Slashdot Mirror
Sir Mix-A-Lot Using Weed To Distribute Music
An anonymous reader writes "Hip-hop musician Sir Mix-A-Lot has made his new CD Daddy's Home available for download using Weed technology. Weed is a relatively new file sharing system based principles of shareware and referrals. You download the DRM WMA weed file and can listen to it 3 times on any computer before deciding to purchase it or not. If you do purchase it (at a price set by the artist), you will receive referral fees (20%, 10%, 5%) for the next 3 generations of people that purchase your copy. The artist always receives 50% of the price. Certainly an interesting approach to distributing music in a world of p2p and iTunes."
Ain't that what the RIAA uses too? ;)
Download rates... really fast! It's great!
It looks like a mini-pyramid scheme. Aren't those illegal?
Guess weed isn't that popular...
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
I like DRM and I cannot lie
You other brothers cant deny
When a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist
And p2p in yo face
You get sprung
Wanna pull out ya gun
Cuz the RIAA aint tough
Vonal Declosion
I can't remember the last time a slashdot title made me do a triple-take. Haha.
Have to admit I was a little disappointed as I read on.
why? forty-two.
We had weed back in my day, but I had to *pay* for it. None of this referral paybacks. :)
You download the DRM WMA weed file and can listen to it 3 times on any computer before deciding to purchase
...then I get the song in a lossless format, complete with digitized cover art and free of any DRM, right? Because as a paying customer, I'd expect to get at least the sound quality and format versatility that the pirates are getting.
it or not.
Sure - it's a free tril so I won't complain about the format.
If you do purchase it...
Yes, I did RTFA - the format is no surprise. When the only option for online buying is DRM, it only encourages piracy because regardless of whether you're prepared to pay for the content, it's the only way to get the music without funny restriction.
The biggest difficulties I see it facing are:
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Even more interesting name. I can see the advertisements now. "Weed, the legal alternative to KaZaA"
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a pothead DLing weed.
Sig- http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?ayefly
While I'm disappointed that they're distributing DRM'ed WMA files (non-Windows users will certainly be out of luck), I don't want to be too quick to dismiss this. Any distribution channel that gives the artist 50% of the sale is already better than almost anything else out there.
Can anyone think of a better system that gives the artist this much or more of the sale?
. . . isn't the first time always free?? ;-)
In this case it's the first 3 times, but close enough
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
For the Weed DRM?
Now he just has to find somebody who would actually want his music, or shall I say, jump on it, jump on it, jump on it, jump on it.
I think his best bet to sell music would be inventing a time machine taking him back to the early 1990s.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
So weed has been making music-sharing happen for several decades, at least. Hmph. Internet.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Can anybody show me something in the U.S. Code, the Code of Federal Regulations, or interstate commerce case law that makes multi-level marketing unlawful in general across the United States? For instance, AllAdvantage.com's payouts used a pyramid structure. It died not because of its MLM structure or because of any FTC action relating to its structure but merely because the bottom fell out of the banner market, which in turned happened once advertisers realized the effects of banner blindness.
In a pyramid scheme after the style of Ponzi, on the other hand, participants get little for their investments, and they make money only when somebody else has signed up under them. Once saturation has set in, nobody signs up anymore, and the bottom rung of the pyramid gets shafted. But in this pyramid scheme, every participant at every rung receives at least a license to listen to a Sir Mix-A-Lot recording. Therefore, it's legitimate MLM and not a Ponzi scheme.
~jeff
(red team go, red team go)
And if the artist and friends buy and buy and buy at the beginning, they can create a false landrush that may influence others to jump in early. "Look at this! This thing is selling like crazy! Better get in now!"
Not a good idea, me thinks...no different than time shares and generic brandingiron futures.
My fri/sat night fun job is doorman for a SJ karaoke bar...
I swear to god if I hear that song being sung by a group of sorority girls screaming into the mics at the top of their lungs one more time i'm going to shoot myself.
Even with Weed, the record industry still stands a very good chance of taking half the profits, unless the song was never released on a major label.
Those that meet their quota of referrals graduate to the amway program?
Fuck the greedy sellout whores. They're the ones giving the RIAA its power (complete with the delusion that they are an actual law enforcement agency), and lord knows the RIAA had its chance to do right by us. They flunked. They have alot to make up for, simply doing it right isn't enough anymore, and I don't expect any kind of reparations.
then I get the song in a lossless format
What is so "lossless" about a lossless format? An 8-bit 8 kHz PCM recording is in a "lossless format," but it's just about telephone quality. Likewise, a 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo PCM recording (hereinafter, a "CD recording") is in a "lossless format", but it still loses ultrasonic signals and everything below -110 dBFS. In modern hypercompressed mastering techniques for pop music, a CD recording loses the punch of drums. Only a live performance is truly "lossless."
That said, engineering practice demands only "good enough." If your ears can't tell the difference between a particular recording and any given higher fidelity recording, then you'd call it "good enough."
it's the only way to get the music without funny restriction.
If you're buying through iTunes or Napster music stores, what "funny restriction" is there? You can burn a purchased recording to CD as often as you want; you can even burn an entire playlist a few times before changing it. If downloads do not work with your pocket player, then why did you buy that player?
That's actually an interesting point. There is a german hiphop band called "Die fantastischen Vier" wich use excessive samples from StarWars IV: "A new hope" on their first album ("Jetzt geht's ab") from 1988. If they recorded the album today they would have to pay a huge amount of money to George Lucas. It really isn't easy to determine where exactly an original work of art begins. After all we are all standing on the shoulders of giants (see also SCOs-Copyright trouble).
;-)
Personally I feel that while things get more and more restrictive less of original ideas arise (same with TV shows, Movies, and so on...).
Or is this just me gettnig old?
You download the DRM WMA weed file
No, no I don't.
You can't take the sky from me...
MP3 is patented, and patents are evil, just like copyright. At least try to recommend ogg if FLAC is too big.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
As a DJ, I'd have to agree with the original poster. The quality lost by MP3s make them completely useless to me. The parts that you lose in converting music to MP3 are some of the most important ones when you're playing it through a 30.000 watt sound system.
Of course, I haven't bought anything aside from vinyl for the past three years, so I guess I don't really care about digital anyway.
Both products become expensive because of government regulations. To protect the profitability of both products, distributors employ tactics typical of criminal organizations. Both products derive their power from the fear of the people who would have a tendency to abuse it, or those that see a threat to other more acceptable means of domination.
And finally, the real danger appears not because of the product itself, but because of the additives that must be used in the mass market to maximize and protect profit margins. The additives create unknown levels of toxicity to your body and your mind.
Of course, manufactured weed and manufactured music are both bad for you, and I would suggest that squirrels and humans avoid their consumption.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
After you download from Weed, you can burn your music to a disc with Alcohol 120%. But make sure you use a crack to remove the DRM first.
How can this be less expensive as a means of distribution than simply setting up a server and sell direct, like Apple did ? I mean, don't think about only bandwidth costs but:
1) Costs of paying people down the pyramid
2) Fraud Management
3) "CRM" with the huge mass of "distribution partners"
Unless they have some brilliant marketing concept hidden in there, which I may have missed, it seems like just a more expensive way of doing the same thing Itunes does.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
...but then I got high.
I thought I was gonna get a free bag if I picked up his new CD. It would certainly help me sit and listen to the whole thing.
Just kidding, I actually used to be a big Mix A Lot fan, like 12 years ago, and this method seems very fair to both parties. Artist gets paid better than thru the RIAA, and the customer gets to listen before they buy. Perfect!
$4.99..................Weed
Deja Vu man. This will be like when I called the hints line at Virgin Interactive. Took forever to explain to my parents that $3.99 to a 900 line called Virgin Entertainment was not a phone sex line.
Honestly though, I wonder if anyone has though about what a tough sell this will be, not to the target demographic, teenagers (they'll love it), but the source of their disposable income, their very uncool parents.
My crystal ball keeps showing me a Chevy Nova.
V.90 dial-up, cable modems, and DSL are patented, having been invented within the last 20 years. How do you get your Internet access?
I'm going to get Kevin Bacon to buy a track. I'll never have to work again.
I had a quick look at the site...
I couldnt find anywhere telling me which direction I should pass it on.
I just wanted to make sure everyone gets their fair share of hits.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Okay. So take the worst of P2P (the person-to-person distribution, the lack of a centralized search engine, the lack of file integrity verification, no customer service, the overall time-consuming and sloppy experience), and the worst of iTunes (DRM, Linux-unfriendly format, special application, costs money that goes mostly to the record label, personal identifier in every file) .. and you've got.. WEED!
I'm glad they're trying new things and all, but I personally wouldn't give two shits for this "viral sales" BS. I've already got iTunes installed and I'm not bothering to install anything else. (Like this would even work with the Mac, I bet it won't).
Best thing to do is download the song, remove the DRM, and upload it back to P2P with the same name.
Sir Mix-a-lot first brought us Buttermilk Biscuits, Square Dance Rap>, Baby Got Back and Put 'em On The Glass. If he's distributing those, I'm buying, or downloading, or perhaps just popping in my old Swass casette.
The term weed has frequently been used in live music trading circles to refer to a method of distributing your favorite phish/dead/moe./sci show quickly. Out of generosity on person seeds the show to two people absolutely free, no blanks, no postage, etc. The only string attached are that each recipient in turn gives it to two more people for free. And so on, like rabbits. peace.
While, and I quote, "hip hop has always been based on other peoples beats and breaks..." is mostly true, and I can mostly agree with it, when you say "all ripping off..." and "...just to rip off other peoples music" I have to staunchly disagree.
It's one thing if you don't understand or relate to the genre, but please know where fact ends and opinion begins.
Hip hop, and techno, and a plethora of other electronic based (also known as 'groove' based) music uses samples of other peoples works. Does that make their preferred outlet of musical creation any less valid? Are you one of those guys that thinks that unless there is a drummer, bassist, keyboards, guitar, singer, et al making the music that it somehow requires less talent to produce?
As a (self proclaimed) music producer working in the digital realm (with limited analog experience) who has worked with live bands, hip hop, and various forms of techno acts....as well as my own band and experimental electronic productions I have found the strenghts of various forms of expression through production......not only that but the difficulty/challenges inherent to each form.
That being said I believe it to be terribly closed-minded of anyone to think that simply because a beat or rythm was sampled that it somehow degrades the quality or talent required to produce it. Hell, the way I see it doing just that serves as an homage to the original...."I couldn't do that myself or even come close...nothing captures the feeling I'm looking for quite like that...." etc, etc, etc.
Failing that I'd like to see you do it.
To sum this up, it appears to be something you just don't understand. That's fine, but please make it clear when you are speaking (or typing) the difference between fact and your own opinion. To yourself, and those hearing or reading it.
~Dan
So does this mean that the songs are being grown in illegal grow ups too?
Likewise:
"Why did you buy that tape player?"
"Because it's a better player, and there's no reason I shouldn't be able to use the cassettes that I bought with it."
OH S***, why does the finger slip when it's headed toward the preview button?
"Why did you buy that tape player?" should have been "Why did you buy that CD player?"
But then they get very pissed when someone does the same to them.
I don't think you understand what "lossless" means.
Using lossless compression, any digital audio file can be duplicated for infinite generations and still be a perfect copy of the original. If you make a FLAC copy of an APE copy of a CDA file (all lossless compression methods), the 3rd generation is identical to the first. No audio information is removed. If you make an MP3 of an OGG of a WMA (lossy methods), the file will change and the sound quality will deteriorate with each successive generation, as more information is irretrievably tossed out each time.
Call me a troll but I can't see how you can call that "music sharing". It's a commercial site with DRMed tryouts.
Oh, and "Sir Mix-A-Lot"? What the hell what a dumbass name.
DVD Jon legalizes weed for linux users!
Citigroup being the biggest Pyramid scheme in the world, and nobody seems to be complaining too much about them.
Karma: Non-Heinous
First of all, I wouldn't call P. Diddy (or whatever his name of the week is) or 50 cent pioneers of hip hop. And hip hop has NOT always been based on that. Sugarhill Gang was really the first to do it and they did it rather well, so much so that Rapper's Delight was a VERY different song from Good Times. And I dare you to find anybody who isn't a Run DMC afficianado realize that It's Tricky borrowed guitar lines from My Sharona.
Hip Hop evolved off the streets with what instruments they had, namely records and their voices. So they'd write poetry, and "rap" it overtop their favourite beats. Funk was big in Black culture, as well as useful for rapping as it was a lot of bassline and not so much lyrics, in the 70s and as such was used frequently. And eventually the DJs started manipulating their turntables to do little tricks, like varying the electrical input to change pitch and using their hands to backspin and play with little samples of music, known as "scratching".
Now, I'm not disagreeing with you that most modern hip hop is blatant plagiarism of other people's work, regardless of whether or not it's authorized. But to outright disclaim the entire genre just because of some people who achieve market prominence in the last 10 years who happen to be talentless hacks seems about as silly as to say that Punk is stupid because you dislike Sum 41. Or that Rock sucks because you dislike Linkin Park.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Sir-Mix-a-lot would HAVE to use weed to get anyone to listen to his crap.
Sir Mix-a-lot is taking some lessons from Cypress Hill...
Heh... They've been using weed to sell their music for years.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Why doesn't he use Baby Got FLAC?
first read this "Sir Mix-A-Lot Using Weed To Distribute Music"?
err....
"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts." - Henry A
the amway of the digital age...
http://chrono.posterous.com/
nt
The audio quality is not as good as in the original file but then you can take the WAV file created by Bob and convert that to whatever format you like (MP3, OGG, etc...). This is definitely not legal and the artist loses out on the payment. I wonder if anyone bothers to tell the artists that this huge hole exists in the supposedly "secure" Weed technology.
Mmm... nebulous beeeeeee.
Shameless self promotion: .ca, thus you may have guessed we're talking canadian dollars).
www.hearsaymusic.ca, canadian independent artists
artists get 45cents for each dollar song (oh, notice the
There currently is an huge selection of 3 artists :-), with a forth coming in a few hours... we are always looking for more independent artists.
cheerswarren
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
Daniel
http://people.cinn.ca/daniel/
"...and this is your music on DRM. Any questions?"
I knew if I'd wait enough, this 60's technology would come around again.
Now I'm waiting for the release of "Acid" DRM to compliment it
Can you imagine what the RIAA would give for us actually forgetting what we'd just listened to? I mean, they'd be able to release the same crappy boy/girl - band jingles year after year and we'd *love it*.
Oh, crap, how did they manage to do that already???
== I was there, but there's no proof anyone else remembers being there to see me . . . ==
I think this is BS promoted by the lawyers. I can pretty damn well figure out that George Lucaas was not intending to create German hip-hop, and I think anybody else could figure that out too. The real question legally is whether the music is "derived" from the movie; I still think the song would have to do a lot more than just sample the movie to be "derivative." What's happened is that the lawyers have everyone at the record companies convinced that samples must be cleared, so that's the way it is. But I'm not aware of any significant case law (perhaps I'm wrong; IANAL) outlawing sampling without permission per se. I think it would be easy to establish that the use of samples in a particular work constitute a commentary on the original, even a parodic commentary, which would be protected as fair use. The problem is, that would require a record company willing to have their lawyers make this argument in court rather than quietly pony up a few grand for every snippet of an original work used in another work.
On another note, I think it's ridiculously hypocritical for record companies to expect anyone to ask them permission to regurgitate a bit of the crap they ram down our throats constantly through the mass media.
I read the headline and got my hopes up. I hope him and his big-bottomed women burn in hell for this outrage.
I think remixes and blends with different beats are awesome. I've been spending a lot of time recently listening to rap mixtapes and some of the stuff is really interesting and/or funny. For example, Juelz Santana's freestyle over R. Kelly's Ignition remix beat is funny because it has a similar flow to the Ignition remix (can be found on The Diplomats Present Juelz Santana, by Kay Slay).
I also came across a hilarious blend the other day (I think it was off a recent Lt. Dan tape) but it had Stunt 101 (by G-Unit) over the beat for Clap Back (by Ja Rule). If you've heard about their so-called beef (it's just words, really) you'd be laughing. Oh, the irony.
True story.
Before even reading the comments for this story, I figured that browsing at "+5 Funny" would get me all the important stuff.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Agreed. That post was hilarious.
True story.
Word! And I say that as a lifelong suburban white boy. To my ears, only Will Smith has matched the Sugarhill Gang's ability to re-cast a popular groove into something worth listening to on its own. "Rapper's Delight" still holds up.
Ogg is an alternative. Make some effort to use it.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Ok, so now people are using coke and weed to get our children to listen to music? This is frickin' rediculous....
today Yaakov Smirnov announced that he will be distributing his new comedy CD over the WEED network as well. As you already know... this development comes on the heels of other major artist launches on the WEED network by such industry giants as: Winger, Carrot Top, Nelson and the Corey Feldman Band.
. SLASHDOT: Home of the vicious nerd.
Their FAQ says they use Paypal, and everyone knows how horrible Paypal is. After reading all the horror stories who's really stupid enough to give Paypal their credit card number anyway? If similar stories were written about a brand of car there would be a massive recall and government investigation, amazing how Paypal still manages to sneak by.
Just like everything else, the people not happy with something are going to be a lot more vocal than the people happy with something. I've used paypal on and off for a few years now, and know several others that have as well, and none of us have had a single problem. Something tells me that paypal has far more satisfied customers than unsatisfied customers.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Maybe the RIAA will like a p2p app that's called sex. After all, sex sells.
Because of your subject, here is how I originally parsed your first sentence in my head:
The similarity between average squirrels and average weed are interesting. Both are grown easily in the home, and can be distributed at almost no cost.
I had to read it a few times before I saw what you actually wrote.
This was also funny because at a funeral a few months ago I met a guy who really was raising a squirrel in his house (though he was giving any away).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hey shithead: SHUT THE FUCK UP!
It's necessary for musicians to make money from copies of music, because it costs them money to MAKE that music. "Musicians lose nothing by the free flow of copies..." Well, you lose nothing by going to work for free every day as well.
Except for your house. And your car. And your ability to buy food.
You're just like all of the other fucking whiny freeloaders, who are using technology and "the revolution" to keep from paying for something of value, and as long as you're not supporting the musician with your money, you're helping the RIAA.
Now there's a world class oxymoron if ever there was one.
This is silly, and the AC is actually not too far from the truth.
By rejecting the so-called "pay-for-copy scheme," you're denying the musician to make any money off of his recordings. Real recording (not basement stuff, which will never approach studio quality) is still expensive, and resource-intensive. If a musician can't at least recoup his or her costs on it in direct sales, then they won't have any incentive or ability (i.e. money) to make those recordings.
Now even if they could make them for free, or had the finances to be able to call it part of an advertising budget, there's another problem with free downloads: It doesn't give any value to the art itself.
Free music downloads amounts to exactly the same thing as a painter being forced to sell every work he does at materials cost alone. You could go out and buy a Picasso, a Dali, or a 'local craft sale artist' painting for the same price of rougly $50. You can argue that it's an original instead of a infinitely copyable item, but that makes no difference--the value is in the art, and by not paying for the art, you're convincing the artists to quit producing.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Nah -- no one as contemporary. The guys I deal with talk about things like Being In The Pocket and making sure that an entire song can be played through by the musicians in one take (even if it takes two weeks to get it -- and then the overdubs...but no edits to the original).
:-)
I pay a LOT of attention to the aural experience, but the stuff we work on is far more centered on good songwritting than anything else. If you can sing along to it, quite honestly, the shittiest recording will sound great because its stuck in your head and *YOU* fill in the gaps.
Out of the bands you listed, I rate one as a decent songwritting band. Radiohead, for example, use to have great writting, but have gone the way of gimicks in the last few releases. Better than average writting, but their focus on as you say the aural experience more than the content itself.
Losing character has everything to do with the source material you've encoded from and the psychoacoustic model that the encoding employs. I have several mp3 encoders from back in the day (before they got shut down due to patent infringement) that sound better than what we have today. These ones would actually let you choose from a variety of compression techniques that were sorted by the types of music that it did well.
We are seeing more and more of this in straight 96khz to 44.1khz dithering processes as well. POW-r is slowly being added to all the major softwares, and there are plenty of other ways to get around dithering from high end audio to consumer level audio. I have a test application that I'm planning on checking out soon that a high end audio company had sent me that CLAIMS to make the dithering process much less damaging to the sound as a lot of high end mastering engineers claim that going from 96khz to 44.1 is almost criminal in their mind. The app actually adds a layer of noise based on gasiuan theory / brownian motion and a shit load of other probably bullshit ideas. The claim is that adding a random layer in a nonpredictable - inaudible way will allow dithering to occur where its warmer to the listener and truer to the original.
In a sense, MP3s and all these others are adding this sort of random layer that is filling out the parts left off because its not just playing the parts as written, its interpretting it.
Both processes are lossy. Both loose a LOT of information from the masters. If you encode MP3 from a CD, you have lost 2 levels of detail. If you encode MP3 / AAC / Whatever from the masters, you get quite a bit of this information back, and if you actually afford yourself the difference that >128bps MP3s give you (128 was about the norm back when I was dealing with the P2P apps), you might see that while loosing some info, with the right attention to detail in the dither / encoding states, its not too horrid.
Remember this -- when Apple first opened the ITMS, they claimed that ALL their source material was coming straight from the masters and this is why it was taking so long to get in. If they had encoded from CDDA (as so many of the other companies are doing), I doubt it would have sounded so good.
In the end, I'd rather focus on the song and not the skills of the guy behind the board. Otherwise, we start getting into BrittanyPop where its entirely the production that is at stake and not the music (not that I'm saying this is bad...I know one of the guys in her recent production crew and he is the top of his game
Subset was a short-term collaboration project between Sir Mix-A-Lot and The Presidents Of The United States Of America (PUSA). Some interesting stuff, Mix's raps over PUSA's grooves.
Do you have a lock on the front door of your house or apartment? If every one were trustworthy and honest it could be argued that you don't need one. But the fact is that there are many (if not most) people out there who will take something for free that they should have to pay for if they know they can get away with it.
Music (and software) piracy is theft. The creator of the art deserves to get their cut of the sales.
What rankles me about copy protection, licensing codes and so on is not the protection of the product (that is legitimate) but the fact that most if not all of these arrangments break something in the process. When a copy protection scheme prohibits me from some leigitimate use then it is like the lock on the front door occasionaly locking me out too. If I buy a CD and want to play it on my computer I should be able to. If I want to cary a copy of a CD in my car rather than the original, I should be able to because I am afraid of the original being ripped off or damaged. These are ligitamate rights that I have when I make my purchase.
Weed is on to something here. I hope that they expand their offerings to music I listen to and I hope they come up with a similar solution for video and software.
I think weed is a fantastic idea -- it works with people's natural inclination to share music they like and still takes care of the artists. We're an indie and we love the idea -- we've put up a few tunes (http://www.stonetigerentertainmentgroup.com/weedp age.html) and are slowly getting our feet wet but have a bunch more that we plan to get out there. I love the idea of working with the fans/listeners directly. Music really should be accessible for everybody. And what better partnership can you think of than weed & reggae? :) Couldn't resist.
We're trying to explain the concept to other artists now and get them involved (http://www.jahweed.com) but the idea is so new that it takes time.
I'm a novice at all the audio stuff and have just been learning about setting up audio files and such on the site but I'm coming along.
Blessings
Which would you pick?
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
Either this is security-by-obscurity, which means, that I'll be able to listen to the same song as many times as I want to (for example, by simply restoring a 'safety copy' of the file, or maybe by circumventing application security (using a debugger)), or I must not be able to copy the file (or to open this file with any program other than Microsoft's WMA player), which effectively makes my computer unusable, because I can't use my own (or 3rd Party Software) on it anymore (then maybe it's still a Microsoft-CD-Player-with-integrated-Microsoft-Type writer, but not a computer).
/dev/fd0 or something, because that would allow you to copy the file's content. You must not be allowed to debug certain applications on your computer.
.. . What about DRM-protected viruses? There will be only a very small group of people who would then be able to isolate the virus.
Just imagine UNIX without the possibility of using pipelines, because only ONE specific program works with a specific file; you must not even be allowed to read from
Now imagine a cracker, who can get a DRM certificate for his newest virus (don't say, it's impossible
I think, we could find a lot of other potential 'accidents' with DRM technology.
DRM technology can't work realiably on open computing platforms, it will always be either totally insecure ('obscure' instead of 'secure'), or it will at least be potentially dangerous. Don't use it.
regards,
octogen
Sugar Hill Gang are certainly old school, but they weren't innovators. That's not to say I don't appreciate them.
Back in 1976, some of the founders of the Internet working within the NSF's funding challenges considered selling "ownership" of the internet to users as a method of enticing its use, of gaining fiscal support in light of dwindling NSF monies, and of allowing for true "peer-to-peer" marketing. They of course did not choose this method, Network Solutions was instead formed. But, if they had, interestingly, a few changes would have come to life, and one of those changes might have something to say about Weedshare. Consider what it would mean to commerce on the network if everyone had a digital identity that represented a marketplace that they were the owners of. Secure (Open Identity Management)trading partners across a global stage, with a built in business model. ie... What you own legally, you can sell as you wish... and the history of owners that have preceeded you, all the way back to the original source owner, can be easily databsed for any product or service commodity. If this had happened, we would not have the issue of "theft" in the world of intellectual capital as we do today on the web. Dont get me wrong, it will always be around, but it would not be sooo easy. OWNERSHIP Distribution is a big deal... in a free market, their is one thing better than "FREE"... ownership. As long as a digital signal is distributed to your home, and you are not the "owner" of it, their is a breakdown. Incentivizing owners to participate is the key. Just because the network is cool and allows for cool activities is not enough in a commercial paradigm. Renting domains that you can organize legally as privately owned commodities is still a legislative priviledge. Ownership of your digital identity/ life brings a whole new experience. Weed speaks to a good idea. On a network, owners of content and owners of consumption resources are partners. It is a 50-50 relationship. If either is slighted by the other, there is a backlash of negativity, especially in terms of fluid economic transactions. Until a system such as weed comes about and can take the issue of ownership to the next level, we will not have a positive solution for trading intellectual capital on the global digital stage. I say kudos... its a hellova long road ahead... but they picked a good theme... all weed should be circulated under such terms );p
NZN