Sony has recently announced that there will be making available music that is not DRM protected.

In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned. Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony (SNE) and Bertelsmann, will make at least part of its collection available without so-called digital rights management, or DRM, software some time in the first quarter, according to people familiar with the matter.

Sony BMG would become the last of the top four music labels to drop DRM, following Warner Music Group (WMG), which in late December said it would sell DRM-free songs through Amazon.com’s (AMZN) digital music store. EMI and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group announced their plans for DRM-free downloads earlier in 2007.

The legislation that gave these corporations Digital Rights was very poorly written. As a consequence consumer largely ignored the legislation and found ways to get around the protection measures. This is notable for several reasons.

A common complaint from Darwin has been that lobbyists corrupt our legislative branch leading to the passage of laws that the majority the citizenry would disagree with. I have argued that when legislation does not enjoy the support of a large block of voters that legislation will die. Either the laws will be repealed and or the citizenry will largely ignore the laws. In both instances, the ‘corruptive’ effect of lobbyists is diminished by the fact that the bad law fails to have the desired effect. It’s not hard to see the fact that the four major music distribution companies have realized that the laws they were able to get passed have been ignored and therefore are willing to abandon the legal rights DRM grants them.

It’s also noteworthy because the failure of the recording companies to make consumers respect their rights underscores just how helpless corporations are at forcing their will on the consumer. All four recording companies at the start of this digital era attempted to force consumers to respect the digital rights given to them by law. Millions of consumers simply ignored these companies’ attempts at coercion. Consumers could easily ignore the company’s coercive attempts because not a single one of these corporations could directly force a consumer to respect digital rights. In cases where they did force someone to obey the company’s digital rights it’s was always mediated through the state via the courts.

One final thing to note. The recording companies turn around on this position started when one of the recording companies began using a non DRM rights model to sell songs through Apple. Once it was noted that success could be attained through that matter competitive force caused the other recording to begin flipping their models. Thus, we see its free market competition that brought about the change. A change that is more in line with what the citizenry wants, but also does not require any of the onerous regulatory laws someone like Darwin would demand. Regulatory law is simply unnecessary because the markets responded to the citizen before enough political will was marshaled for the passage of regulations.

Lobbyists are helpless to force citizen to do the will of their corporation. Securing the passage of laws that most citizen disagree with will not protect the company or industry’s interest since the citizenry will simply ignore those laws. I should like to point out that the Digital Rights Media Act of 1998 was no doubt passed because the vast majority of citizen did not understand what the law meant. It seems to me that lobbyists are most effective at influencing law when the majority of the citizenry is ignorant of the significance of the law. If true, it’s difficult for me to get to upset at the ‘corrupting’ influence of lobbyists. If anyone is to blame it’s the ignorant citizenry. Seems to me the lobbyists are clever by taking advantage of relatively neutral political climate to get their legislation passed.

And as this story shows, no matter how clever the corporations lobbyist are, companies are helpless to force the citizenry to do their bidding. As I have said before, and I’m sure I will say again, I can choose to trust a corporation. I have no choice but to trust the government.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Lobbyists, Regulation, Coercion, Capitalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.