Mixed reaction to Apple's announcement iTunes will drop DRM

Apple did not blaze an overly impressive consumer-rights trail at this week's Macworld Expo. While some consumers were happy that the company is removing DRM from songs sold thorugh the iTunes Store, a prominent consumer rights organization slammed Apple for continuing to allow draconian DRM restrictions in other Apple hardware and software products.

Writing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, activist Richard Esguerra saw a connection between DRM and iTunes new tiered pricing scheme. "Apple's announcement comes nearly a year after Amazon.com's DRM-free MP3 deals went live, demonstrating that the record labels were holding the DRM card until they could wring business concessions from Apple (in the form of variable pricing)," he wrote. "This just underscores that DRM is not really about stopping piracy, but rather about leverage over authorized distributors."

Esguerra went on to submit a long list of other areas in which Apple products and policy still follow DRM requirements and the unpopular Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They include locked-down movies and TV programs in the iTunes store.

Slashdot commenters have run the gamut from unaccepting of Apple's practices to sympathetic. Declared poster Zish: "Purchasing or using technology restricted with DRM only serves to validate DRM. If you validate, you also enable. If you enable, you suggest (even passively) that it could be applied further. What you eventually see is a slow, calculated erosion of your rights."

However, not everyone is critical of Apple. Poster V1 praised Apple’s slow-as-you-go approach to free media: "It's easing the music industry into free music at a pace it's willing to go. It's something that the consumer can tolerate, and something the industry can tolerate. Consumers will never accept lockdown, but the industry eventually should accept fredom of format. Just need to give it some time."

Motley Fools' Tim Beyers sees Apple's latest move as a win for shareholders. "Amazon, Microsoft, and others have used the iTunes-music-won't-work-anywhere-but-your-iPod stick to beat up the iEmpire for years," he wrote. "The agreement should also deepen Apple's long-term partnerships with labels like Warner Music and Sony BMG, which now gets to avoid what looked to be a DRM death sentence."

Currently, iTunes DRM-protected music lets users transfer songs and videos to up to five computers, burn seven copies of the same playlist to CD, and sync to an unlimited number of iPods. Shoppers can avoid copyright hassles and their popular workarounds by opting for DRM-less iTunes Plus songs, which cost the same 99 cents. So far, 8 million of the 10 million iTunes Store songs have been stripped of DRM, but it costs 30 cents to upgrade each old song a user might already own, according to News.com. Amazon has less than half of Apple’s inventory but all songs are copyright free and start at only 79 cents.