Slashdot Mirror
SDMI; MusicNet; Felton
The NYTimes had an article this morning about MusicNet, a new venture of Real and the record industry to provide pay-per-listen music to the masses. (Read the AP version if you don't want to register with the Times.) Meanwhile, CNET reports that SDMI adjourned from their most recent meeting without picking any technologies to go forward with - an admission that they are all thoroughly broken, by the team led by Professor Felton, who spoke yesterday at Stanford.
I know nothing they do alters _my_ intention of putting my music out there for the widest possible distribution, preferably using P2P networks to supplement ordinary web sites.
So, in the long run, in order to be able to compete with a rent-music model, the music industry has to be able to literally suppress me and take away my ability to legally put my music out there for people to have- because there are loads of people in my position, including a lot of the skilled musicians of decades past who are out of fashion now.
In order for this 'rental' nonsense to really work, the biz has to _suppress_ other music in much the same way Microsoft has to suppress open source software to hang onto its monopoly.
I'm curious to see what they'll try to do. Besides crushing all P2P mediums and changing the consumer media format to something where you need a $200,000 license for the encryption key to produce media for the players, that is. o_O
The economics of scarcity that permitted the media industries to grow into their present form has been changed irrevocably by digital technology. People are likely to continue to spend money on music and other media, but "how much money?" and "under what circumstances?" have become open questions. It's just gotta suck when your business model goes *poof*. 8-)
So, as long as the yankees will be stupid, they will have the DCMCA, and region-locked DVD players.
Fortunately, it seems that the rest of the world is not as stupid as the yankees are.
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Really, what's the constructive difference between the 0.0000001% of the population which stand up for their rights by using DeCSS for fair use activities versus the 0.0000001% of the population which refuse to fatten Hollywood's content protection wallets?
Actually, come to think of it, there's a big difference. Your 60 DVDs are helping pay for the next system which isn't built so stupidly. DVD's content protection was flawed to begin with and many people (including CircutCity Divx) said so. "Fair use" by thinking you (or someone) can stay one step ahead of them technically is not a solution (and frankly, nobody cares if you go to a lot of trouble to skip some commercials). Fair Use from a corporate system that recognizes that right is.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I have said this in other places. Pay per play with regard to music just is not going to cut it. There are too many problems. The major labels want this, they want it so bad that they will crush any alternative. It is just not about money, it is about control. As long as they have it, they will be able to preserve the monopoly they have now.
Pay per play is problematic for a few reasons. (There are lots more.)
1. People are used to just buying music and being able to do what they want with it.
2. Paying by the song will be annoying. The work you do to listen is about as much as the listening itself. Besides, who listens to music at their computer. Sure we all have our mp3 collection, but how valuable is that really if you have to be at the machine to listen?? Monthly subscription models will mitigate this somewhat, but still there is the problem of copies. If people can't make them easliy, then they are still tied to their machine. Not too appealing.
3. People want to trade tracks. Why not profit off of that? Answer: Control. Alternative labels could make good use of something like Napster and friends to get known and compete. God knows the majors can't have that!
If I could predict the future....
--------------- Begin Wistful Fantasy ------------
1. RIAA -vs- Napster.
2. Napster gets neutered.
3. The slightly smarter consumer goes to one of at least 10 alternatives, or at the least just starts
trading tracks through ICQ or something similar.
4. RIAA and friends push hard for content controlled inferior means of distribution. In doing this they blow much of the gift that P2P technoloiges offer in the first place, but they take the long view, and decide maybe it is worth it, after all if they are the only means of distribution, even if it sucks, they will win in the end.
5. The slightly smarter consumer just moves the content off the content controlled platform, if they even buy any of it, and goes about business as usual...
6. The Feds watch in amusement as the battle goes on and on and on...
7. SDMI arrives stillborn, and is "supported on the windows platform", new players sporting lots of colorful logos appear. The slightly smarter consumer asks "Why?" I have that now!
8. The hardware guys don't like any of this so far because they just want to sell things, and the only way that works for the masses is if it is simple. People buy their stuff now, anything that makes that harder is not in their interest so...
9. SDMI will get about the same attention as AM Stereo did.
10. The Fed decides that they have been here before, and lays down the law. People like Hatch see that they can actually make some rules, and look good to the voters, so they do what they can to please the largest number of them. Soft money only goes so far. When push comes to shove, the RIAA does not have the numbers voterwise so they get the shorter end of this exchange.
11. Through all this the slightly smarter consumer has already found and mastered a number of alternatives. The hardware guys cater to these people as they are actually buying things. Easy, simple things, just the way they like to make them.
12. It takes the RIAA 10 years to pay off their investment in content control due to the lack of paying users on their new services. But again they take the long view and realize that they are getting paid anyway, and that they are in control.
13. RIAA begins to market around the new services in an attempt to boost revenue, and gets sued by the mainstream retailers, because of unfair competition and price fixing. RIAA is seen as trying to milk an old business model at the expense of their partners. (They are still trying to sell CD's at $16.99...)
14. New labels sprout up that utilize an alternative distribution model. It is P2P based. Their fans begin selling for them. The artists have a lot of control in the process, and share in the success. New labels make services avaliable for the small talented groups that would otherwise get looked over. Reasonably easy online access results in lots of exposure. They partner with Amazon for those more mainstream buyers that still want their traditional media, and those same angry retail outlets by helping to fund their law suits against the RIAA.
Eager to level the playing field the new labels are more than happy to invest a little as they are now beginning to take the long view of things... Because they are young, and can adapt they are confident that they can compete in the new more open distribution channel, their future looks bright indeed.
In the end, people are going to get what they have now. Access to a large music catalog unfettered with albums, and unwanted tracks. The hard truth here is not ethically correct, but simple. The service and technology is here now. Somebody is going to use it, and they are going to continue to use it. Sombody will force the issue, but they are not going to just make a new thing like this go away because everybody wants it. Would be political suicide to do otherwise and deny the advantages of the technology that is out there now ready for people to use.
--------- End wistful fantasy ------------
Do I think this will happen? Maybe.
Do I want it to happen? Oh yeah. The sooner the better. I know damn well that current P2P technology permits people the freedom to get music they want, and make a ton of money. Any other lame pay to play scheme pales in comparison. One source quoted 40million Napster users at one point. That is a lot of people that are going to realize the same thing...
Blogging because I can...
Despite what information theorists tell them, the music industry presses ahead with schemes for encryption destined for failure. It's a classic case of "I know you told me it's impossible, but we'll show you by just going ahead and doing it!"
This is a great way to waste a huge amount of money. A couple good examples are the Atomic Airplane attempts of the late 60's, and currently, President Bush's dogged determination to produce an missle defense system.
America's love of the underdog and the axle grease and spit way of getting things done can really get in the way of common sense sometimes. If the music industry would just get the fact that these watermarking and other various types of protection during widespread distribution are doomed to failure, perhaps we could all get on with enjoying some music online for a reasonable price.
Hanlon's Razor:
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Microsoft, of course, has used a lot of astroturf to accomplish this - fake calls from phony members of the general public requesting WMP because "That other one doesn't sound good but the Microsoft software always sounds good." Of course, the people in charge of making the decisions are so blinded by the simultaneous offers of assistance that they usually fall for the obvious fake calls.
These companies are probably losing lots of money on this, but they see the future profits of total subjugation to their rule as so deleriously wonderful that they will be willing to sink a lot on this for a long time.
Little does NPR realize that that kind of ass-kissing will get them the same fate as pacifica, eventually. This is a hardball game.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
As long as you keep buying DVDs I really don't think they care what you say or do.
War is necrophilia.
You can bet that the meeting entailed a lot of spite directed at Felton. Stuff like "he shouldn't be allowed to break our encryption!" or "he should of been silenced!". Why is it that people have so much trouble understanding the cryptographic process? If a good guy can crack it then a bad guy can crack it (although exactly what intentions make 'good' and 'bad' is always open to debate, especially in this case), and the more people who know about it the better.
How we know is more important than what we know.
um ... you do? i don't see that in my copy of the constitution ...
nobody
parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus
RIAA general counsel Cary Sherman told The Associated Press late Thursday that the [threatening] letter [from Oppenheim] was a mistake. "We simply weren't as sensitive as we should have been about how the letter would be perceived," Sherman said.
When asked if the RIAA would sue if the paper were published, as Felten fears, Sherman said "No."
I'm counting that as a win for the good guys...
Does anyone know what happened with the paper they wanted to present on the SDMI challenge? I had heard they (Felton et al.) where threatened by the RIAA. However, I was at ICASSP 2001 and they had a paper about the SDMI challenge. Is this the same paper?
. html (3) http://www.ee.princeton.edu/~sacraver/pubs.html
This paper explains and analyzes successful attacks submitted by the authors on four audio watermark proposals during a 3-week SDMI public challenge. Our analysis points out some weaknesses in the watermark techniques currently under SDMI consideration and suggests directions for further improvement. The paper also discusses the framework and strategies for analyzing the robustness and security of watermarking systems as well as the difficulty, uniqueness, and unrealistic expectations of the attack setup. [Keywords] audio watermark, data hiding, SDMI, attack analysis. [Websites] (1) http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/ (2) http://www.ee.princeton.edu/~minwu/sdmi/rsch_sdmi
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
considering none of the anime companies are members of the MPAA... most of their dvd are macro free (unless the j companies demand otherwise) and many are region free.
br.
no
i don't see that in my copy of the constitution
Cornell's copy of the U.S. Constitution contains a Fourth Amendment to protect some forms of privacy and a Ninth Amendment to provide for loose construction of the rights of the people, much as the "necessary and proper" clause allows Congress to spread its powers a bit. For example, the right to fair use is a Ninth Amendment extension of the First Amendment right to freedom of press; without it, the current implementation of copyright law would be on shaky constitutional ground. (Weather report for DMCA: earthquake warning.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
With this service you pay $10 to play 75 songs for a month.
With Gnutella and friends you pay $0 to play several million songs forever.
Which one is the better deal? Which one will users choose?
I tend to buy used or cut-rate CDs myself...
/Brian
I've said it before and I'll say it again: this is economic fascism (as much as that actually means anything). To those laissez-faire capitalists still left out there, you should be chilled to the bone at things like this. (Funny you should mention Nazis -- a question to this effect of mine on /. a couple of weeks ago confirmed my suspicion that this sort of corporate co-opting was Just Doing Business in Nazi Germany...)
But anyway...
The industry has it even worse than that. Economy of scarcity aside (which it is, by now), there has been a general trend, driven originally by youth culture and especially the warez community of the early PC era, towards the total monetary devaluing of IP as we know it. I don't think anyone is going to argue that this trend won't continue now that Napster and Gnutella have blown the whole thing wide open (and Fraunhofer had best kiss its patents goodbye -- if there's any better way to screw up a revenue stream than the nudge-nudge-wink-wink-say-no-more distribution method Apple is using for iTunes, I'd love to see it).
The big question is how long it will take this whole mess to come crashing down. It's not far from that now...
/Brian
Meanwhile, CNET reports that SDMI adjourned from their most recent meeting without picking any technologies to go forward with - an admission that they are all thoroughly broken, by the team led by Professor Felton, who spoke yesterday at Stanford
Are they going to sue Professor Felton for talking publically about SDMI like they did last time?
[satirical question based on the asinine past actions of the SDMI group]
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Check in...(OK!) Check out...(OK!)
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Development moves along as usual. A Quicktime component for OS9 is being worked on, test streaming servers are going up, and Winamp will include a Vorbis plugin in an upcoming version (probably the next version). You can snag a copy of the plugin here. I use it, and it's quite a bit better than the plugin at Vorbis.com.
...that it's RealNetworks that's involved with this. I cringe every time I see Real sign a deal with some kind of content provider.
Not meant to be flamebait but the Real players are easily the lowest quality media players available. Unfortunately, the better (WMP) and best (QT) options don't include Linux into their list of supported platforms.
Will people listen to and pay for music than sounds like it's being played from a 1920's era phonograph? Dunno. I just hope this isn't a future glimpse of the new standard of listening to digital music.
Thanks to /. and a variety of other sources I already knew most of the information presented by the speech. There were a number of interesting quotes (from memory). He said the paper leaked to the internet was part of the peer review process, and the final paper was better (no details were discussed). He refused to discuss future strategy, but said he had not given up.
Perhaps the most important clarification to me was explaining exactly why the RIAA could make this threat. The DMCA encryption research exception only applied to researching, not to publishing (i.e. disseminating). Prof. Felten made some excellent points about the value of analyzing existing systems in security research, which is not generally recognized by the legal system. He also repeated several times that analysis is an important tool in many types of research. Although this is currently a computer security issue, he predicts the DMCA as it stands now will have a dramatic impact on many other areas of science and academia.
One of my favorite quotes, which did not make it into the Salon story went to the effect of "They made the threat, and once it was effective, tried to withdraw it". He also mentioned that there were some verbal communications from the RIAA, which made the threat even more clear.
John Gilmore (of DES Cracking fame) was also part of the hallway crowd. He was wearing his mind-bending shirt (a very brightly colored tie-died t-shirt with the NSA seal on it). After most of the crowd had dispersed, we went into the hall, and John wondered when "they" would be coming after him for his part in producing the contraband (he was waiving his co-authored book around Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics and Chip Design).
Indeed, one might almost think this is a government plot, as well as the more obvious RIAA/MPAA plot. Got any encryption research you want to discourage? Just use it in a copyright protection scheme, and now you have the ability to suppress any information about that technology.
...but I doubt that it will under the circumstances. I just wanted to point out that some people think that pay-per-listen is inherently evil. To that idea, I have but one word in answer: JUKEBOX. It would be pretty handy at a party to have a mega-jukebox load of songs available on tap, pay-per-listen. Bandwidh, payments, and steeoopid technological obstruction schemes will be the downfall of any such proposal for the moment, however.
AirSupply: go ahead, cut me off.
What experience do you have besides wearing your t-shirt? I've used CSS, firsthand, for legitimate ways to access the content I legally purchased. I've used it to avoid the commercials at the beginning of my The Sixth Sense DVD. I've used it to DivX;-) my Die Hard trilogy to watch on my laptop during a recent flight to California. I've used DVD Genie to defeat the region-coding to watch my legally purchased, Region 2 ER Season 1 DVDs without having to lock my DVD drive to region 2. Can you say the same?
I also mirror a DeCSS binary, DeCSS code (multiple versions), and region defeating software. I post explanations why DeCSS is ethical and legal to use. Not Robin Gross' saying "The MPAA sux" but my own, explaining my own legitimate uses with the 60+ DVDs I've purchased. Hell, I even bought the same t-shirt you did and contributed to the EFF. Let the MPAA laywers come to my door - I am a concerned supporter of DVDs who wishes to use his posessions beyond the limited ways the movie studios have predefined for me. I am a living, breathing example of why DeCSS is right.
So stop fucking telling me that I cannot be against CSS and still "have one of these things". The MPAA will not change their tune by you whiny 0.0000001% of the buying public saying, "I won't buy these. So there!" while patting yourselves on the back. Until they, the lawmakers, and the public at large see that THERE * ARE * SIGNIFICANT * AND * LEGITIMATE * USES * OF * DECSS nothing will change.
Flame away.
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We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
hour two had a really good show on "digital" copyright today;
e =05/18/2001&PrgID=5
http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/cmnpd01fm.cfm?PrgDat
The had the chair of the SDMI working group on, Talal Shamoon. Also, Jessica Litman, author of Digital Copyright : Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet, and Lawrence Lessig.
It covered topics that have already being milled over here, but it was still interesting to listen to. The conversation was polite, but the SDMI guy was noticeably squirming at a couple of points (they did mention the Felton story). Ms. Litman really argued the need for fair use/public representation well. It ended on a caller saying the music industry is "greedy." All in all a good listen.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Second, the systems being proposed in this article aren't flexible enough. Their current model is to alter the consumer music licensing model, moving from a perpetual personal use license, to the rental model mentioned in the aticle:No consumer would go for this. It ranks up there with Microsoft's software subscription model, but even more restrictive. Microsoft Backed off their plan, and so will these music services.
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I'd do something like this under 2 conditions
The bulk of the profits go directly to the artists
I could order (for the cost of the cd) the songs I've already downloaded and paid for.
They can bite me if they think I'm gonna "rent" a song.
---Most Definitely not a Karma Whore---
Wholesale copying/uploading/downloading does not cost record companies a cent, it just means that you don't pay for a whole lot of songs that you wouldn't have paid for anyway...
"None of SDMI's methods stopped Felton, except the one involving potential litigation."
This seems to be the common wisdom here. Think the RIAA/MPAA will finally take notice of this lesson now that it's been attached to a major PR problem? We can only hope.
Disclaimer: The quotes might be slightly off. I'm not perfect.
Reality is indistinguishable from any sufficiently advanced fantasy.
Bang on. Here's the sequence of events as I see it:
Your move, Gubmint.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
As much as I'd like to believe otherwise, content protection is inevitable. You know why I think that? Because every time there is an Anime' story posted here, it's usually only available on DVD and everybody here seems to have seen it. Now if the DVD CCA and its heathen spawn CSS are so evil, how come all of you have one of these things? The only way to make a statement to the RIAA and the MPAA is to vote with your pocketbook, and Slashdot has got more hanging chads than Florida.
And when content protected HDTV hits the market, how many of you are going to "just say no" then? From what I've seen here, probably far too few to even make the needle twitch on the copyright robber baron's give-a-shit meter.
I'm not trolling for flames, just stating what I see as obvious. If you want this copyright idiocy to go away, then large numbers of people have to revolt in the only way that's understood by content producers. If they lose money on this, it will die, but right now any sane person would place all his bets in the content provider's corner.
By the way, I don't own any DVD-related product. Well, except maybe for my DeCSS T-shirt.
My friends, you are missing the point
The big five are not interested in online distribution, and will do everything they can to impede it's process. You've seen this for years. The lawsuits against mp3.com, the locking out of online music companies that had a desire to produce for pay music service working with the labels.
The labels have a very specific agenda. Preserve their very high margin compact disc sales at an ASP of $12-$15. As the digital music revolution has unfolded, the labels knew all along that steadfast refusal to do anything was causing problems. So they invested in companies they didn't want to succeed, and produced trial products that were intentionally poor user experiences. They have intentionally allowed the SDMI spec, once heralded as the way the big five would play online, to wither and die with little direction.
This is not incompetance. Say what you will about rhe big five but you don't become billion dollar companies without the abilility to execute on a plan. While perfection may not have been possible, certainly something was... to date they have allowed years of delays in delivering a reasonable spec... all the while leading partners on by the nose, confusing them and keeping them from working on competing solutions.
Fast forward to 2001, you have Hatch on the hill talking about compulsory licenses for on demand systems. Hatch and other know very well there are at least a half a dozen such solutions complete and backed by well funded partners. The only thing all of these lack are the licenses, which they aren't getting come hell or high water. It was said on the hill, in essence, either you do it or we'll let them do it for you.
So the answer? Launch a pair of mediocre services that don't cross-license and essentially produce a failure. Throw in a couple of launch delays, a relauch, and at least a year to declare them total failures. Tah-dah they've just bought themselves at least two more years of unconteseted cd sales.
And that, brothers, is the cold hard truth.
Now, for what would bring me back to paying for music. I would pay for a non-subscription, pay as you go service, of the following description. It would have most of the published music available. You check the tracks you want, and they send you by snail mail, one or several compilated CD's with those tracks. You can choose an image to go printed on the CD, if you want a booklet with the lyrics, biographies... you name it. No protection of the tracks, of course, just a regular CD. The tracks should have their volume and dynamic range normalised (as far as possible, of course, if you try to mix classical music and AC-DC, you are in for it).
I reckon some kind of automatic process could take care of mostly everything. The new releases would have a waiting time before being available in this service, like for the video version of a film, only probably longer. The price? About half a dollar for track, plus post, packaging. Total price of a ten-track CD at home, less than $10. No box, of course, only a hard envelope.
The web site would be a gigantic central point for music, with lots of user comments, forums, cross-references (if you liked that, you would probably like to check...), and so on. Probably would be one of the most visited sites on Earth, for buying, but mostly for hanging around.
That I would pay for, and gladly. I do not know if I check with the profile of many others, but I know that those half-baked, half-hearted attemps to a paying service leave me cold. I'm just not buying it. I will refuse them my attention till they start doing something interesting. I suppose they don't care, they are busy with other kinds of users. But I don't care either, I'm busy burning my own CD's.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
OK, so exactly what do the RIAA say they own? I'm honestly a little confused. Here's an example. Take the following "binary" string off MetallicA's Fade to black CD:
1001101110100101101011010101010101010101...
Just a bunch of one's and zeros. Now the RIAA (and MetallicA) says they "own" that particular sequence of digits on a CD. OK, fine, now take and MP3 of the same song:
1110110101010101111110100101101010111111...
Now the RIAA says they "own" this sequence of digits and you cannot copy it and give it to someone. let's say I invert the digits:
0001001010101010000001011010010101000000...
Persumably the RIAA is going to says they "own" this sequence of digits too. Since I can conceivable write a program to turn any string of digits into an infinite number of different strings of digits and back, the RIAA is going to claim that they own all different strings that can conceivablly be somehow turned into that original string? With that logic the RIAA could claim the scanned image of my girlfriend is an illegal copy of MetallicA's Fade to Black. (given the right "decrypting" program)
What does this mean? Napster isn't illegal. The people using it may be doing illegal things, but even that is a bit suspect. At the basic level Person A is sending Person B a string of ones and zeros. Might be music, might be my girlfriend's picture, might be BOTH! Oddly enough this sounds like another similar arguement:
"Guns don't kill people, people do"
The root of the problem is the RIAA is trying to shoe-horn a 100 year old law into a new age of technology. The whole concept of copyright and IP is flawed. It just doesn't work anymore.
As a final example, I'll use my own industry as an example of what works. I write software. I am fully aware that if my software got into the handds of some unscrupulous person, it's sequence of bits could be changed, while preserving the basic function of the code to the point that any court would rule that the new seqments of code are different and thus not violating my copyright.
As an example:
for (int i=1;i10;i++) x += i;
is the same as:
x += 10*i
While my software is copyrighted, I do not rely on that to protect my code from others, what I do rely on is my secure server where my code runs, properly encrypted so that those unscrupulous people cannot access it.
Not to light a flame, but SDMI was "the right way" to go about the problem the RIAA has. Unfortunately, the current CD format cannot properly protect the artists data. One option would be to change the format. An econmically bad idea. I don't have the answer to the RIAA's problem (that of illegal use of their "property") but I know the problem is not Napster, it's Napster's users.
--
He had come like a thief in the night,
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Sorry if the italics offended you...but it's my right. Free speech is not to be taken lightly, nor is it to be scoffed at.
Abraham Lincoln: "No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent."
Moore's law is relative to the computer chip industry, while Lincoln's statement speaks about huumanity.
I ain't no chip.
Folks, that raises the hairs on my neck. I pretty much don't want anyone tracking my preferences for music, film, art, literature, or whether or not I have an innie or an outie.
As an American, I have inalienable rights under the constitution to protect my privacy.
This ain't cool and this dog won't hunt.
When is vorbis coming up? Instead of waiting and looking at what the labels are up to, I think we should look at setting up our own patent free compression/streaming audio mechanisms, which cannot be touched upon by any legal minefields..
"Do something man. Right now."
Initially when this whole filesharing stuff started, I was of the opinion that I would listen to new songs and buy them if I like them. For quite a while that seemed very plausible.
However, when the RIAA/MPAA started with their nasties, more and more of this plausability turned into a 'no... these people have no relation with 'art' anymore.' If anything has been established by their actions, it is that they have shown their true face, and so have a whole bunch of so called 'artists'.
Art... to me is an expression of one's inner emotions. It shows just how great people can be when they are in the right frame of mind and talented enough to display their art to the public. But Metallica, MPAA, RIAA, and then some, are like a big stinking oozing sewer leaking poisonous chemicals into a sparkling mountain creek. While I used to like Metallica, now when I hear their music, all I think is 'oh it's those assholes'. While the existance of the RIAA was safely hidden from me before this all started, now every CD branded with their logo is tainted.
So no, I will not use their 'service'. Just like I would not buy Nazi memorabilia.