Posted by
Hemos
on from the striking-deals-abroad dept.
nfras writes "News Ltd is carrying a story about how Australia's largest (and government owned) telco has done a deal with Warner Music to sell music online. It will use Windows Media format and will be similar in pricing to US sites."
[...] with the cost added to users' internet service bill [...]
There's a lesson to be learned here: large ISPs offering their "own" services can handle micropayments easily. And it's a lot safer than using credit cards.
Comfort and customer service
by
Compact+Dick
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The levels of copyright protection afforded by the service were "at a level where we are very comfortable with it," he said.
Sure, he is comfortable. But what about the consumer?
Tracks will be available in the Microsoft-developed.wma format. The levels of copyright protection afforded by the service were "at a level where we are very comfortable with it," he said.
I just can't understand the insistance of so many online music retailers to go with WMA instead of a more popular and widespread format like MP3. It can't be because of a fear of pirating -- this isn't going to help keep new (downloadable) music from Kazaa and the like because there are still too many simple ways to circumvent it, starting with looping your analog output back into your line input, and all it takes is a few people to realize this before the music gets out "into the wild".
In the meantime, it's just one more annoyance for their paying customers. Old mp3 players tend not to support WMA, and there's also the distastefulness of your music being tied to a Microsoft proprietary format, which have a tendency to have backward-compatibility issues (ever try migrating Office documents between versions?) and to be changed without much customer input. Given these issues, I don't think their security would suffer much by going with mp3, and it would be a good selling point for their legit customers. All in all, I see this as an annoying trend towards a business model where companies continue to try to impose their controls on things you've already paid for, rather than just letting you have full use of your purchases after you've forked over your cash.
-- The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away...
"It can't be because of a fear of pirating -- this isn't going to help keep new (downloadable) music from Kazaa and the like because there are still too many simple ways to circumvent it, starting with looping your analog output back into your line input"
Yes, but it's still an extra hassle. If a user has to go through all that trouble just to share their music on Kazaa, they're less likely to bother. At the very least, the music isn't going to get auto-shared when the user first installs Kazaa and gives it permission to scan their system for mp3s.
Also, P2P works the best when lots of people have identical copies of a given file. By forcing people to reencode the song to make it shareable, they're reducing the efficiency of getting the song via Kazaa.
I do wish people would stop opening these sites and saying that only people from one particular country are allowed to use them. What happened to the Internet being an International resource?
Slashdot Mirror
[...] with the cost added to users' internet service bill [...]
There's a lesson to be learned here: large ISPs offering their "own" services can handle micropayments easily. And it's a lot safer than using credit cards.
No thanks, I'll pass. WMA format and all.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
In the meantime, it's just one more annoyance for their paying customers. Old mp3 players tend not to support WMA, and there's also the distastefulness of your music being tied to a Microsoft proprietary format, which have a tendency to have backward-compatibility issues (ever try migrating Office documents between versions?) and to be changed without much customer input. Given these issues, I don't think their security would suffer much by going with mp3, and it would be a good selling point for their legit customers. All in all, I see this as an annoying trend towards a business model where companies continue to try to impose their controls on things you've already paid for, rather than just letting you have full use of your purchases after you've forked over your cash.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
I do wish people would stop opening these sites and saying that only people from one particular country are allowed to use them. What happened to the Internet being an International resource?
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