Microsoft and Apple are not willing to pay EMI for refusing DRM

6th March 2007

EMI suspended negotiations with the companies, the owners of online music services, says E-Commerce Times. The negotiations concern possible refuse of EMI use copy protection technologies, which EMI implements into the music from their catalogue. Trends of licensing music, which can be freely copied, EMI discussed with Apple, Microsoft, RealNetworks, Yahoo and Amazon. But the negotiators failed to come to agreement about the sum, retailers will have to pay to Record Company. All the four companies have found this sum too high, and negotiations had stopped. The main term of EMI was the fact that the companies should pay beforehand as compensation for the possibility of music copying. And the music sellers via the Internet are concerned about the other thing: how much will they have to raise tracks and albums cost if they agree with of EMI`s terms. It has been already known, that the recording studio`s announcement of selling part of its disks without protection against copying, have caused high agitation in the industry and were approved by the hard-line opponents of DRM. However, until quite recently, the label representatives said that EMI would never refuse the use of DRM completely.