Top 5 music DRM disasters of all time

DRM has been around for many years now and despite all the millions of dollars spent each year on the technology, a lot of bad mistakes have been made, which unsurprisingly has led to widespread negative publicity about it.  For example, ideally DRM should stop piracy of content, without affecting legitimate usage.  However, pretty much any content protected with DRM restricts usage, limits what and how many devices one may use the protected content on and so on.  Worse still, it seems to only affect genuine customers, since pirated versions remain DRM free!  Oops…

This Audiotuts article gives what it calls the top 5 music DRM debacles of all time, showing just how evil content providers can be when they abuse DRM.  This is really worth reading, however, if you don’t have the time, these are summarised as follows:

RealNetworks Harmany starts in 5th place, where RealNetworks tried reverse engineering Apple’s Fairplay system to make its store’s music downloads compatible with the iPod.  As Apple owns the FairPlay DRM technology, sure enough, Apple issued a statement warning that Real’s Harmony technology may cease to work after Apple updates its iPod software and all it took was a few months for Apple to issue a Firmware update that blocked Harmony’s technology from working.  With Apple repetitively issuing firmware updates to block Harmany, eventually RealNetworks decided to discontinue its iPod support.

In 4th place comes the RealNetworks DVD Copy software, RealDVD.  Not only does this $49 software copy DVDs, it also applies a layer of DRM, which locks the DVD copies to the PC the copies were made on, something freely available DVD copy programs don’t do!  To make matters worse, the movie studios decided to sue Real for breaking their DVD copy protection.

Sony Connect is in 3rd place.  Up until its launch, there were two main DRM systems in use – FairPlay, used by the Apple’s iTunes and iPod series and PlaysForSure, used by most other music download stores at the time and other DRM supporting music players.  Sony decided to try following Apple’s move by launching a music store with music crippled with its own copy protection system.  Only its line of compatible players could play music from the store.  After having no luck getting much interest from consumers, they eventually closed its Connect store.

In 2nd place comes the Microsoft MSN music store.  After having little success competing against iTunes, Microsoft decided to launch a new store called the Zune Marketplace and closed its MSN music store in 2006.  However, despite Microsoft’s aim to promote its PlaysForSure logo, it sure made hems of this when it announced that it would shut down its MSN music store DRM servers on August 31st, 2008.  This would have meant that customers with music bought from the former MSN music store would no longer be able to authorise new devices or PCs to play their music.  So, what’s this “PlaysForSure” slogan suppose to mean again?

Sony BMG Extended Copy Protection so far remains unbeaten when it comes to a disaster with DRM, placing it straight at 1st place.  Unlike DRM that affects music downloads, XCP DRM was used to copy protect audio CDs.  However, the software was so evil that it was classed as Malware, since it would automatically install without the user’s consent, hide its files from detection and made itself very difficult to remove.  To make matters worse, Sony’s removal tool caused more harm by opening up additional security holes in the system.  It was not until several lawsuits were filed against Sony that it finally decided to recall the affected discs and offer to replace them with unprotected versions.

Thanks to Crabbyappleton for letting us know about this news.