Correct. It is still illegal to make copies of music. However, the definition of legal copies is somewhat hard to determine.
Right now, under Apple’s usage rights, I am allowed to burn copies of music that I own and share them with friends. This is legal.
I have a friend who bought an album through iTunes. He is allowed to burn a CD with this music and give it as a gift to his friends, because this is covered by the iTunes usage rights.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a CD burner on his computer and so he asked me to help him burn the CD. I didn’t want to de-authorize my computer and re-authorize it, so I sent him over to an old computer I had with a DVD burner. Unfortunately, the DVD burner was flaky and so he could not burn it.
So I will have to un-authorize my computer, authorize it with his account and burn the CD.
What’s interesting about this is that this is all legal, just terribly inconvenient. Rules are being enforced fairly, but in a way that makes it a lot harder to do something that is perfectly legal by the usage rights to do.
The EMI tracks will have the same usage rights, but they will not be enforced. So if he bought the EMI tracks, he could copy them over to my computer and I could burn them onto a CD for him.
You might say, then, that this implicitly says that it’s OK to give copies of CDs of iTunes music to your friends. In fact, you can burn up to 7 copies of the same song sequence in a row, so it’s even legal to give away seven copies of your music. This implies that “normal” usage rights allow you to make that kind of distribution.
What is illegal is to go to a peer to peer music sharing network and make these copies available to 10,000,000 of your closest friends, because that will destroy potential sales of albums. If you give songs to your friends, they might still buy the singer’s new album, or tell their friends about it and convince them to buy it. But if you do the same to the public, they’ll just wait for more “free” music to become available.
So you can see that what you can legally do is different from what’s easy or convenient to do, which in turn is different from what’s clearly illegal that you can get away with doing anyway.
The DRM-free music will make it easier for you to do what’s legal, and hopefully not too many additional people will abuse their usage rights by going to the peer to peer networks where the real damage is done.
I think people are most excited about DRM-free music because they want to stream music using devices incompatible with FairPlay DRM. For example there are devices designed to stream music to speakers throughout your house. You would be able to use these devices with the EMI DRM-free music but not with other iTunes music.
I don’t think too many people are going to be interested in buying music from iTunes and putting it in their Zunes or even Sandisk Sansas. I think Apple realizes this is unlikely to say the least to do much to their entrenched music player market position and so from their viewpoint the DRM is nothing but a nuisance that was necessary at the time to get the record labels on board.
Hope that helps.
D
The usage rights that you have are granted by apple, without them even with DRM-Free music, it would be illegal to make a copy onto a cd.
I’m looking forward to using DRM-free iTunes on my cowon and sansa mp3 players. EMI has a huge collection of old recording I can’t buy anywhere, if they start posting the really old archives up on iTunes, I’m looking forward to d/l’ing some 1960’s jazz EMI has rights to, but has never released in digital format.