NY Times on online music pricing

The NY Times sums up the current view of online music pricing in What Price Music?.

After all, some say, antipiracy, anticopying technology may be available within the year.

If that happens, the industry is likely to back away from the kind of pricing innovations with which it is now experimenting. Already, a strain is evident between record labels that want to restrict what consumers can do with the music they buy and the new on-line retailers, which argue that people won’t use their services if they can’t use it freely.

That right there says to me that the DMCA is stifling competition and innovation. Beyond that, copy protection does not work. It doesn’t work techincally and it doesn’t work as far as relationship with the customer is concerned. This was proven with software years ago, and that was before the Internet. With the Internet, a protection scheme can be cracked and that crack spread throughout the world within hours.