Researchers at Rice University and Duke University said that the level of piracy in digital music could possibly be decreased if intrusive copy protection features were removed.
It was Napster that sent the music industry, some artists and especially the RIAA down the road of piracy paranoia. For the better half of the last decade, every owner of a computer was labeled as a potential music pirate by default and the industry chose a path to lock down its music rather than innovate and catch up with a changing music distribution model.
Various approaches of digital rights management (DRM), a euphemistic description of copy protection, were taken and often seen as a trial-and-error exercise to find out how much copy protection the consumer was willing to accept. In the end, there may be a chance that most copy protection will fade away, at least if the conclusions Rice University and Duke University have published.
According to their result, "only the legal users pay the price and suffer from the restrictions," as they are prevented from making backup copies, for example. Even if users are willing to pay for music, DRM can be a turn-off and promote music piracy. Digital music without DRM could be a natural way to decrease piracy, the researchers claim.
"Removal of these restrictions makes the product more convenient to use and intensifies competition with the traditional format (CDs), which has no DRM restrictions," said Dinah Vernik, a marketing professor at Rice University. "This increased competition results in decreased prices for both downloadable and CD music and makes it more likely that consumers will move from stealing music to buying legal downloads."
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