Music Copyright Protections
Threaten Users' Ability to Enjoy

By THOMAS E. WEBER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

MUSIC LOVERS, beware. You may be lucky enough to get Apple's sleek iPod, which holds 1,000 tunes in digital format, or some other MP3 player this holiday season. Unfortunately, it could be useless in a year or two, unable to play new music.

Don't blame Apple or the other portable player makers. It's the fault of the recording industry, which keeps tightening restrictions on what you can do with the music you buy. These constraints are ostensibly meant to thwart the rampant copying unleashed by Napster and its successors. But they also threaten consumers' ability to enjoy the music they've paid for.

The problem is that record companies don't seem to want to sell you music anymore. They want to lease it, collecting rent checks in perpetuity. People who fail to keep up on their payments may well find that their music collections have evaporated.

You can see this trend in new online music services that seek to offer legitimate alternatives to file-sharing services -- but put all sorts of limits on when and where you can listen to songs. It's also apparent in new copy-protected compact discs that redefine the idea of "owning" a CD.

IF YOU GO to the record store and buy a CD that incorporates copy protection, you'll find that you can't "rip" it, or transfer the songs onto a personal computer. (Because of glitches in the copy-protection technology, you may not be able to play the disc in a regular CD player either, but that's another issue.)

Should you care? Absolutely.

I've ripped hundreds of CDs onto my computer but I'm not a criminal or a pirate. These are all CDs that I paid (or overpaid) for. I often prefer to listen to the music I've bought on my computer. My PC has decent stereo speakers, and I spend a lot of time working there. But it's more than that. With the songs on my hard drive, I have instant access to my entire collection -- much better than rooting through piles of discs. I also like to transfer the files to my portable MP3 player so I can listen at work without schlepping CDs back and forth. And I take songs from several albums and burn them onto custom-mix CDs ("Still More 80s") for the car.

Copy-proof CDs won't let me do any of that. Certainly record companies are entitled to take measures to stymie widespread copying, in which hundreds or thousands of illegal duplicates are made from a single CD. But somehow the legacy of Napster has given all copying a bad name.

Did you know that under U.S. copyright law, it's generally considered permissible to make copies of music you've purchased? "It's completely legal," explains Jessica Litman, a law professor at Wayne State University and the author of "Digital Copyright." As long as you're making a copy for private, noncommercial use, you're pretty much in the clear. File-sharing services have gotten into trouble by enabling copying on such a massive scale that it's not really noncommercial even if no money changes hands.

NOW, AFTER TWO years of complaining about services like Napster and KaZaA without offering alternatives, record companies are finally fielding their own online music networks. But guess what? Those networks don't just prevent illegal copies. They block other copies, too.

Look at RealNetworks' new RealOne Music service. It costs $9.95 a month and lets you download 100 songs (saving record companies the cost of producing and distributing actual CDs). But you can't burn the songs onto a CD or transfer them onto a portable player. You can't move them to another PC either. To do that, "you will need to set up a different customer account and purchase another subscription," RealNetworks says on its site.

Those 100 songs, by the way, expire after a month. If you find a song you really like, you can keep it active, but it gets charged against the next month's allotment. RealNetworks argues, with some merit, that it's not a bad deal. "You get to try on the order of eight to 10 CDs a month, for half the price of a single CD," says Erik Flannigan, vice president of music services and programming. But even so, are consumers really ready for music that expires?

Pressplay, a soon-to-launch rival from Sony and Universal, will be a bit more friendly to portable use. You'll be able to burn songs onto CDs, but quotas will govern how many. "We want to show consumers we understand what they want," says Pressplay CEO Andy Schuon. Transfers to portable MP3 players will still be forbidden.

Eventually, online services hope to support portable players -- but only when those devices can count how many times you've listened to a song or check to see what date it is. That way the services can wipe out the songs if you're behind on your rent. The approach could make listening to new music about as enjoyable as a cab ride in a traffic jam with the meter running.

If you object to what the music industry is doing, don't buy CDs labeled copy-protected. If you get a disc home and you can't copy it, take it back to the store. To keep posted on what's happening, visit http://www.fatchucks.com/, a Web site where music fan Chuck Heffner lists CDs that listeners have reported have problems. And if you decide to pay for an online music service, make sure it gives you what you want.