So, Apple has lowered the price of its DRM-free tunes to .99: Apple lowers price of DRM-free iTunes songs - Digital Life - MSNBC.com, and *not* in response to competition from competitors such as Walmart and Amazon that sell DRM-free tunes for even less than .99 (uh-huh). So where does that leave DRM-burdened tunes?
I did note a couple of days ago that DRM-free doesn't mean the same thing as downloaded from p2p or ripped from your own CD -- there is a license when you buy a DRM-free tune and it allows copying for personal use, but not for sharing. This story at the Seattle Times contains excerpts from both the Apple license and Amazon's license.
So the licenses say you can't share. This should come as no surprise. Honestly, I don't think the record companies need to say this, but they think they need to say this, and it's probably the only way that they could be persuaded to step into this arena at all. Ultimately, if they learn (as I think they will) that digital without DRM sells well, eventually they'll also learn that sharing need not be the death of music. Baby steps. At least they are walking now instead of barring the door and resisting all attempts to get them to join their customers in the digital world.
And what does this have to do with mass digitization projects? I have just begun to write a paper at Mass Digitization ~ changing copyright law and policy in a CommentPress blog that allows commentary paragraph by paragraph (so *you* are invited to come over and participate), and the subject of the paper is the effect of mass digitization projects on copyright law and policy. Apple, DRM-free music and the Creative Commons (among others) are all part of the story of why mass digitization projects are actually not having much of an effect at all! Google provides a notable exception, but for the most part, business models are evolving forms that tend to place copyright further into the background, behind contracts, as noted above, and more positively, behind other ways of generating revenues than controlling, counting and paying for copies. And that's what copyright law is about, or at least, that has been the primary way copyright owners exercised their exclusive rights for the last 200 years. If control over copies becomes irrelevant, does copyright law become irrelevant? That is a very interesting question. I'll be exploring it over the next 6 weeks, and invite you to explore it with me!
