Copyleft: the magazine

We’ve been anticipating this one for sometime, but Phil Schiller just announced in his MacWorld keynote that, by the end of the first quarter of 2009, the entire iTunes catalog will be DRM-free. This puts an end to six years of DRM on Apple’s iTunes and iPods, though it will still likely be in the proprietary .M4A music format. Furthermore, it reflects the new realities of the music industry, where the record companies have finally recognized that downloads are far more important than physical media and consumers won’t put up with their music being locked up in absurd digital “rights” regimes. We just want to play songs without interference from the people from whom we legally bought them.

In other iTunes news, Apple will also be introducing differential pricing for the first time, with song prices ranging from $0.69 to $1.29. It has been reported that iTunes is already offering to upgrade people’s libraries to DRM-free versions for $0.30 per song. So go forth and liberate your music library!

(via Engadget [1],[2] and CrunchGear)

Update: The ever vigilant Cory Doctorow notes over at Boing Boing that this new DRM-free announcement only applies to songs, not audiobooks or videos. While we at Copyleft: the magazine concur with Cory’s concerns about the continued encumbering of non-music files on iTunes, I think it’s a huge step just getting the music industry to accept DRM-free music. The film industry and traditional publishing are a bit behind the learning curve here, and are going to continue to be skeptical of DRM-free online sales. But, hopefully, they’ll learn more quickly than the music industry did now that they have a solid case study of how an industry can fail by applying DRM and the success that industry will have now that downloads will be nearly universally unencumbered.