ButtUgly: Main_blogentry_210406

VP of Finnish RIAA: "DRM is good for consumers"

Welho-magazine 2/2006 (translation mine):

"All this is made possible through Digital Rights Management, DRM. It's also a good thing for consumers. We can now vary the prices flexibly according to the use", ponders Kyyrä [VP of ÄKT, the Finnish equivalent of RIAA].

Um. If this means that I can get non-DRM music, even at a higher price, for my own flexible uses, then I agree. But if it means "we can give you the option to make one or two or three copies of this music, and for an extra fee you can listen it between 22-07", then no, then it's not good for the consumer. Stateth Cory Doctorow: "Nobody woke up in the morning and hoped they could do less with their music."

However, he does have a good point:

"You don't have to own all the music."

Yup. And this is what digitalization gives us - because duplication and storage is (for all practical purposes) free, ownership becomes meaningless. You start to pay for services instead of owning a copy of something.

If hard drive space continues to grow at the current rate, by 2025 the entire music ever recorded in the entire world will fit on your iPod. For $500. Bend your brain around that.

Estimation based on 1M songs/year, 150 years = 150M songs @ about 3MB/song is roughly 500 TB. Storage space goes up by a factor of ten every five years, again roughly. A 600TB iPod would thus be available in 20 years.