Apple recently announced it will remove its “digital locks” to its music files which control the contents from its iTune service. With this move, what will be its impact to the recording industry?
The recording industry imposed “digital locks” which work by controlling the music files from a certain site. This requirement is adopted by Apple iTune service, but just recently, the company announced it will drop this copy-control—much of the dismay of the group.
According to Apple, it is planning to offer millions of songs without imposing digital locks. Meanwhile, published reports said that the company has long been planning to remove the restricting program but often pressured by label groups.
With Apple’s decision, the record group should decide for a more constructive way to deal with file-sharing activities.
The group has long been in a deadlock battle with various bitTorrent sites that it was determined to resort to measurements to combat online piracy—much of these are controversial due to its nature.
In 2003, the record industry filed a mass lawsuit to more than 35,000 file-sharers who allegedly committed piracy by downloading copyrighted materials. But last year, all these charges were withdrawn due to its legal complexity and controversy.
While some experts believe the reason behind the withdrawal of the lawsuit is not just about its being time-consuming and extremely complex, but also very expensive. They also believe that this decision was long overdue since this initial strategy was not a constructive way to address the piracy problem.
Just recently, the recording industry announced it will shift to another tactic in combating online piracy. By working with Internet service providers (ISP), the group can penalize illegal file-sharers by slowing down their connection, and if they continue to do illegal downloads and ignore the warnings, their Internet connection will be cut off.