Looks like Iomega Corp is wooing the besieged recording industry with its latest technology initiative. Iomega has signed a non- binding letter of intent with Liquid Audio and with online music store Soundstone.com. The three companies have said they will collaborate on Tunus Collectus, an internet music-of-the-month club. Tunus Collectus will use the Liquid Music Player with a special record-to-Zip download button. Users can download singles from SoundStone’s web site onto an Iomega Zip disk. They can replay the content, but they can’t make copies to give to their friends. The songs will be encrypted with Iomega’s Record/Play copy protection technique, which is designed so that when music or other content is copied onto an Iomega storage product, the data is bound to that particular disk. The idea is to make Zip, Jaz and Clik disks safe for copyright- protected internet content – and by implication, impossible for pirates to use. This is a big concern for the music publishing industry in particular. The proliferation of the MP3 audio compression standard has made it easy for music fans to exchange high-quality copies of songs over the internet. Record labels don’t want to relinquish these customers as potential sources of revenue. If Iomega wants the support of the established content providers for its storage products, it has little choice but to build in a copyright-protection mechanism like Liquid Audio’s digital watermark. As the president of Iomega’s personal storage division, Edward Briscoe, puts it: In essence, the Zip disk of the digital future can be used as a VCR for the internet. Note his careful choice of analogy. A VCR can be used to make copies for personal use, but subsequent copies are difficult to make and of far poorer quality.
