With digital rights management (DRM) so much in the media lately, tonight’s little rant will hopefully illustrate what can easily go wrong with the entire idea.

I own a recording of Yo-Yo Ma entitled “Solo”. The first track on it is Mark O’Connor’s Appalachia Waltz, arranged appropriately enough for solo cello. I was listening to it today and realised that this was a piece I’d really like to learn. A quick google search revealed that Mark O’Connor has his own web site, and that through an arrangement with a company called Net4music I could actually immediately buy the sheet music online.

This was way cool. So I bought it. And this was where my troubles started.

First of all I have nothing against Net4music. I think it’s a fantastic idea - being able to buy sheet music across the Internet and print it out is the sort of thing that reaffirms my belief in the net’s inherent usefulness, even when ABC News claims today that porn is the driving force behind innovation on the web.

However, in order to ensure that my $4 doesn’t allow me to republish this music Net4music uses encrypted PDF files, and their own custom plugin into Acrobat. Fair enough, I suppose, but this led to problem one: I downloaded the PDF on my G4 laptop, and their plugin doesn’t work in OSX. Fine, perhaps they meant for it to work on OS9. So I reboot my laptop into OS9 for the first time ever, and then bring up the file in Acrobat Reader.

Problem two: the plugin apparently communicates a host key across the Internet to ensure that the PDF (encrypted for a host key) can only be printed once on the machine on which it was purchased. And the host key of my laptop when in OSX (which is where I bought it) is apparently different when in OS9 (which is where I can print it) - so I couldn’t print that file from my laptop at all.

At this point I’d only spent $4, and so I had no problem paying another $4 and purchasing the same sheet music again - but this time from my Windows XP desktop machine. This time everything seemed to be okay, and the Secured Print option wasn’t greyed out from the File menu.

Now I don’t have a printer at home, but I do have access to one at work. I thought I’d try configuring a generic Postscript printer that just printed to disk, print out the PDF to a Postscript file, and bring that to work for printing on the Linux network. So I configured a generic Apple printer, ensured that a test file worked, and tried printing the newly purchased PDF. At this point I quickly ran into problem three: Acrobat anticipated this, and won’t let me print secure PDF files to disk.

So at this point I’ve spent $8 and have nothing to show for it. Which leads to my point, which isn’t about money (sheet music tends to be fairly expensive anyways and I’d gladly pay much more than I have already in this instance). It’s that DRM has, in this case, been nothing but an absolute hindrance - and I’ve never had any nefarious intent here; all I’ve been doing is trying to get a file to print in my little world of multiple operating platforms and networks. I feel conflicted between respecting the rights of the composer (who in all honesty probably has no idea that any of this is going on) - and the feeling that I also should have the right to dissect this PDF file in any damn way I please. And it’s exactly these sorts of problems which leads to people like Dmitry Sklyarov writing tools which circumvent DRM for entirely plausible reasons - and it illustrates why the DMCA is stupid beyond belief.

I’m still sometimes on the fence when it comes to the ideas behind DRM; partly that’s because I’m a developer of licensed software, and also because it was the realisation that I’d never make a living as a musician that led me to where I am nowadays. (Interlude: I have pretty strong views on the entire Napster/mp3 debacle, a summary of which is: I do believe piracy of mp3s hurts legitimate musicians, but I also subscribe to a more radical view: that the musicians who are hurt by this are mostly overpaid anyways, that paying for recorded music is soon to be a thing of the past because any attempts at imposing DRM on recordings will ultimately fail, and that musicians in the near future will have to rely on earnings from live performance, much like musicians in ages past.) Based on today’s minor experience though, I’m tilting towards the anti-DRM camp - and have definitely entrenched my position against the DMCA.