Re:Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential
by rmc on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @04:48AM
(#7056195)
Actually I think you can also attribute it to (a) the iPod becoming massively popular and becoming synonmous with "portable music player", (b) Only Apple DRM and non-DRM-able MP3s supported on the iPod.
The iPod won the music player market, so if you tried to sell music with DRM you need to either (i) play by Apple's rules or (ii) have mundane tech users being confused when they can't play the music they bought on the what at become THE standard music player.
In 2006, during discusion of the Broadcast Flag DRM, an 82 year old senator was given an iPod and started to realise that lots of DRM wouldn't work with it. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2006/01/history-and-senator-st...
Re:Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential
by RexRollman on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @06:40AM
(#7056480)
True, but the Apple music beast was really created by the music industry who insisted on them using DRM in the first place.
Re:Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential
by mseebach on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @08:47AM
(#7056961)
Yes, Apple did a bait-and-switch on the music industry. First they won by playing by the rules, then they used their dominance to change the rules.
Re:Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential
by pajop on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @05:09AM
(#7056248)
I agree with this. When I was buying physical music CDs and play it on my laptop - different CDs had different DRM formats. After a while, I had 6-7 different DRM-enabled players. I stopped playing physical CDs on my laptop after that.
Apple should get significant credit here. It was Steve Jobs' open letter of 2007-02-06 to the big four labels calling for them to go DRM free that got the ball rolling. EMI agreed, and Apple started selling DRM-free tracks from them on 2007-05-27.
Amazon's public beta of their MP3 store launched on 2007-09-25, four months after Apple had started selling DRM-free music. Amazon was the first to get contracts in place with all four major labels for DRM-free music.