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Replace Your Music....Again
sethadam1 writes "I was not at all surprised to find that experts are predicting the death of the compact disc in as little as 5 years. This article over at Ananova suggests the next format of music will be little fingernail-sized cards. As cool as these sound, is anyone else worried that sneaky industry folks might try to distribute all new music in DRM'ed WMA files?" Yeah, this description sounds basically like bigger Magic Gate, that wonderful situation where you can pay more than normal to get DRM. Update: 11/13 16:45 GMT by H : As RobertB-DC pointed, this is sort of a dupe - see our previous article.
In the UK, the large supermarkets started undercutting record shops by importing from other EU countries. The record company response was to start releasing "special editions" for the UK with video clips/a few extra crap tracks/remixes.
Most people won't pay the extra money for a few gimmicks. It was music quality and size that sold CDs. People have a replacement on the size front - MP3 players. They won't do much more about quality.
A DVD has a volume of 13.56 cm^3, and stores up to 17 GB (2 sides, each dual layered). That yields a density of 1.25 GB/cm^3, and I was being generous by including the hole in the volume measurement. Surely they can do better.
Also, seeing as this hasn't come out yet, it will compete with other future products, like blueray, which weighs in at 23.3 GB/side and 3.4 GB/cm^3.
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One reason is that portions of WMA are covered by PATENTS. Until those MS patents expire, MS can absolutely control who can legally implement players for the content, and the terms under which they are allowed to do the implementation. For example, the license may include large monetary penalties for failure to honor the DRM flags. Unlike the situation under DMCA, which attempts to block reverse engineering on copyright grounds, and may be subject to overturn on the basis of fair use precedents, reverse engineering of patented techniques has always been illegal and the case law all supports that.
I can't find the links, but IIRC, at least one open source program for converting between different media formats, has withdrawn support for WMA because MS threatened them with a patent infringement lawsuit. The only real defense against an existing patent is to invalidate it in court, which can be a VERY expensive undertaking.