In News.com, John Borland reports that record labels are unhappy that Apple is able to offer more consumer-friendly download products than the labels would like: Music moguls trumped by Steve Jobs?: “Frustrated at what they see as Jobs’ intransigence on song pricing and other issues, some record executives are now turning their hopes toward other partners, particularly mobile phone carriers eager to get into the business of selling music. They see this new focus as a way to broaden the digital music business, and lessen Apple’s dominance over their market in the process.”
Apparently, the studios are upset that Apple is giving consumers something that is easy to use and is unregulated enough for the vast majority of uses. Anti-DRM absolutists undoubtedly feel that the Apple implementation is crippled, and there are likely a non-trivial number of outlier uses that are presumptively Fair Uses, but prohibited by the FairPlay DRM. However, the major label copyright owners would much rather see music services work like the mobile phone ringtone or mobile data services. These mobile phone services are deterrent to use, because they attempt to monetize every aspect of the transaction and nickel and dime consumers. These are generally not consumer-friendly services that offer good value.
Elsewhere, Derek Slater breaks the news that hackers are set to crack Napster’s Windows Media DRM scheme (note that this is not the Napster-to-Go “Janus” DRM). A Copyfighter’s Musings: The Cracking of Napster WMA DRM:
Cody and co. are apparently very near an implementation of a utility that will allow people to turn songs acquired through Napster Light (the a la carte service) and Premium (the non-portable subscription service) into unencrypted files. You have to have paid for the songs first to do this circumvention, because the keys have to be retrieved from Napster. This tool will actually circumvent and remove the DRM, rather than recording from the sound card or employing other similar workarounds to create unencrypted files.
