Boston – It has been the better part of a decade since Napster and other free song-sharing services began scaring the daylights out of the music industry. And still, recording companies can’t find an effective anti-piracy technology to save their hides.
The fact that so-called digital- rights management might always be a doomed experiment became painfully clear with the fiasco that erupted after Sony BMG Music Entertainment added a technology known as XCP to more than 50 popular CDs.
After it was discovered that XCP opened security holes in users’ computers – as did the method Sony BMG offered for removing XCP – Sony BMG was forced to recall the discs last week. About 4.7 million had been made and 2.1 million sold.
Factor in lawsuits that Sony BMG could face, and it’s worth wondering whether the costs of XCP and its aftermath might even exceed whatever piracy losses the company would have suffered without it.
Phil Leigh, analyst for Inside Digital Media, said the debacle shows just how reluctant the labels are to change their business model to reflect the distribution powers – good and bad – of the Internet. He believes that rather than adopting technological methods to try to stop unauthorized copying of music, record companies need to do more to remove the incentive for piracy.
“The biggest mistake the labels are making is, they’re letting their lawyers make technical decisions,” Leigh said. “Lawyers don’t have any better understanding of technology than a cow does algebra.”
It’s easy to understand why the music industry wishes songs could magically be prevented from being ripped from CDs and shared freely. The industry has seen an estimated $2 billion overall decline in CD sales in the past five years. New digital services such as Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes have made up some of that but still account for just 6 percent of the industry’s global sales.
The challenge has been to find an anti-piracy tool that works well enough to please the industry without overly annoying users, many of whom want to make legitimate backup copies of their CDs. Sony BMG would not say whether it plans to explore techniques that are less intrusive than XCP.
“They may be going through various iterations to try to find the sweet spot here,” Leigh said. “But they’re stumbling around, and the consequences of them stumbling are not worth the price.”
