This article that asks why we are being penalised by big business interests.
http://business.guardian.co.uk/economicdispatch/story/0,,1796610,00.htmlDRM is not just a problem for the music industry. Recently I attended a seminar at the British Library (standing room only, by the way), which is deeply worried about the way restrictive digital rights contracts are being imposed by companies. The British Library is one of the world's great treasure houses, yet less than one percent of its priceless archive has been digitised because of potential conflicts about digital rights and preservation. If that's not a digital scandal then I don't know what is.
The music industry still talks about downloading a track as if it was stealing a record from a shop and warns that a whole generation is being brought up not used to paying for their music. What rot. The same people allegedly refusing to pay for downloaded free tracks are the same people who, amazingly, are prepared to pay £3.50 to buy part of a track in the form of a ringtone. The difference? Ringtones have an easy payment system whereas downloads, at least until the arrival of iTunes, did not.
I am strongly in favour of artists being paid for their creations - as long as it is reflected fairly in the price. But you can't buy a record these days, only the right to play it on certain occasions in a defined format on a single manufacturer's hardware.
You can, however, hear a track for nothing on the radio, or get it free as a newspaper promo or search for it on an internet radio station such as Shoutcast.
Add on to that the fact the cost of "manufacturing" an extra track and delivering to your device is zero in the digital age, and you can see why prices ought to come down.
The article goes on further to ask why we should delay digitising material because of potential rights fights over it in later years, stealing a valuable resource from humanity is in the case of a museum or place of learning just plain wrong.
Putting profit before people will always be wrong, forget this concept and the core value that hold us together as a worldwide community evaporates.
