Disney try to break the DRM rules!

This morning, reading some news, I was amazed by what I read: Disney will release the new Jesse McCartney album without DRM!

DisneyWell, it IS a good news, for more than one reason I will try to explain later on, but the point that shocked me was not the fact that someone has released a DRM free album, but that the one who did it is Disney! Disney is well known for its restrictive ideas (time limited DVD, something like “…this DVD will autodestroy in 5 seconds…“).

Well, why is an album without DRM a good test for the major? In my opinion I think that DRM is only a waste of resource and freedom. The majors invest millions of dollars to find an uncrackable protection for their music and films, but they are usually mocked by the first teenager who look at this multimilion technology with fun, cracking it in some days. Who do you think pay for the millions of dollars spent to invent new short-lifed DRM? The customers! Now, the customers are the first to blame the major for the high prices, and they also have to pay something more to grant them the possibility to limit the customers’ freedom to access what they buy.

iTunes 7 has been released with a new DRM, that has been cracked in some hours. I think the frustration of those poor developers who spent days and days creating the new technology, only to be witness of its failure in few hours.

Disney, yes Disney, I was loosing the point. Normally an album is usually cracked few hours before its release (if not before it) and the “thieves” start flooding the unprotected copy of it through P2P. So, the major that produced that DRM-ed album can see its work and its money flooded in some hours, without counting the fact that a lot of customers will try NOT to buy a DRM-ed product again (they don’t work wherever you want, even if you had paid for it!)

Disney is probably start thinking that they will not be able to stop these “thieves”, and that the DRM as it is today is not good enough to fight a war lost at the very beginning. They will release the new album without DRM on Yahoo, in order to see what will change… Maybe they will understand that the piracy level will not increase, but they will understand that without releasing the new DRM technology they had saved millions of dollars. Then they could also think that, removing that amount of money from the price of a CD, more people will buy it, without downloading from the P2P network.

Will they be SO sharp to see all this, becoming the first major open itself to the idea that being greedy does not pay?

…a good move from Disney: they should get a point in my personal “praise list“, only for the fact that they are thinking that remaining in the “Dark Side of the Force” is not a good thing… not for their visibility and neither for their money!

By the way, does anyone of you know who Jesse McCartney is?!?!?