Today's story/lesson is called "What Not To Do When Distributing Content." Otherwise known as "Why Certain People At Sony BMG Are Morons."
This is brought to you by that fact that I'm feeling compelled to write about things which have almost no personal bearing on me, the fact that I'm in a slightly snarky mood tonight, and the letter 47.
Once upon a time, there were people called 'musicians'. They played instruments, or sang, or maybe just pounded on things, and had coins or bits of food thrown at them if people liked their music a lot. This also sometimes happened if people just wanted them to shut up and go away. Music was a bit hard to come by, in those times: if you wanted music, you had to bring musicians around in person. This made it rather annoying, not to mention expensive, to have background music while studying. You generally couldn't listen to the same song twice, since nobody could quite remember how they'd performed it last time. Quite coincidentally, people were also fond of drinking large mugs of ale at this time period.
Somebody eventually invented sheet music. This is the person to blame for all the hideously mangled copies of "Fur Elise - 1st Grade Version" lying around, so it's probably just as well I can't remember who it was. At any rate, it soon became all the rage to play pieces of music sort of like they were played the previous time. And the time before that. This also quickly led to repetitive exercises for the training of small children who weren't at all interested in learning how to play the bass violin.
Things managed like this for quite a long time. You still had to hire your musicians and whatnot, but at least you could get a semi-accurate estimate of what the music would sound like. This greatly decreased the number of dirges played at weddings, for instance. Unfortunately, technology was soon to make a completely unprecedented leap. Edison was about to wake up in a cold sweat, with visions of sound-recording devices still running through his brain. Somewhat like sugar-plums, but without the sugar. Or the plums.
Instead, there was much money to be made. Music could now be recorded and played at a later date! Even at a completely different location! The technology grew by leaps and bounds, discarding each new recording media as a bigger and better one poked its golden rays over the horizon. You could now go the store and buy music. You could play it in your house, over and over again. You could annoy your neighbors with it, without going to all the expense of hiring your own personal orchestra! It was an amazing and confusing time. New recording companies sprang up to offer a helping hand to the dumbfounded and hopelessly lost musicians.
At some point, on a slightly different, but still connected, timeline, computers were invented. With them came the idea of digital information, and also the idea of putting small speakers in the computer to make cryptic beeping noises when nothing was working. Eventually, someone realized you could use computer speakers to play music, after storing this music in a form the computer could read, and digital audio was born. Of course, it didn't really take off until some other bright soul came up with a form of media that you could put on top of said speakers without having your music turn into static. This amazing breakthrough was called the CD, which stands for Clinically Depressed. The inventor was going through a difficult stage of life, and didn't believe in acronyms which corresponded to the technology for which they were made.
The recording companies were very happy with this. CDs were cheap to make, and were purported to last longer and still be used to play high-quality music, increasing customer demand. They also were capable of getting scratched, further increasing customer demand. Customer demand being very important, these CDs, and the associated CD players, began to sell quite well, Everyone was enormously pleased with themselves.
Until, one day, the unthinkable happened. Since CD drives had been introduced to computers as a new means of distributing software, some bright, intelligent young person decided that a device to make CDs should sell well. Clearly, it did. The recording companies were slightly shocked. Digital audio, such as that distributed on CDs, could be copied perfectly. And now this power was in the hands of the common man. It was clear that man would only use this power for evil, making hundreds of copies of the CDs they owned, and spreading them all over, depriving the recording companies of all their hard-earned pennies! An outrage, to say the least.
And so the search began for a means to stop this menace and save the economies of the free world. After many years of distributing purely audio CDs, the recording companies began putting little bits of software on the CDs that would be loaded onto computers into which the CDs were inserted. These bits of software were meant to stop people from making gazillions of copies of the CDs they had bought, and distributing them around the world. That was the record companies' job, and they paid the musicians a small percentage of the money made from the sale of these CDs for the privilege. Sometimes this meant that the people who bought the music couldn't make backup copies of the CDs, or play the music in anything except the recording-company-provided music software program, but that was merely an unfortunate side-effect.
However, it was soon discovered that the common man was creative, sneaky, and not to be trusted. People were finding ways to get around these small bits of software, called Digital Rights Management software, sometimes known as Diplodici Really Matter (DRM) software. Creativity is a well-known problem in the hoi polloi. But one company, called Sony BMG, thought it had the solution to this problem.
Since people were finding the software which the CDs so helpfully installed, and were removing it themselves, the obvious answer was to hide the software. And then not tell anyone how it was hidden. Or even, maybe, that parts of it existed. What the common people don't know can't hurt them. This new DRM software only worked haphazardly, as DRM software in the hands of determined copiers is apt to do, so it didn't get installed on all the CDs. Distracted by the Holy Grail of Perfectly-Working Content Management, Sony BMG wandered on, after distributing only 5 million or so of these CDs to stores.
At this point, the entire world suddenly stopped what they were doing, rushed to the nearest cliff, and proceeded to hang from the edge by their fingernails. It was an astounding sight.
Posted by Ardith at December 19, 2005 10:29 PM | TrackBack