Macrovision, the original DRM company, replies in open letter to Jobs
By Ryan Block 
posted February 16th 2007 9:03AM
posted February 16th 2007 9:03AM
Thanking Steve Jobs for his Thoughts on Music isn't exactly how we'd expected a letter to start by Fred Amoroso, CEO of Macrovision, the original DRM company whose fair use crippling technology dates back all the way to 1984 (no joke). The latest in a litany of responses to Jobs's recent open letter, with pleasantries dispensed Amoroso cuts to the chase in a pro-DRM rant at times rank enough to turn a few Engadget editors' stomachs, with crowd pleasing points such as DRM is an "enabler" (certainly not for customer satisfaction), that it "increases not decreases consumer value" (huh?), and that by having no DRM on our digital media, we "will unnecessarily doom all consumers to a 'one size fits all' situation". (Are you laughing yet?) Despite a very pointed and well written argument in favor of "transparent, interoperable and reasonable DRM", Amoroso's restrictions-laden vision cites no facts or figures to support his conclusions -- not even shaky and questionable numbers like Steve cited in his Thoughts. Luckily for Jobs, Amoroso is even magnanimous enough to take the burden of FairPlay off his hands: "We offer to assist Apple in the issues and problems with DRM that you state in your letter. Should you desire [Steve], we would also assume responsibility for FairPlay as a part of our evolving DRM offering and enable it to interoperate across other DRMs, thus increasing consumer choice and driving commonality across devices." Sorry, we were too busy laughing at your pomposity, what was that you said, Fred?
LOL I spilled my cereal reading this!
You can always use this guy Amoroso's head to mop that up.
Perhaps by not having to add the cost of DRM to every digital media produced the cost of the media would be reduced, thus decreasing the value?
"We offer to assist Apple in the issues and problems with DRM that you state in your letter...thus increasing consumer choice and driving commonality across devices."
Translation:
"We would love to weasle ourselves in position to get a nice slice of the profits from DAP sales. By helping to license fairplay, we will get a nice slice of profits from every DAP sold that supports our "interoperable" standard. We'll probably do a terrible job and the new "open" fairplay will be cracked within weeks, but that doesn't matter because by then we'll already be able to collect our royalties on the devices, regardless if the protection actually works."
Sigh.
Yuck, I think a little bile just came up. Gross.
Hooray! Buzzwords!
"New!! You miss all the CEOs' absurd announcements? The new "CEOs Sayings" DVD is here!! Watch hours of different one man shows. It also includes the old classics! "nicotine is not adictive", "640k ought to be enough for enybody", "there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home" and much more!!! Available NOW on bittorent!!"
:P
although that would be a cool DVD... :D
These two guys look alike:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/images/1027-06.jpg
http://www.engadget.com/media/2007/02/fred-amoroso.jpg
...coincidence or does inflicting misery on people cause one's appearance to degenerate into a "universal evil"?
You may be right .. Maddox might at least agree with you.
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=spot_the_pedo
Dear Steve,
If companies like yours abandon DRM, then companies like mine, who make this shit, are screwed.
We have spent years and years convincing the bozos who sell content that DRM will make them richer, and you know what? The suckers fell for it, not only does it cost them sales, but they have to pay us to use our technology.
I am proud of my companies acheivments. We have pulling the wool over the these guys eyes ever since we screwed with VHS.
So I am asking you buddy, can't we just get along? You make stuff that people want, we make stuff they hate, what on Earth is wrong with that?
Fred
Dinosaurs like him better start adapting because the meteor is here. The longer they wait to come up with DRM that doesn't infringe on consumers' reasonable fair-use expecations (or just get rid of it entirely), the more outlaws they are creating. Once you learn to justify stealing music because it is more usable than bought music it's hard to go back.
I'm not very hopeful though, because the proprietary mindset is deeply entrenched. Check out this story:
http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9687999-1.html?tag=head
The punchline is that even way back then they wanted to control what music you could play on your device.
So, does all this "no DRM at any cost" talk mean that you guys are against any kind of subscription or rental models for content. It seems to me people really like blockbuster at a few dollars per rental vs buying the whole thing. These models require DRM in the digital world.
It is just amazing how little the "technorati" take everything around this kinds of issues around copyright and content as though there is no proper role for protecting content under any circumstances
"So, does all this "no DRM at any cost" talk mean that you guys are against any kind of subscription or rental models for content."
DVDs effectively have no more DRM. Yet there is a thriving buisness in the monthly fee rental subscription like netflix.
Emusic sells DRM free music. They use a monthly subscription fee. But unlike the DRM subscription services, where you pay forever or your music dies, with emusic when you stop paying all the music you downloaded is still yours.
As far as the monthly fee subscription service that you have to pay forever or your music dies. Yeah I would be against that. That is the most moronic thing I ever heard of. DRM enables models that are downright lame.
I have never bought anything with working DRM in my life. I have bought tons of music/movies/games that I have the ability to backup and that allow interoperability and won't someday fail because my DRM key has been revoked or similar nonsense.
Yes. Because with DRM, subscription means I watch it once. Hey, that's great. No different than what I do at Blockbuster.
But purchase means I might watch it twice before the device to which it is node-locked is wiped, broken, upgraded, replaced, had its keys revoked, or thrown away because it is ten years obsolete. Plus I can't lend or resell the rights to the bits I supposedly purchased.
The purchase model for DRM is absurd. Without an open platform for interoperability and a neutral standards body to design it, it is better to have no DRM at all, even if that means a complete lack of downloadable digital content.
I whole heartedly agree. Much of what this guy says has merit and it makes these snide comments look foolish. The truth is a world without DRM is not likely. The recording industry has the right to protect it's media from blatant and rampant illegal copying.
I'm all for the current talks going on...I hope it fosters a more open and less restrictive use of DRM in the future. But the absence of DRM entirely seems to be a pipe dream at this point and I think folks should think twice before proclaiming that a world entirely without DRM will be a functional one that will sustain the recording industries.
This truly is the problem with the online world...everyone thinks that everything should be free. If you worked for or had family that worked for the recording industry...you would feel very differently.
If I'm not mistaken, *nearly* every single video on DVD right now is easily ripped and shared. That means Netflix, Blockbuster and Walmart, are all selling or renting out what *might as well be considered* non-DRM media.
Not to mention that even though I could easily download the latest flicks off of a torrent, if the flick I'm interested shows up at the Red Box at the grocery store, I'll always get it there first -- it's maddeningly convenient, cheap, and I rent MORE now than I ever did.
You don't need DRM. We're living proof of that LEGALLY every day RIGHT NOW at the video store or at these DVD kiosks.
wow...just seeing his picture makes me want to punch him in the face for no reason....then i read this and i laughed..it was very entertaining. The feeling of me wanting to punch him in the face has not changed.
"...evolving DRM offering and enable it to interoperate across other DRMs, thus increasing consumer choice and driving commonality across devices." That doesn't at all sound like "...will unnecessarily doom all consumers to a 'one size fits all' situation" to me. Thank god we have highly educated, when I say 'educated' I mean 'paid', people clearing up stuff for us lay people.
Would you buy a car from that man?
I know I wouldn't.
DRM increases value because it reduces the availability of specific programming content. Basic economics tells us that will increase the value of said programming content. Of course, that value only matters to those who sell the content (legally or illegally), we consumers are plenty happy to have the market value of our music (etc.) reduced.
I think it's hilarious that a blog written about all the latest and greatest gadgets is so painfully stuck in the past. "Owning" music is an antiquated concept and all those stuck to it make themselves needlessly worse off. You have at your fingertips a system where you can pay a measly $12 a month and download whatever you want instantly and in perfect quality. Subscription services are an amazing tool of allowing people to expand their tastes in music, and they're not possible without DRM.
I feel that all the crap that people who "buy" (not "rent") music with DRM on it is a good thing. Y'all need to learn.
"you can pay a measly $12 a month and download whatever you want instantly and in perfect quality. Subscription services are an amazing tool of allowing people to expand their tastes in music, and they're not possible without DRM."
Yeah that makes sense. $12/month for the rest of your life or your entire collection dies. For that you could have 12 CD's a year. At the peak of my music buying, I might have bought 10 in one year.
As for expanding my music, you can sign up for FREE services that stream in specific genres to you. I also have friends that have CD's that I can borrow.
Renting music is a mugs game.
Yeah thats great, then when you move to a different country you have no music at all, what about when you go on holiday?
john miller if all you want is to learn about new music you are not that smart i could do that for free on finetunes.com. i like owning my music without the thought of it magically disapearing one day.
"Subscription services are an amazing tool of allowing people to expand their tastes in music, and they're not possible without DRM."
I pay for an eMusic subscription, and their mp3s don't have DRM.
People, JUST STOP BUYING DRM!!!
and maybe in 10 years they'll learn.
John, Much of the music I own, I'm luccky to even find album art when I import it into iTunes. Some of the stuff was only sold on cassette back in the day. So. renting is fantastic for somebody who never listens to college radio, for example. But, most of what I buy I have to import myself, which I actually prefer. No DRM. I can use it as I please. There will be a rental market, I don't think that Apple is ever going to cater to those users. The Zune works great for that...
Good luck with that stuff Macrovision! Who the hell came up with those damn sticker seals on CDs?
"DVDs effectively have no more DRM. Yet there is a thriving buisness in the monthly fee rental subscription like netflix."
So what you are saying is that you don't believe that anything other than snail mail is an appropriate way to rent a movie.
"As far as the monthly fee subscription service that you have to pay forever or your music dies. Yeah I would be against that. That is the most moronic thing I ever heard of. DRM enables models that are downright lame."
First, emusic does not offer unlimited downloads and so is really not what I am talking about. So if I want to be able to listen to hundreds of new songs a month without paying hundreds of dollars, that is lame and I am a moron for not wanting to spend thousands of dollars a year on music? Perhaps I could borrow some cash from you so I can afford not being so "moronic".
"Yeah that makes sense. $12/month for the rest of your life or your entire collection dies. For that you could have 12 CD's a year. At the peak of my music buying, I might have bought 10 in one year."
So far I've downloaded over 19 GB of music, not counting the stuff I downloaded and later parsed from my HDD. I don't know how many songs that is, but if you assume 5 MB per song (a conservative estimate), that's 3800 songs. Assuming 12 songs per album, that's 317 albums, or 26.4 year's worth of music. So yeah, if I didn't download another song until 2034, I've gotten my money's worth.
If $12 a month can give you access to every song ever made, why do they care that people are copying music? It is obvious that the value of any song is less than the bandwidth used to transmit it.
That cheap subscription model is one of two things: a bait-and-switch to get you dependent on DRM before they jack the price or turn the screws, or the very least they otherwise make per month on typical purchaser of music.
Let's be generous and assume the latter. What does it do for the artist now that all royalties are derived from the same pool, and they've got to trust the distributer to determine their fair cut? How should that even work? The value of the artist is no longer how many units they sell, but how many subscribers they entice to join or remain in the system. And what happens when there are competing networks with mutually exclusive songs? How can this be stable or good for anyone but record executives?
Subscription models are flawed in both implementations. On one hand, you have the monthly rental subsription. I probably buy $8 worth of tracks from itunes each month, at most. Why would I pay $12 for a subscription that simply erases all my music if I decide I want to buy from someone else? My itunes tracks, even if they do have some DRM, at least will always stay with me. Renting music is bullshit.
The second subcription type, the pay-per-month to buy model, is also flawed. This only exists for indie sites and the major labels will not support it. Why? Abuse. Without a stringent monthly download quota, some people will download as much as they can. And if you have a stringent quota, what the hell is the point? If the record labels aren't making as much per song, why would they support that?
The DRM-less model is tricky because in the past, with CDs, at least it was a physical media. You bought it, you owned the disc and the tracks, you could lend it to friends, etc, but you could not copy it because there didn't used to be cd burners everywhere or an itunes library to coordinate. But then, all of a sudden, here were cd's that people could now copy and digital files that they could share. As much as we might wish to deny it, file sharing really did kill the music corporations. But this is not a bad thing. You see, music corporations are crap to begin with. The artists themselves have been getting screwed for decades.
The future of music will be DRM-free, but the artists will directly bring their albums to market without the help of a record company. This will enable them to realize more profits from their music (which, if you read courtney love's letter on the music business, is currently not a lot), and face it, no one likes to steal from the little guy. You have no problem pirating copies of photoshop and flash but when it comes to the $10 shareware, you want to shell out for Joe Developer in nevada who's up at night coding this cool app. If we bring music back so it's about people again, we won't need no stinkin' DRM or stinkin' record labels.
"no one likes to steal from the little guy. You have no problem pirating copies of photoshop and flash but when it comes to the $10 shareware, you want to shell out for Joe Developer in nevada who's up at night coding this cool app"
Pirating copies of Photoshop hurts shareware developers more than it hurts Adobe! Most of the people pirating Photoshop wouldn't shell out $600 for Photoshop, but many would pay $10 for a shareware paint program. However, they don't buy the $10 shareware program because they can get the professional software for free.
Max,
You would buy much more than $8 a month in music from iTunes if you could try out to a whole song, not just hear 30 seconds. The major point about subscription services is that they change the way you discover new music. ***Subscription services take away all the restrictions that are in place that prevent people from hearing new music.*** And that, my friends, is how DRM liberates consumers. To me, being able to just sample full tracks is worth at least $12 a month.
The point about losing music if you stop subscribing is silly. If you pay $8 to see a movie at the theater, you can't go back in whenever you want to watch it, and people still do it. Same thing with cable TV-- people are going out in droves to buy TV shows on DVD because even though they paid for the cable TV to watch it, they don't own it.
"The point about losing music if you stop subscribing is silly. If you pay $8 to see a movie at the theater, you can't go back in whenever you want to watch it."
Seriously you must work for the DRM/content business to come up with this malarkey.
You just finished bragging how you downloaded about 20GB of music. The amount of time devoted to doing this is huge. You are hooked for life now. On the hook to pay extortion forever or your music goes poof. Not to mention that your monthly fees can go up whenever they want. IMO only an idiot would put his money, not to mention his time into such a system.
Not only that, but you are hostage to technology as well. Can you play your music on the #1 players on the market (iPods)? Can you burn it on a disk and play it in your car?
I find it increasingly hard to believe there are that many idiots who would lock themselves in for lifetime payments on their music collection that they can barely use.
Come on, you must work for these goons, there is no way anyone is lame enough to think this is a good idea.
I miss the good old days of showdown at noon. Yeehaw.
Wow, just WOW!!! Fred Amoroso should be the poster boy for what is WRONG with big media right now. If this dumb ass got his way I wouldn't buy any media ever again.
Guess I have to add Macrovision-ed products to my list of boycotted products. Yes I know its in almost every media product.
Well, they woke up last week and realized a world without DRM entertainment meant Fred would have to find a job besides being a parasite - contributing absolutely nothing to society ... Macrovision is like the company who spills paint on our streets and says it's a good thing otherwise municipal clean up crews wouldn't have a job.
Fred, the three most successful formats EVERY in entertainment have no DRM: TV, LP's and CD's.
Buh bye Macrovision.
Correction to the article title: they've been doing RM for 20+ years, but it wasn't D in those days.
I'm so glad the book publishing industry hasn't enacted some sort of DRM to screw libraries out of being able to loan books to people for FREE.
And gee. Look how well that industry's doing. It what I do for a living, and things are great. I still get customers in my bookstore, and I still have a bazillion pre-orders for the next Harry Potter book, even though people could certainly download a PDF copy of it within a few days of street date.
DRM doesn't help anybody. It doesn't stop the determined pirates, and it doesn't make the honest customers any happier.
I could take any book in my library and photocopy it or scan it without incident. I could distribute it on the Internet or give it away to friends. So why isn't the book publishing industry crumbling? Why isn't there a task force to sue the bejezus out of people who use their library cards just a little too liberally?
This is about CEOs covering their ass and trying to make their business based on treating consumers like crap seem like "the good guy" and not the control freaks they've become. These days, DRM isn't so much about protecting against piracy as it is about keeping a DRM company in business. "B-b-but you NEED us!" is no longer a valid argument, Macrovision.
Being anti DRM is certainly in fashion. DRM is viewed by some as a tool used by 'corporations' to further enslave 'the people'. It's simple: if you want people to make the effort to create intellectual property, you have to make sure that the property is protected and that the creater will have the opportunity to reap the benefit of his or her effort.
It's quite obvious that non-DRM protected MP3s are widely shared. Recent NARM and NDP surveys indicate that about half of the music consumed in the USA is pirated - either via CD or MP3. Anything that makes piracy easier, like making unprotected MP3s more readily available, will make things worse not better.
An open DRM standard is absolutely the way to go. Furthermore, hardware players should only be able to play DRM-protected music. This is what will ultimately protect the music & video from piracy. Ultimately this will BENEFIT and not hurt the consumer, because if the rights of the property owner are protected, there will be greater investment in new production.
Some of the popularity of the Anti-DRM movement stems from the mistaken belief that the content owners have themselves 'robbed' the content from the 'artists/creators'. Piracy is hence viewed as ethically positive - it is stealing from the exploiters their ill gotten rewards. This is a horribly misguided perception. Artists benefit enormously, both directly and indirectly, from the sale of their creation. These sales are what makes it possible for companies to invest in and support artistic endevors. The US industry for recorded music makes about $30 Billion in sales revenue annually. Of that, corporate profits are only about 0-10%. So almost all that revenue is immediately re-invested in the production, distribution and promotion of new music. Furthermore, entertainment industry workers are on the whole paid pitiful salaries, so it's not the case that the bureaucratic machine is leaching off of the artistic talent. Criticize if you like the musical taste of industry decision makers, or their inefficient use of resources, but don't believe this trendy myth of exploitation.
First things first. Subscription based only works if you listen to the latest music. I don’t. I buy about 8 CDs a year (Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chili Peppers and a few others), use iTunes to rip to my iPod. Then listen to it, along with my Nirvana albums, Smashing Pumpkins albums, etc. I do not want to pay 12 a month just so I can keep an album that is 10+ years old. That doesn’t make sense economically.
2nd if you know anything about the major record industry then you know 2 things
1) How underhanded it is (back shelfing artists who sound to much like an artist the record company already has is an example I know a lot about).
2) Artists see little cash in the way of record sales. It is all about live shows and product placement. Most rap artists have their “bling” on loan from the industry, it is not stuff they own. Why? Because of the deal with the record industry (they only see a few pennies for every album sold.)
The major issue with DRMs is how they punish the people who actually purchase the products. That is the major issue at hand. The Sony rootkit is a more extreme example but other issues that are along the same lines. That purchasing something, only to not have the “proper hardware” to view it. About 4 years ago I was using my PS2 as my DVD player, but due to my electronics set up I had to unplug and plug in about 3 different electronic devices just to watch DVDs on it due to DRM. So I only had about 8 DVDs total at the time.
Ultimately this isn’t an issue of protecting intellectual property. If you believe that then you are looking past years of (VHS, Tape decks, CD Burners, etc) where the entertainment industry cries foul but is then ultimately gives in and everything is fine.
DRM has it's place, but the real problem is that the legal system doesn't understand technology.
What should be focused on is a watermarking system for downloadable content that identifies the purchaser. Then use that to be more able to go after those who provide the content illegally, because that is the big problem. Most people do not fully understand what is or is not under copyright, but those who are supplying the original media should know wether or not theirs is under such restrictions.
DRM does nothing to stop piracy, only slows it down. It is really only good for self-destructing rentals. "Locks only keep out honest people."