drm will die in 2008

[dock98]

DRM will Die in 2008, British Music Service Predicts

Quality DRM-free tunes sell well, says 7digital, which plans to drop copy-protection this year.

Jonny Evans, Macworld UK

Monday, January 14, 2008 9:30 AM PST

U.K. online music service 7digital saw sales climb 188 percent last year, explaining that the growing quantity of high-quality DRM-free content has driven the sales spike.

The company also revealed its top-selling albums of 2007, including five albums from Radiohead, which aren't available through iTunes because Apple won't allow the band to license the tracks as an entire collection. Top selling albums include Kylie, Arctic Monkeys and The White Stripes.

The removal of Digital Rights Management (DRM) and availability of high-quality 320kbps format MP3 tracks has resulted in massive surge in the popularity of digital music and year-on-year sales growth of 188 percent, the company said.

full article

[marke68]

B) And watermarking will replace DRM .....

With all of the Big Four record labels now jettisoning digital rights management, music fans have every reason to rejoice. But consumer advocates are singing a note of caution, as the music industry experiments with digital-watermarking technology as a DRM substitute.

Watermarking offers copyright protection by letting a company track music that finds its way to illegal peer-to-peer networks. At its most precise, a watermark could encode a unique serial number that a music company could match to the original purchaser. So far, though, labels say they won't do that: Warner and EMI have not embraced watermarking at all, while Sony's and Universal's DRM-free lineups contain "anonymous" watermarks that won't trace to an individual.

Still, privacy advocates were quick to point out that the watermarking is likely to produce fresh, empirical data that copyright material is ping-ponging across peer-to-peer sites -- data the industry would use in its ongoing bid to tighten copyright controls, and to browbeat internet service providers to implement large-scale copyright-filtering operations.

"It gives them the ability to put pressure on policy makers and ISPs to do filtering," said Fred Von Lohmann, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney.

:D cant see how thats going to stop piracy ;)