A fair way to promote fair use?
or a mean way to enforce copyright law?

Tapes have been around for years, and they have always been a fact of life for the music industry - and have never really had much impact on CD sales, nor tape or vinyl sales due to the generally low quality of duplications in comparison with the original. With the advent of digital media came a significant problem - MP3s. The MPEG Layer 3 sound compression algorithm allowed very high quality copies to be made of large sound files, squeezed into a fraction of their original size.

To give you some idea, a 60Mb WAV file ripped direct from a CD can be stored almost losslessly in 10% of that space using this technique. This meant that people could share the music illegally at very high quality, very….very easily.

The idea of DRM is that a musical (or indeed any other type of media in the form of a digital file) sound file has copyright attached to it. DRM enforces this copyright by limiting the number of computers allowed to access it, as well as limiting the end user from sharing the file out to friends and colleagues, or indeed the internet at large.

There are two main sound DRM containers : Microsoft’s WMA and Apple’s AAC. You can think of them as MP3s with locks and keys. In fact they use the MPEG 4 sound standards (or similiar) which is an advancement of the MPEG1 Layer 3 audio technology in MP3s.

If you listen to the hype, certain of these companies would have you believe that their format is “higher quality”. This is not true, all in all. It is true that AAC sounds better than WMA at lower bitrates. But if you run them both up at a reasonable 192kbps, there really is nothing to tell between either of them, or an MP3 file, or an OGG.

That aside, what uses are these two DRM formats put to? Well, portable devices and legal downloads is the answer.

AAC is used on Ipods and Macs (and PCs!). WMAs are used on windows mobile devices and PCs. You either download (and pay for) a pre-encoded file which is then “locked” to your computer system, or you put your audio CD (legally obtained of course….) into your CD drive and either Itunes or Windows Media Player rips the audio data off your CD, and encodes into a format, once again, locked to your PC, or Mac.

In general, you can transfer the files from computer to computer 5 times. This would allow you to share the music with, say, your family and a friend, but not the rest of the internet world. You can burn them to a CD a limited amount of times as well, to put one in your car for example. Fair Use is an ideal (not legally binding) that states that you should be able to backup your CD, and have copies in handy places wherever you may want to listen to it, for example, one CD in the kitchen, one in the lounge, one WMA/AAC on the PC, one on the Ipod and one in the car.

It would appear at first glance that this DRM application is actually fairly flexible, and should not be something to worry about, but think in the long term. Your CDs may only last 12 or 15 years, but a digital file could last a millenia. How many new devices would you own in the next 30 years which you may wish to play this file on? a lot more than 5 I can assure you.

I decided to “go legal” with my digital music collection 2 years ago; Since I own all of my favourite music on CD anyway, I deleted all my MP3s of illicit origin (which meant all of them), and installed Apple’s Itunes.

Thinking in the long term, I decided a lossless collection would allow me to lose or scratch my original CDs and not worry about it, as well as allowing any digital networked device in my home to access the music whenever I wanted it. Perfect! So I set to ripping every single CD I own (No mean feat!) to a vast library of near-as-dammit perfect quality copies on my PC (using Itunes), from which my audio world was soon to revolve. This of course, took me hours and hours across a fortnight or so.

It wasnt long after I had done this (patting my self on the back at the same time) that I got hit by a virus. The dastardly thing was impossible to remove (by me at any rate), so I decided to pull out the hard drives, stick in a new one for the operating system, and reinstall. I then introduced the old disks once that PC was secure and properly protected. Unfortunately this constituted one transfer of every single file I had copied onto the PC using Itunes.

Perhaps I am just unlucky, or perhaps I should have used a brand new hard disk, but only 4 months later, the click of death was upon me. Removing all hard drives but the system disk, I soon discovered that it was the new OS disk I had reinstalled onto. Knowing that windows had a tendency to “slow down” after 8 months anyway, I reinstalled again.

By this point all of my collection was down to 3 transfers, and any that had been copied to my portable device and /or CD for the car were already down to 2 and 1 transfers. It hadnt even been a year, and some of my legally owned CD rips were now locked to playing back only on this PC! I was in complete despair at my own idiocy, and that of DRMs.

I cut my losses, deleted the entire archive and re-ripped the whole lot (taking another 2 weeks) to high bitrate MP3s, and I’ve never looked back since. They play on every portable device I have ever tried to play them on.

I like Itunes so I still use it to play them back but nothing ever gets ripped with it (Itunes MP3 ripping is intentionally poor quality to make AAC look better…………). I thought my troubles with DRM were over…..

But I then got a Motorola Razr mobile phone with Itunes on it which was great!! All my MP3s were re-encoded on the fly to WMA only for use on the RAZR, and it was perfect. Until I foolishly paid for tracks with Itunes. £40 worth of music was purchased and downloaded through my Itunes account from the Itunes online shop, downloaded in the dreaded AAC format. Everything was going great until I reformatted the PC again. I’m a teccy, I reformat often and vigourously.

I reinstalled Itunes, imported my MP3 archive, and everything was golden, but where were my paid for files? No! they were stored on the C Drive and lost forever! But wait there they are, in Itunes on my phone. It will copy them back across surely?

No. It will delete them the moment you reconnect your portable device.

The files must reside on the master PC, otherwise they are just deleted.

But surely I can re-download them? Apple know that I paid for them, and I paid as much for the album download as I would for a full CD. Lets just re-download…. Uh-oh, only one download is allowed per purchase. No exceptions. £40 down the pan. I have to this day lost the lot.

What is the moral of the story? What stops the pirates can NEVER suit the legal users. And being legal is now FAR

more trouble than its worth. Security vs Functionality. Like Windows Vista, the quest for security has blindly trampled the honest and hardworking Mr Functionality. I can only recommend using an unprotected, flexible media container which relies on your judgment and morals to keep its content secure.

Thanks for listening, you have not been charged.

written by Pensive