When Amazon.com announced its plan to open a digital music store to sell MP3s, you had to really work to get excited about it. It’s hard to think of a press release that would be less surprising. At this rate, my 3-year-old daughter will be opening a digital music store pretty soon. And Amazon’s selling MP3s? It’s a digital music store. What else would it sell? But Amazon’s move was actually a strategic salvo in the great secret war of the $60 billion music industry, the fight over Digital Rights Management, usually known by the spine-tinglingly thrilling abbreviation DRM. What’s DRM? An invisible layer of software that bodyguards a computer file and limits what you can and can’t do with it. Buy a song from Apple’s iTunes Media Store, for example, and you can copy the file to five computers but no more. That’s because the song comes with Apple’s DRM software, FairPlay, baked in, and FairPlay has its own ideas about what is and isn’t fair. Most people don’t even notice DRM–who puts their music on five different computers anyway?–but there’s something annoyingly unfair about FairPlay even in the abstract. You paid for the music. Who is Apple to tell you where you can and can’t stick it? Nobody will admit to actually liking DRM. Consumers feel retailers are treating them like potential copyright criminals. Retailers say they use DRM only because the labels make them. The labels blame us, the customers, for being such filthy music pirates. And around we go. Steve Jobs even swore that he would de-DRM every track on iTunes if only the labels would let him.
