Sony BMG Plans to Drop DRM
Found on Business Week on Friday, 04 January 2008
The last major label will throw in the towel on digital rights management and prepare to fight Apple for valuable download revenues
In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned.
Labels used DRM software in an effort to prevent illegal sharing of songs on peer-to-peer networks, such as Gnutella. Instead, the restrictions served mainly to frustrate paying customers, forcing them to degrade the quality of music by first burning it to a CD before uploading it for play on the device of their choosing.
The sad part of this story is that the big labels aren't dropping DRM because the customers want it, but because they don't want Apple to get all the sales.