Potential Effect of Digital Locks on Music Industry Clouds

Since Bill C-32, an Act to amend the Copyright Act, died with the election, the new Tory majority government had promised in their campaign to reintroduce and pass the same bill, albeit with a new number, in the next Parliament. It is unclear what, if any, changes will be made to C-32 upon reintroduction.

If the Bill is passed in its current incarnated form, one of the more contentious aspects are the digital-lock provisions. The Copyright Modernization Act proposed to make it illegal to dismantle digital locks on digital media, locking down content, music and movies, to specific devices. This would mean anyone with more than one media-capable device, or anyone who wanted to swap a netbook for an iPad say, would be required to repurchase their existing movie, television episode and music libraries for the other/new device(s). Provisions like that would pretty much encourage piracy.

But for the far-sighted, another issue arises.

What effect would C-32′s digital lock provisions have on the growing cloud-based music service trend? Amazon launched  Amazon Cloud Player in late March, Google started its Google Music Beta in the US two weeks ago and Apple is heavily rumoured to have purchased the iCloud domain name and has even reached licensing deals with three of the four largest American music labels, Warner Music Group Corp, followed by EMI Group and Sony Music Entertainment. Universal Music Group, the largest of the four, is reported to be within days of a deal.

C-32 would make it illegal to dismantle the digital locks that lock down content and tie music and movies to specific devices. But the very point of cloud music services is that users who have purchased and/or uploaded their music to the Cloud can access it from anywhere or any device so long as they have a working internet browser.

For the currently upload-based services of Amazon and Google, if C-32′s digital lock provisions force content to be device specific, then using their cloud services would limit a user’s access, from a certain device, to that media content in the cloud that was uploaded from that same device, if that is possible to do. Or perhaps the digital locks would prevent the uploading altogether. Either way, it defeats the purpose of using a cloud in the first place, to make the access to your media content more flexible and available. In such a case, I don’t see why upload-based cloud music services would come to Canada.

Or with Apple’s iCloud service, because they have managed to negotiate licensing agreements with America’s major music labels, pending Universal, they would not even require users to upload their own music. They can simply scan a user’s iTunes library, then allow that user to listen to those same songs from the music cloud, seemingly overriding digital locks altogether. For example, if a user has a Justin Timberlake album in his or her library, that album would be available to stream through Apple’s cloud service, leaving the original copy’s digital lock intact, but now available to be streamed onto any web-browser capable device. Digital locks potentially have not effect on such a service.

So in their current state, digital locks could either defeat music clouds’ purposes or be of no effect at all. Of course, cloud-based music servers are still in their foetal stages in the US, and they certainly have not reached our shores yet. But as with any major American online service, like Netflix for instance, it is only a matter of time. And it seems, particularly with the digital lock provisions, its proponents would rather choose restrictive laws over encouraging the music industry to meet the new challenges of a digital age and innovate.