Copy rights and wrongs

Second, there is no legal provision in UK law or any others that says if someone has enough money it’s OK to take something that belongs to them.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is a vocal supporter of DRM. The BPI argues that the music industry in the UK employs some 125,000 people, and they need their livelihoods protected.

New music acts, says the BPI, make up 17 per cent of sales, and they need every sale to help them make an impact.

Finally, the industry estimates it has lost £1.1bn in the last three years due to illegal downloading.

The BPI says it has no immediate plans to prosecute people who download its members’ music from file sharing sites and, instead, is chasing the habitual uploaders. However, it stresses that this is a matter of policy rather than any reflection of British law, and that viewing, and indeed storing, illegally copied material could become a matter for litigation.

Is it legal?
It’s simple to tell whether you’re downloading something illegally or not, assuming it is controlled by copyright and not being given away deliberately.

If you’re buying from a store – say Napster or Apple’s iTunes – it will be legal. If you are you are downloading a file sharing system such as Kazaa, which looks around to see if someone on the network has what a customer is looking for on their computer and shares their file with that customer, then it’s possibly illegal. The BPI wants to see this sort of thing finished – illegal sharing of music files that stops its members from being paid for their work.

While the arguments are pretty clear cut, the technology that underpins DRM can be more contentious. Key among the problems with DRM is that it frequently places restrictions upon the person that has paid for the music or movie that go beyond illegal copying. For example, some music protected by DRM won’t play on Macintosh or Linux computers.

Apple’s iTunes Music Store provides another example. Apple places DRM on music downloads from its store, and allows only five computers to play the tunes. If you buy a new computer, you have to authorise it to play the music you’ve bought, and if you want to play the music on more than five computers, you’ll have to deauthorise one to add another.

On top of that, only iTunes and the iPod can be used to play Apple’s music file format. This meant that if someone didn’t have the right software on their PC, they couldn’t play the tunes – nor could they transfer and play the music or talking books onto any MP3 player other than an iPod. Recently, Apple and one music company have changed this – of which more later.

Customer rights
DRM doesn’t just apply to movies and music. The BBC wants to put some of its content on the internet for TV licence payers to view for up to seven days after broadcast. To do this and still protect its sales of programs on DVD and broadcasts abroad, the Corporation has chosen to put DRM provided by Microsoft into the software used to play BBC content.

Unfortunately, this means that anyone not using Windows XP or Windows Vista may not be able to see the BBC’s programmes as a result. As Computeractive to press, the BBC had just launched its iPlayer. See a future issue for a full review.

The Open Rights Group, an organisation dedicated to protecting consumers’ digital rights in the UK, points out that, even if the DRM works correctly, this locks out those who choose not to, or who cannot afford to buy, a modern PC running Windows.