Making digital music difficult

Why is it so difficult to get Digital Rights Management MP3’s to work properly?

For anyone who purchases music online, the concept of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology will likely be familiar. Combined with Windows Media Audio (WMA) music files, DRM forcedly controls the number of times a music file can be copied to a portable device or burnt to a compact disk.

I believe this adds to the piracy problem, rather than inhibiting it. Let me explain:

The Toshiba Gigabeat: A common MP3 player.

Once upon a time, music files were sold or distributed in the MP3 format. This was the original digital music format and permitted unlimited usage and distribution. Software to ‘rip’ compact disks into MP3 files was easily obtained, so when peer-to-peer file sharing developed in the late 1990’s, there was a proliferation of unlicenced, pirated music floating around the internet. In reality, it was a free-for-all and downloading whole albums gratis was a simple operation. Of all the music-sharing websites, Napster was the biggest of them all.

Napster was eventually closed in July 2001 after the Recording Industry Association of America sued for breach of copyright, but the website’s success highlighted the interest in digital music and the extent of the piracy problem that ran in parallel to that interest.

As a response, Microsoft developed WMA music files, which incorporated forced restrictions on the number of copies of the file that can be made.

Australian digital music retailers quickly took up WMA technology. Today all the major music chains such as Sanity and JB HI-FI sell WMA music online, as well as new entrants to the industry like BigPond Music, Chaos and ironically, mp3.com.au.

The problem with this is that the DRM licences attached to WMA files tend to corrupt easily, thus rendering the digital music useless. And this is not an infrequent occurrence, either.

I usually like to backup my files on CD-ROM, copy an audio CD for the car, and transfer a copy to my portable media player. However, when I do this, I use up all the ‘burn credits’ on the files and I am no longer able to copy the files to another audio CD or portable device.

Whilst this may initially seems like a reasonable number of copies, problems arise when technology fails or disks are damaged and I need to make a new copy for myself.

Recently, my Toshiba Gigabeat (which uses the ironically-named PlaysForSure technology) didn’t take well to me plugging it to my work PC and as a result all the digital music licences on the device were corrupted. Only music in the older MP3 format that I had copied from my own CD’s would still play. Because I had used up the licences on some of my WMA music files, I was unable to copy all of the songs back onto the Gigabeat MP3 player.

In the end, I had to use the tried-and-trusted method of burning the WMA files as audio tracks to CD, then ripping them back as MP3’s and uploading them to the Gigabeat. But what a hassle!

Limiting the number of times a file can be copied is futile for this very reason. Should anyone want to illegally distribute WMA music, they need only convert it to MP3 format and the licence data is erased.

However, the presence of DRM for those who legitimately purchase music is such a hindrance that it is often far preferable to source an MP3 from somewhere else and rest assured that the music will always play.

DRM’s failure to function as designed only serves to punish those who purchase music legitimately. And it is enough to push any reasonable person to source MP3 music across the internet before purchasing dodgy WMA media files with corruptable DRM attached.

I have no problem with the legal prohibition on the free distribution of music over the internet, the airwaves or via any other means. But I do have a problem with being restricted in the number of times I may make a copy of my own music for personal use.

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