Why is Apple a DRM bad guy?

Randall Stross of the New York Times has written a piece on DRM with the headlineWant an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs.

The article is linked from this post. A bitter irony of his argument is that you have to pay the NYT a hefty fee for the right to read it online. DRM comes in many forms, Mr. Stross, but I bet your employer’s lawyers might have something to say if I posted the entire text here!

While he has been overall reasonably fair in what he says from an anti-DRM point of view, I do NOT like the headline and the intro paragraphs referring to “crippleware”. That is an emotive term being used for shock effect in a lawsuit, and should not be used as the lead in a news piece unless quoted in context. Quotation marks do not cut it.

DRM is an industry-wide issue, not Apple’s issue. Apple’s DRM is a pretty light touch, and provided you take a minimum of care, should not affect most users – exactly what Apple wants. At the same time, I would suggest that their hardball approach with the record companies has protected us from higher and tiered pricing, as well as more restrictive DRM.

The problem with rabid anti-DRM pieces like this that throw mud at Apple as the largest target is that they ignore one simple fact – that the iPod/iTunes combination is a runaway success that is making Apple billions of dollars. As such, the Apple approach to DRM has effectively been embraced by the market.

Yes, Apple adds DRM to music available unencrypted elsewhere. That ‘flat DRM policy’, like the ‘flat pricing’ policy, is what keeps the majors in line, preventing them from negotiating individual DRM deals or threatening to walk away.

If you want to see what the Music industry would like, take a long hard look at the Zune.

– A locked-in player model, it won’t accept music from anything except Zune software. So far, just like iPod-Itunes.
– But then, it can send songs to other Zunes wirelessly – except it tacks on a 3-play, 3-day DRM restriction EVEN IF THE ORIGINAL FILE WAS UNPROTECTED (such as the MyMac podcast).
– You can burn songs to CD – except that the record companies can embed code in the DRM to stop you doing that for certain songs.
– You can buy songs from the Zune Marketplace – using a confusing “points for cents” system that is structured to get you to buy points in excess.
– You can buy an ‘all you can eat’ Zune pass – effectively a subscription. However, around 50% of the music in the Zune marketplace has been exempted from the pass by the record companies, so that you have to buy it with points.
– If you bought tracks from Microsoft under PlaysForSure DRM, they won’t work and you have to buy them again.
– Despite all of this, Microsoft still pays each major a fee per Zune sold to reimburse them for the piracy it supposedly creates.

Get the picture? This is structured to allow record companies to fleece their consumers. They treat us like commodity cattle to be milked as they see fit.

Take a look at the situation with video. HD content is encrypted from the disk surface all the way to the internals of your TV with military grade encryption and a system that allows the industry to remotely revoke encryption keys and stop things working if they feel security has been breached. At the same time, Microsoft Vista users could find their graphics cards, sound cards and monitors locked down or degraded when they play HD content to minimise the risk of recapture of content.

I can live with a modicum of DRM, to prevent casual copying and sharing. I can understand that. But if the industry has its way, they will encrypt everything right up to the retina and eardrum, just so they can charge us over and over for the same content. Perhaps the media should lead with that rather than a headline suggesting Apple is the leading DRM bully.