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Gateway to Ship PCs with Pre-Installed DRM Music Files
Captain Chad writes "News.com has an article about Gateway's decision to bundle Pressplay's music service with its PCs. Of interest is the fact that 2000 popular songs will come pre-installed, helping reduce download time for those of us with modems." I wonder how much Pressplay is paying for this privilege. All sorts of interesting legal wrinkles here: you're buying a computer which contains data that you cannot legally access.
Gateway spins Pressplay service on PCs
By Reuters
December 5, 2002, 10:11 PM PT
Computer maker Gateway on Friday announced a deal with online music provider Pressplay to load its PCs with 2,000 songs from music stars such as Eminem, Bruce Springsteen, the Dixie Chicks and Frank Sinatra.
The deal with Pressplay, a joint venture between Vivendi Universal and Sony, capped a turbulent week for Gateway, which saw its stock fall 17 percent Thursday after the troubled PC maker warned that fourth-quarter revenue might not measure up to expectations.
The news came after three consecutive quarters of losses at the Poway, Calif.-based computer maker, which has suffered from weak demand and stiff competition from rivals such as Dell Computer.
Under the Pressplay deal, Gateway consumers can access the Pressplay service and features in several ways, including a 90-day free subscription to the service that contains 2,000 songs preloaded and available for streaming and downloading.
By loading it on a computer, consumers, especially those using dial-up connections, will save weeks of downloading time, said Michael Bebel, chief executive officer of Pressplay.
Other Pressplay plan options will also be available, some to be sold separately in hard-drive packages.
Gateway signed another deal with Pressplay rival Listen.com's Rhapsody a few weeks ago, marking the first distribution pact between a computer maker and one of a current crop of subscription services, trying to lure customers away from unauthorized song-swap services that have emerged in the wake of now-idled Napster.
Under that deal, buyers of Gateway desktop PCs will get a coupon for one free month of Rhapsody and a demonstration of the service on the PCs.
"The Pressplay deal is significantly different because we're pioneering a way to deliver digital music on the hard drive," said Brad Shaw, a senior vice president for Gateway.
Shaw said the deal would have no impact on the company's fourth-quarter forecast announced earlier this week.
After the free trials, consumers can get the Pressplay service, which provides more than 200,000 songs and additional features, with pricing options starting from $9.95 a month.
"We're now making it possible for people without a broadband Internet connection to get in on the fun of digital music by delivering it to them in a whole new way," said Ted Waitt, Gateway chairman and chief executive in a statement, adding those with broadband will enjoy it even more.
Gateway earlier this year sparked the ire of the music industry by running TV ads that showed Waitt and a cow--the company's mascot--singing along to a homemade CD, directing viewers to a Web site that encouraged them to "protect their digital music rights."
The ad was construed by the recording industry as an invitation to music fans to join in the fight against Hollywood as technology and media companies locked horns over digital copies of entertainment.
Entertainment companies, burned by piracy and file-sharing services like Napster, have been seeking more control over digital copies of movies, music and TV shows, while tech companies are putting out even more products that encourage customers to "rip" and "burn" entertainment software.
Gateway executives this week said they have always supported legal copying.
Waitt said the Pressplay deal was a great example of the technology and recording industries working together to drive innovation and serve demand for legitimate digital music.
Gateway plans to promote with television, Web, catalog and e-mail marketing.
All sorts of interesting legal wrinkles here: you're buying a computer which contains data that you cannot legally access.
That's not new. I've been other examples of software that comes pre-installed but "locked" where you need a key that you can get by calling the company and paying more money. I seem to remember Adobe having some fonts like that pre-installed at some point, and I definitely recall special-purpose PC's coming with application software pre-installed but disabled until you bought an access key...
I'm not sure what kinds of "legal wrinkles" might apply, but I do know this is not the first time it's been done.
101010, 222, 52,
you're buying a computer which contains data that you cannot legally access
So ? If I recall correctly, mainframes in the old days used to ship with HARDWARE that you couldn't access legally. The machine came preshipped with X amount of RAM, which was enabled by simply flipping a switch after you payed for it. Noone ever complained, even though RAM prices those days were somewhere in the region of what we pay now for an average house.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Gateway ships YOU with preinstalled DRM Red Army Choir music files.
You caputer the digital out of your sound card
Make that "analog out". Windows ME and Windows XP operating systems have a Secure Audio Path that disables digital outputs and unsigned drivers when playing restrictions-managed audio files.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I believe it is you who are mistaken about a great many things. DRM means that you have to comply with whatever terms the copyright owner wants to put on you in order to access the material. Simply buying the computer may not be the only term, and it most likely will mean that you can only access the material a certain number of times, or for a certain period of time without coughing up more cash.
Small problem with that. These people are not idiots. They know that people will do things like that, or find some other way of cracking the encryption and extracting the data. That's why these mp3s are watermarked. As soon as they see certain songs show up on a p2p sharing app, they grab them, examine the watermark, and trace it back to the credit card that purchased the computer.
Unless you can show that your credit card was stolen, you're getting sued.
Money I owe, money-iy-ay
Did YOU read the article?
Under the Pressplay deal, Gateway consumers can access the Pressplay service and features in several ways, including a 90-day free subscription to the service that contains 2,000 songs preloaded and available for streaming and downloading.
and
After the free trials, consumers can get the Pressplay service, which provides more than 200,000 songs and additional features, with pricing options starting from $9.95 a month.
So basically, Gateway is allowing Vivendi to put music on the drives, and Vivendi allows users to play it for 90 days. After that time, I'm sure the assumption is that some of the users will like this way of downloading music (knowing that it's correct, that it's virus free, and that somehow the artists are probably benefiting from it) and will continue to use the service.
Yes, the users can access the data. No, they don't have to pay for the first three months.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
You do realize that this is an optional component right? You don't have to get it with preloaded music, in fact you have to specify that you want it and you pay for it. So, why would you pay for it, then nuke it?
Stupid is as stupid dies.
Your interpretation is wrong.
.
Under the Pressplay deal, Gateway consumers can access the Pressplay service and features in several ways, including a 90-day free subscription to the service that contains 2,000 songs preloaded and available for streaming and downloading.
You get 90 days free when you purchase the system, and in those 90 days you'll be able to access any song PressPlay offers (access = listen to, not burn). The 2,000 on the drive are there to save you time.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
Pressplay sells two plans:
$9.95 / month for unlimited streaming + downloading into press play format
$17.95 / month for unlimited streaming + 10 conversions to portable formats
they also offer the $17.95 / month plan as $14.95 / month if you pay for the entire year in advance.
The non portable format is tranferable to one other system. Further tracks can be organized in play lists and sets....
My guess is that they are trying to sell people on the $9.95 / month to have a large music library on their computer. I'd further guess that pressplay also is coming out with some sort of portable player for their format.
So a gateway customer paying $9.95 / month has:
1) a very large music library on their system
2) The ability to add to it freely as new music comes out
3) The ability to take this music and move it to their portable player
I can see this doing quite well. 200k songs ~ 18k albums ~ 500 shelves ~ 100 sq foot CD collection ~ 1/2 a small record store excluding duplicates ~ a small record store including duplicates.
That's a lot of music for a home user at a price which is not unreasonable. I can see music fans which aren't that computer savvy going for this. The main thing that needs to happen is for gateway/pressplay to offer a way to get the music into a car for people not to realize this is not as good a deal as it looks like.
...where id software decided to package all of their old games encrypted on the CD with the ability to 'unlock' them with a credit card.
Then some unscrupulous scoundrels broke the encryption, and turned a $9 game preview into Best of ID Software Platinum "Game of the Year" Edition.
blah blah client side security blah blah tooth fairy...
Also, i wonder if, when they tell you the size of the HD, do they chop off the space they've filled up with 2000 unwanted songs? Do they make it obvious that you could save a few gigs by deleting them? Probably not.
vk.
Nope, yours is.
The reason they put the data on the PC does not dictate what you can do with it, the law does.
You are forgetting about the doctine of first sale. This states that if I buy something copyrighted I am automatically given certain legal rights, unless I sign a contract otherwise. So if when buying a gateway, I don't have to sign a contract, I am given certain rights to all the data on that computer. One of those rights being personal use.
So, I have permission under copyright law to use those files, but the DMCA makes it illegal for me to translate them into a usable format.
Here are some more links about first sale:
Life is too short to proofread.
You're right, as long as the book was just under copyright and you didn't agree to any other license. If you did agree to some, say, shrinkwrap book license, you'd have to obey that license.
Here, the user is agreeing to a license before they have access to the files. They have to obey that license. Just by keeping and using the computer, they're agreeing to the licenses that came in the box, whether or not they read them. Hill v. Gateway 2000 decided this issue in 1997.
It's a good opinion, by a smart judge (Frank Easterbrook). Read it.