Digital Rights in the US and Korea

As I have spent a good deal of my free time here in Seoul trying to find a good place to listen to Korean (and Japanese, and Chinese, and Western) music online as well as a good P2P site for downloading songs that I find and like, I thought I'd post a link to this article from Carlo Longino at Mobhappy lamenting the incompatibility that DRM technology has spawned in the US digital media markets.

After querying my colleagues on the state of affairs in Korea, I found that the majority of downloaded music still comes to PCs in MP3 format over unrestricted P2P networks (they estimated over 50% for this). Most people still listen to unprotected music files on portable MP3 players (Suwon, Samsung and iRiver together have over 60% of the market compared to iPod's 3%), but an increasing number are beginning to do so on their mobile phones as well. One telecom operator (KTF) allows unrestricted MP3s to be transferred to their phones, but these files can only be listened to for 3 days. Another operator, SK Telecom, allows unrestricted files to be transferred to the phones and listened to for 10 years. All operators also have services for downloading directly to the phone in formats other than MP3 (for cheaper prices than MP3s and with unrestricted listening), but these formats are capy-protected and are incompatible with other services and devices.

All in all, the multiplicity of available download formats and file-sharing standards seems to indicate that digital rights management (especially as it converges with mobile telephony) has caused some standardization and incompatibility headaches here in Korea just as it has in the US, with the major difference being that telecom operators and telephone manufacturers seem to be the ones setting the standards here (with probable behind the scenes pressure from music producers) whereas it is the record companies, MP3 player producers, and software providers leading this effort in America.

I'm not sure where this will lead in the next couple years, but I agree with one of the comments on the article above (courtesy of Mike Rhee at Chicago Public Radio), that in addition to a rewriting of DMCA and/or reframing the DRM issue in the US, consumers around the world will have to succumb to the paradigm change that perhaps music in the future will most often not be "owned" as has been the tradition since the phonograph but merely "listened to" or "rented" on a variety of devices across a variety of platforms. Clearly these types of services are already beginning to emerge...