and listening and viewing preferences for music, films, and books, and allow this information to be tied to existing databases of credit information, supermarket and other personal shopping habits, and even motor vehicle and personal location data.
There are about 10 companies in the digital rights management field, most notably Microsoft, RealNetworks, and a specialized firm, InterTrust Technologies, which offers hardware as well as software copy protection. They each have a number of alliances and partnerships with the largest media companies--especially the five record companies that control 80 percent of all music purchased today--and with the manufacturers of media playing devices. Microsoft and RealNetworks are each allied with one of the two major music consortia being created to deliver digital music, pressplay and MusicNet respectively. InterTrust, on the other hand, aspires to being a "neutral provider." Sorting out developments in the fast-changing world of digital music isn't easy, but it's important in its own right as well as being a harbinger for digital content distribution in general.
Contact: Steven Cherry, 212 419 7566, [email protected].
For faxed copies of the complete article ["Making Music Pay" by Steven Cherry, Senior Associate Editor, IEEE Spectrum, October 2001, pp. 41-46] or to arrange an interview, contact: Desiree Noel, 212 419 7555, [email protected].
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