As Peter Cassidy, director of communications for the security company Blue Spike, observes, "Putting a lock on the CD or music is not about making a transaction doable, pleasurable and honest. Why put a lock on it when you can put a payment mechanism on it? The first step is an authentication scheme to make sure you know what is being consumed, and SDMI has the talent to do that."

Of course, even assuming that the record labels and hardware and software industries are smart enough to move more quickly toward the creation of a celestial-jukebox-like device, there will still be free, pirated music widely distributed online for a long time to come.

CDs won't disappear anytime soon -- certainly not until the vast majority of the worldwide population has adopted digital music as their first and foremost medium for music consumption, a process that could take decades. And as long as there are CDs there will be rampant music piracy online -- because even if SDMI implements watermarks on future CDs, there will still be plenty of hackers capable of cracking those watermarks. Sure, the audio quality may not be terrific, but an awful lot of college kids listening to dewatermarked Madonna tunes over tinny speakers and cheap stereos aren't going to care.

The onus, again, is on the recording industry to make their own subscription-based offerings so tempting that you won't want to go through the bother of cracking or downloading pirated music. As Rob Reid, CEO of Listen.com, puts it, "If people can pirate for free, but it's hard to find things and it's hard to get good quality, most people who have more money and less time than they used to have will feel fine paying $10 [for an industry-approved service] and getting a better experience."

Likewise, if the music industry really wants to convert the pirating masses into paying jukebox customers, they have to make the system bigger, better, easier to use and more pervasive than the Napster-like P2P services that we currently use. They can't put too many limits on what you can or can't do with the music you buy; they can't make it too difficult to use or too expensive. If they do these things, no one will buy -- and music will continue to be as free and freely distributed as it is now.

Companies like Listen.com (which has partnerships with all the major record labels) and Bertelsmann and Universal are clearly already thinking of ways to turn P2P services like Napster and Scour into secure subscription services; let's hope they do it right. And the opportunity is now, while Napster and Scour face the very real possibility of being turned off for good. As Reid observes, "There's a narrow window in which the industry can provide a facsimile [of Napster or Scour] at a fair price that consumers could embrace. That window is the next two to three months, and if that is not done, or if there's just a few months' lag time before that experience is broadly available, then the unplanned confluence of hackers and tens of millions of consumers will create their own system that can circumvent anything that the industry puts in front of consumers. The opportunity to create a huge artistic bonanza will be missed."

The Free Software Project
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