SELF-DESTRUCTING digital recordings may be the future of music and movie sales, with files auto-erasing or locking after perhaps just 20 plays or a year on your shelf. But consumer groups are concerned this could signal a future in which rental of recordings may become the only option.
The ability to limit playbacks is buried in the small print of licences for the new MPEG-4 digital recording and transmission format now used in 3G mobile phones. It is also popular with film and music traders.
MPEG-4 is a digital compression system for video recordings developed by Apple, France Telecom, Philips, Mitsubishi, Samsung and Sun. It can be used for everything from sending small video clips between mobile phones, to burning full-length movies onto a DVD.
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Crucially, MPEG-4 incorporates a new technique to lock sound, pictures and the actual playback program into a single stream of bits. Because the playback mechanism is locked into the file, it can control the number of plays or render the file useless after a certain time. Subsections of the licence (see ) reveal how this will be used for a system called Stored Data. For instance, a video file can be downloaded to a blank disc, but the disc cannot be played until a fee is paid for a key to unlock the recording. The customer then gets to listen or 鈥渁t least 20 times鈥� or 鈥渇or at least 365 days鈥�, according to the license. The recording is then locked unless another key is bought.
The 20/365 option was quietly added to the licence after talks with the movie and music industries. Larry Horn of the MPEG-4 Licensing Authority in Denver, Colorado, says they wanted to create a new way to buy content that would be halfway between outright ownership and pay per view. 鈥淟imiting use is clearly what the industry wants,鈥� says Horn.
This worries Julian Midgley of consumer pressure group the Campaign for Digital Rights. 鈥淚t opens the door for a variety of pay-per-use models. Instead of buying music, you may be forced to rent it.鈥�