RealNetworks rep to Linux: DRM or die!

4/10/2006 3:57:00 PM, by Anders Bylund
Ars Technica

A RealNetworks vice president voiced a few inflammatory opinions during LinuxWorld Boston last Tuesday. The RealNetworks rep in question, Jeff Ayars, said that Linux as a consumer platform would be dead unless DRM capabilities are built into the OS itself.

"The consequences of Linux not supporting DRM would be that fixed-purpose consumer electronics and Windows PCs would be the sole entertainment platforms available," Ayers said. "Linux would be further relegated to use in servers and business computers, since it would not be providing the multimedia technologies demanded by consumers."

Ayers has a few supporters in this issue from the Linux camp, as Novell, Linspire, and Red Hat spokespeople reportedly said they would be happy to add DRM to their distributions, but with some caveats. Novell, for example, is "currently in discussions with vendors who control proprietary formats" with the goal of supporting these formats in SuSE Linux. One can only surmise exactly which formats that would be, but recent rumblings from Redmond make it likely that Microsoft DRM solutions such as PlaysForSure could be among them. Holding your breath for Apple's FairPlay to be licensed to third parties like Novell could be bad for your health, though. Those are the two DRMs Linspire hope to use if given the chance.

It certainly makes commercial sense for Linux vendors to support technologies like FairPlay—just look at the huge installed user base for that particular DRM. But FairPlay didn't reach market dominance by accident to begin with. Georg Greve of the European arm of the FSF explains this rather succinctly:

"The Sony rootkit case made it quite clear why DRM is not accepted by consumers and why there is no successful business case for DRM. Apple iTunes allows people to burn their tracks on regular CDs, which can then be re-encoded and file-shared easily—so is better described as 'digital inconvenience management' only. eMusic.com offers clean audio tracks without any restrictions. No DRM platform comes close to either of these in popularity. So fortunately, it is up to the consumer to decide what the consumer market wants. And its answer is clear: It does not want DRM! The sooner we bury the foolish notion of putting each and every use of a computer under control of the media industry, the sooner we can start looking for real alternatives."

That sounds like a plausible explanation for at least part of the success of iTMS and the FairPlay DRM it relies on. It lets users do what they want, albeit forcing them to jump through some hoops to do it. Of course, the Apple faithful might prefer the superiority of the iPod user interface over such a pedestrian explanation, and marketing that seems to hit a nerve with America has something to do with it as well. But it's back to the familiar old hobby horse: give the customer the ability to play her content whenever, wherever, and however she wants to do it. A truly open, cross-platform and device-agnostic DRM stands a much better chance in the marketplace than, say, what Sony thought was a workable solution. But it's still just putting lipstick on the furry lobster.

This ties back to Sun's DReaM platform, which can probably only succeed if content distributors and gadget manufacturers adopt it in huge numbers, and even then faces shaky support from the OSS community. The proposed version 3 of the GPL is controversial because of its flat-out refusal to allow DRM technologies to use that license. Then again, some people just don't care: Linus Torvalds, for example, calls himself a coder, not a politician, and simply wants things to work, DRM or no DRM.

While it's a near-certainty that a DRM-free movie or music download service with major studio backing would become very popular, very quickly, it's equally probable that the files would be wildly pirated as well. But then again, it's already easy enough to find any song or film you need fairly quickly, if you just know where to look. Therefore, it seems much less certain that unprotected content would cause much harm to the pocketbooks of RIAA and MPAA members. And we've had unprotected media around us for years, like FM radio or good old cable TV, and all we need in order to make unauthorized copies of those broadcasts are cassette radios or VCRs. Just because content has gone digital shouldn't mean that we all are going to turn into the dirty, rotten pirates in need of heavy restraints that DRM proponents seem to assume that we are.