Comment Articles

Digital rights: What Microsoft could learn from Apple

David Coursey AnchorDesk

Published: 13 May 2003 16:02 BST

I received a letter from Steve Ballmer last week, the same digital rights management (DRM) message the Microsoft chief executive sent to a half-million other registered customers. Maybe I expected too much, but I was hoping Steve would tell me something I didn't already know, rather than just tout the wonders of the DRM package he wants to sell my company.

For months, maybe even years, I've asked Microsoft to tell me what they think people should be able to do with the content they "own." I use the quotes because, while you may own the physical manifestation of the content (a CD or book, for example), you never own the content itself.

Microsoft has, however, been silent on the issue. The closest the company has come to making a statement on the subject is the way it handled the DVD recording debacle involving its Media Center PCs. After initially locking down video content -- typically TV programmes -- recorded on the machine, Microsoft eventually chose to let content owners decide whether a particular programme could be recorded onto a DVD that could be viewed on a consumer DVD player.

Beyond that concession, Microsoft has been silent on the issue of content rights for consumers. What they're doing in the business arena (building rights management into the enterprise versions of Office 2003) makes a lot of sense. But those efforts just make the company's silence on fair-use rights even more apparent.

To make that silence even more embarrassing, Apple's Music Store and its Fairplay rights policy put that company way ahead of Microsoft on the issue and could set a standard for what consumers may do with the content they purchase.

Fairplay allows you to purchase and download any song or album for personal use. That use is defined as playback on up to three computers, unlimited syncing on iPods, unlimited burning of individual songs, and the right to burn custom playlists onto a CD up to 10 times each.

Two weeks ago, at the Music Store introduction, Steve Jobs predicted that most customers would never run into these limitations: computers can be easily deauthorised (meaning that, while you're limited to playback on three computers, you can change which three machines those are), and any change you make to a playlist resets its "burn count" to zero, allowing you to create another 10 CDs.

The most amazing thing is not that Apple developed the Fairplay concept, but that the five major recording labels agreed to it. After years of sabre rattling by its trade group, the RIAA, the recording industry's endorsement of Fairplay is nothing short of amazing.