As those three work out deals with the major labels to do a cloud-based music service, TechCrunch’s sources say that the labels “are demanding that a user can only stream music that is watermarked to their username”. The major reason this would be a step backward as described, is that backdoor DRM, as privacy advocates like to call the practice of scribbling your user info inside a song, didn’t incur any functional limitations. It was like writing your name on a CD. A little weird, but it’d still play perfectly on anything it’s shoved on, like any other DRM-free music, just with the fairly reasonable expectation that it’s not shared with a million other people.
What’s being described here sounds like more of a functional limitation, turning user data into a more active form of DRM, if songs can only be played by a specific username on a specific service. It’s venturing into Steam-like territory, where you effectively wouldn’t own the music (and I suspect the licence agreement for these cloud services might read as much).
True, we’re talking about streaming versus download, cloud vs local, so it’s not entirely unreasonable to try to limit the service in ways to make sure that everybody at a potential all-you-can-eat buffet has their own plate. But the coming shift could be transformative, if streaming or cloud services become the primary way people consume music, versus downloading, which seems to partially be what Apple, Amazon and Google – not to mention the raggedy records labels – are betting on, or at least preparing for.
When you don’t actually own something, how much can you complain about it not working right? [TechCrunch]
Image CC licensed from Flickr user Mosesxan
Liam James
Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 2:15 PM“When you don’t actually own something, how much can you complain about it not working right? ”
The real question here is exactly WHAT it is you own. Through purchasing a license to stream certain content from a website as opposed to a licence to play certain music downloaded from a certain service, users really need a manner of ensuring that the contract they sign is a fair one, which includes rights for them to demand a certain level of service as the same time as committing a certain level of money towards payment for that service.
The problem is that the licenses are negotiated in a very one sided manner, that being that they are one-to-many pro forma contracts, which the average consumer neither understands nor often realises they are entering into. Most consumers still exist within the paradigm that they are buying and ‘owning’ some kind of physical object, albeit one made up of data and bits. In all cases it is even less than that. What is being transferred is only a license to play and consume a certain copyrighted material, and the transfer of that material is only in order to give effect to that licence.
If people were able to understand that what they were purchasing was effectively a certain level of right, and had a better understanding of which music service offered what level of rights, then they may be more inclined to take their money to the business that sells the more open bundle of rights to certain music, rather than the one with the most coverage or cheapest upfront dollar-figure.
This really does require a dramatic paradigm shift however – right now the average consumer is lucky to realise the difference between ‘purchasing’ a drm-free or drm-laden file, or streaming vs download, let alone in understanding the different rights afforded by an Amazon MP3 purchase as opposed to an iTunes one etc.
Sorry for the long comment but it is an area I’m particularly interested in!