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When Would You Accept DRM?
twigles asks: "Following on the heels of Apple closing DVD Jon's end run around its DRM and a British TV station offering DRM'd downloads it seems fair to ask, what DRM would you accept as a consumer? Personally, I take the view that if a song, movie, book, etc. is DRM'd then it isn't truly mine. On the other hand, if a particular piece of digital media is priced correctly (a la' rental fee) would that be satisfactory, or do you feel that DRM in any form is ridiculous?"
Not as long as I have any alternative.
I do feel "DRM in any form is ridiculous". It's that simple.
- No DRM of any form is ever okay: I should be able to do anything with items I obtain, including sharing them with others;
- It's not right for content creators/originators/owners/licensors to expect to be able to protect their content; if their content needs protection, their business model is dying;
- All "information" and "ideas", which includes music, software, text, and other unique works, should be allowed to freely flow between people in an unlimited fashion without any encumbrances of ownership;
- DRM is fundamentally flawed and is only used as a tool of the rich and powerful to forcefeed commercial tripe to the masses;
- In the digital realm, ideas of "ownership" and "theft" are meaningless. The world has changed, and unlimited digital copies of all manner of content can be distributed nearly free and without any harm to or detraction from the original. Therefore, any old model based on physical manifestations (books, CDs, DVDs, etc.) is dead.
The Pragmatic Progammers sell the PDFs of their books with no DRM and they seem to be doing okay. That is to say, the books aren't all over Google.
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/starter_kit/faq s/pdf_faq.html
Agile Artisans
DRM is bad, m'kay?
The only DRM I would like would be impossible to implement at the moment. i.e. a system that lets me do what I want with my purchases as long as it's legal. Simple. As soon as I'm losing rights then I don't want DRM and I don't think anybody can build a system that can do this without major headaches on my part.
I have no other choice, because the lemming-like "masses" have already been duped into buying all DRMed stuff, and buying/selling non-DRMed hardware is illegal, and comes with a 30 year jail sentence, and I've become nothing but a hollow shell of an old man/corporate consumer.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Accepting DRM in any form is a win for the corporations. Just like the tale of the boiling frog, once we become use to mild DRM, the strict stuff will be right around the corner, of course, when we all forget about the no-DRM days.
I'm fine with any 'Digital Rights Management' that doesn't, in the course of said management, infringe on _my_ management of _my_ digital rights.
...if a company wants to sell me something, yet wants to put restrictions on that thing, then I am not likely to buy. If you want to sell me a subscription, then do that, but don't make it so that I can't move the content from place to place in my domain (ie, living room, portable devices, computer, etc.).
As it is, most content is unbuyable now, anyway, so I don't even buy that much. (I haven't bought a CD in years, and a DVD in months.) Media companies need to start making intelligent music and shows, and then let me do what I want with it. If they want income streams, fine - sell me a subscription. But if you're going to do that, and I'm willing to buy, then don't restrict how I use it.
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
...it doesn't interfere with my privacy or ability to do whatever I want with the product. Be that copy, play, or backup.
and there is no reasonable alternative.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
I have already accepted iTMS (for the time being at least)
-mkb
If I know I can take it to every new Windows/Mac/linux computer I use and I can play it on just about any digital music player I buy then DRM wouldn't be much of a problem. Sharing it with my friends and family would be a plus, but not a requirement.
TW
I'd accept DRM when it wouldn't restrict my fair use. That will never happen, so long as manufacturers and content providers are using DRM to lock people into their proprietary platforms and distribution networks (whilst claiming to use it to combat piracy).
London's finest organic fairtrade coffee
Only if it allowed me to *easily* transfer the media to other devices I own. Basically if it didn't get in the way as much.
Of course I don't think that could happen without actually removing the DRM.
If I am purchasing music, paying per song or album, then it is MY music. I don't accept that at some date in the future my music will no longer be playable because some company went out of business or no longer supports my hardware/operating system, or because I moved all my files over to a new computer and can't get the DRM to work.
If I am renting music, for example paying $20/month for all I can listen to, then I can accept pretty much any DRM because I don't expect the music to be "mine". If something goes wrong with my DRM I would just switch to a different service and for $20/month have unlimited listening rights again.
Note that, for me, it's not worth $20/month to listen to music on my computer. I already have plenty of music I own on my computer, and there are free alternatives for radio-style listening.
But I get that it's a worthwhile proposition for some people.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
If music and video with DRM was ultracheap, say 1 penny per song and 10 cents a movie, and I could keep them as long as I wanted and watch/listen to them with open-source software on any platform, then I'd accept DRM.
In other words, never.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
The current message at the bottom of the Slashdot screen does seem appropriate:
"Never give in. Never give in. Never. Never. Never." -- Winston Churchill
...but people will always find ways to circumvent protection. From things as easy as burning songs to CD-s and the grabbing them back, to cracking encryption etc. Companies selling DRM-ed material may lose in the end more than they earn.
Jon patched it to work again already
The arms race continues, Apple oblivious to the poor LUsers.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The only DRM I'll accept is the kind where I am the one doling out the rights... and even then I'd only use that in circumstances where extra security is required... at my work, we have encryption that does that, so DRM is redundant...
When the content is properly priced, what's the need for DRM anyway? If the download offers value for money then anyone should be willing to pay for that. If it's overpriced then DRM is a way to force the high price down the customer's throat.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
I'd accept DRM in rentals, such as movies - but I will not accept it in anything I bought for keeps (eg. movie rentals vs. buying music). -Ares
If something is being "sold" to me under the presumption that I own said purchase, than I will not accept DRM under any circumstances. If I am rented something and paying a fraction of the cost of what it would cost to purchase, then I will accept DRM to some extent. The Problem I have is people confusing, or blurring the line between owning and renting....
Alright, this is ridiculous. DRM is no different, in principle, than copyright. Does everyone here feel that copyrights are unacceptable? Most people (myself included) that have problems with DRM aren't or shouldn't be with DRM itself, but how it's implemented. If DRM exists, to show a digital copyright, so to speak, but it does not infringe on my fair use, the ability to copy a song or video to media for my personal use, or use it in ANY of my personal audio/video devices, than I think DRM is wonderful.
If I buy something, it is not acceptable for it to be encumbered by DRM.
However, if it's used to enforce a rental or temporary use of something, and that's what I'm agreeing to pay for, no problem.
But again, if you are trying to sell me something that is broken, I won't be buying. FYI: If everybody made their purchases this way, there would be no such thing as DRM. In my opinion, iTMS users have done serious damage by undermining expected fair use by accepting these purchases.
No Comment.
I would only accept DRM if was for renting something, or a sample (say a free song that would play once).
If i was to rent songs, i wouldn't pay much at all, no more than 15p for one song for a week because i can go to my local library and rent a whole cd for a pound for 3 weeks.
Music is valued far too highly because of the current price tag. I currently refuse to buy music because there is no way that 12 songs (8 of which are usually filler) is worth £10 (£2.50 per song).
Plus most of the decent bands have either sold out (best example is metallica) or split up long ago.
The problem is not that when you buy some DRMed media that you do not really own the song, the movie, or whatever. The problem is that when you take part in a DRM system, you do not really own you computer any longer. I will not buy into a system that has my computer acting against me on behalf of others - not at any price, nor for any benefit.
Computers are not like cable boxes or satellite receivers, or even DVD players. They are our most fundamental and important devices of communication. To surrender control over those devices to others is a mistake we should pay for dearly...
Just wanted to point something out about DVD Jon - he is not the hero boy genius that he is being made out to be. He obviously has some talent however, just as with the DeCSS mess he's not the true brains behind the whole deal. He's is fronting a group of people and is young and certainly cocky enough (especially after winning the first law suit) to risk the wrath of the **AAs and at the same time getting kudos for beating Apple's DRM single handed.
Nothing wrong with this of course, he has balls and I like that.
a good universal cracker comes out....
Put a switch on my box, where "Turbo" used to be - "DRM mode". Use it as signature of authenticity, as proof of safety. When "on", untrusted software won't run, spam-originated media won't display. When "off", I'm free to use any media/software I want.
There's a porn forum, where a "sponsor" offered "50 free movies to download". Actually what it meant there was 1 movie, DRM'd and 50 free views of that movie.
As you can imagine, people who downloaded the file after the 50-shot license expired, weren't impressed.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Consumers have accepted the idea of rentals which they also don't own. I think DRM material can find it's own place somewhere between the idea of completely owning a physical disc and renting material that they will have to return.
I personally use iTunes and have never been bothered by the DRM. It works fine on my computer, my iPod, and my truck's CD player (when burned).
What seems to be the problem?
My books aren't DRMed, but it's cheaper and easier to buy a new copy of a modern book than to duplicate it, so I buy them instead of making copies of my friends' books. When it's easier to buy non-DRMed music and video than to scour the net looking for a ripped version, I'll gladly pay for it. Until then, I'm abstaining from getting any new digital media altogether - I'll just rip my own CDs and call it good.
Note to the industry: if you had allowed iTunes Music Store to sell non-restricted music, I probably wouldn't have bought a bought a Satellite radio.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I do not like DRM
in a house.
I do not like DRM
with a mouse.
I do not like DRM
here or there.
I do not like DRM
anywhere.
I do not like
D-R and M.
I do not like DRM,
Jobs-Steven
I don't like to buy anything that would somehow cripple my functionality. Pirating aside, there are a lot of legitimate purposes for making a CD into an MP3. I do it at work all the time, I bring it in, rip it to MP3, and then take the CD home with me.
But I don't think we'll really have a choice in the future. If there's one thing companies hate, it's lawsuits, and they'll do anything to avoid them, including implementing DRM.
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
Personally, I don't really care that much about DRM, as long as it's designed well, like the iTMS. I don't know if I "own" the songs or not, but I don't really care - it's never really restricted what I've wanted to do with my music. And if they do make it hard, I'll just find a crack to get around it.
Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
What you said. It's not mine if it's DRM'd. I tried it once with audible.com (I didn't realize they used DRM). It was a pain in the ass to remove the DRM so I could use it on my portable mp3 and the audio quality sucked. It was easier to just rip the free realplayer streams of the show I wanted, and the audio quality was better. I got a refund and donated the money I would have spent at audible directly to the NPR show. (using Total Recorder to rip the Realplayer streams BTW) Never again.
For example, I buy a song on iTunes. I should be able to put it on an MP3 player, burn it to a CD, whatever I want for personal use, including sharing it with close personal friends. I don't expect to be allowed to share it on the internet or sell it or anything not considered fair use.
It is NOT acceptable when my rights for personal use are heavily restricted.
Read my sig if you like, but I'll never see yours, thanks to Discussions, Viewing, Disable sigs...
Now, let's just wait and see if the ubiquitous "THEY" start trying to apply some DRM-like techniques to books, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, speech, etc...
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Would simply remind the user when the appear to have exceeded their license, and do nothing more to get in their way.
Would i oike un DRMd music, sure i would, and a regular audio CD is about 15, i can rip it to mp3/ogg/whatever and im fine.
Of course, to actually get it for 15 ill have to go to el big music store and stand in line for 30mins.
Now, if i buy th same album in iTMS i only pay 9.99, dont have to stand in line and can listen to it a couple of minutes later.
In exchange i can only burn the hole album 7 times, big deal, i dont even KNOW 7 people who like the same music as me.
I can Burn it to audio CD an rerip it if i want to, and seriously, neither you nor me is gonna able to notice the sound degradation because we dont really have the equipment to listen to it at that degree of fidelity.
So, for 1/3rd off the price i might (or might not) have to jump through some little hoops. I for one can deal with that.
-- never underestimate someone who overestimates himself
The first DRM I was aware of was Macrovision.
/. comments but i figure most didn't see it the first time)
I remember a call from a friend of mine who remembered that I was knowledgeable in video editing and she contacted me to help her with a problem they had with a student project. (that was back in 1994)
They were student who selected very short extracts of scenes for their project for the last 20 sleepless hours and they wondered why they couldn't make copies of many of their extracts. When I finally arrived all I could do is explaining what was happenning and tell them to find some other scenes (Macrovision had a cyclic effect in which a few seconds would be copied all right) I didn't have any video filter at that time to go around it and it was too late to go and find/build one.
CONCLUSION:
It's simple, DRM prevented those kids to express themselves correctly, it was damaging their possibility to create.
Now, with DRMs much more insinous than Macrovision nowadays just try to imagine the artists who have been prevented to express themselves, imagine also the art forms that have been crushed before their own existences by these DRMs.
DRM is bad, it is evil, it MUST be banned for the sake of the human spirit.
( it's the second time I put this story in
DRM is acceptable to me in a situation with cheap all you can eat services like Rhapsody, though I don't think Rhapsody is cheap enough to be attractive/acceptable.
A large part of the value of a piece of digital media is the ability to faithfully reproduce it for backups, repurposing, mixing, media shifting, etc... as the consumer sees fit.
You're going to have to make that 99 cent song 5-10 cents per year rental or $5/month to make me happy with losing those abilities, and I'll still only rent the most ephemeral items.
My wife bugs me because I have an extensive DVD collection that includes a lot of black and white classics she has no interest in. I look at it as a library, much like books. If the DVD format goes away (which it will, eventually), I don't want to have to repurchase my library on the next format. I want my kids to be able to enjoy Casablanca or Citizen Kane or Bringing Up Baby without having to poop out another $20 per title to the MPAA and the studios who did nothing to earn the additional payment other than point a recording device at a strip of celluloid and hit record.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
The problem isn't really the restrictions now -- I will gladly grand the copyright holder the right to control the (re-)distrobution of their product. Copyright doesn't, and shouldn't, control or limit use, which a lot of DRM/copy protection does, and that I do object to. But having iTMS want to limit P2P reproduction -- to me, that's fair.
To me, the issue is instead what happens 150 years from now -- they copyright has expired, but Rights Manglement never dies....Do you like Japanese imports?
I have no problem with DRM because there will always be people like DVD Jon who will crack it. That way, everybody wins: the companies get money from people that legimately download songs, and the people who don't like DRM will be able to get rid of it. I've run several songs that I've downloaded from iTunes through JHymn and produced MP3 files without DRM. So, let companies feel secure and buy DRM music. Then, remove the DRM portion of it.
I have gas, but my car uses petrol.
Richard M. Stallman has written a fiction story called "The Right to Read", which is very relevant to the current subject.
I download music from iTunes all the time and burn it to audio CD's. How isn't it mine?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
As long as PC architecture is open, and PC programs are available that play the DRM'ed audio, there will always be a way to make a digital copy of the audio. Ideally, write an audio output driver that captures everything passed to it in non-DRM format. If nothing else, create a PCI-based sound card that does this same thing in hardware, capturing the signal before it passes to the DAC.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
The real issue is that the media giants aren't willing to work within the new marketplace. It's like going to another planet where humans have already discovered they can breath without a space suit, and they come along and want you to wear one anyway. I think if they would release a lot of their old libraries, cut those prices, they'd have a market willing to buy new songs at decent prices. So much DRM today restricts moving songs from one place to another to prevent piracy at the expense of convenience. People have grown accustomed to taking a CD from car to home to friend's homes etc. now you want to lock them down. I understand the need for DRM I just think they need to rethink their methodology. I don't know the answer, but I am uneasy with a technology that is basically attempting to make an outdated business model fit into this new marketplace. This shows an amazingly naive understanding of the digital landscape. They need to change with the times and they just can't see it. That doesn't mean give away their music, but it does mean understanding your market.
Watermarking = OK, DRR = !OK.
;)
I accept DRM when it is easily bypassed*.
* but even then it's wrong because you are legitimizing the loss of your fair use rights, etc. etc.
DRM is utter sheite, it has saved me alot of money though. I refuse to buy any media which uses it and since it's so hard to keep track of what does... Anyway thanks to allofmp3.com I don't need to deal with it in music.
-- Note to liberals, yes please flee to Canada.
Because, simply put - it's a distracting chimera. It can never work. Say it with me - It Can Never Work.
Any DRM scenario I've seen put forward to date is broken. Either the user holds the keys, or there is an untrusted link in the transmission of the key, or *something*. There is always something missing.
The only DRM that would have a chance of working would be to put the media behind a plate glass window and allow the users to peek through the glass at it. But you'd still have people inside the building to social engineer info from...
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
DRM is unacceptable to me in any form. It's basic premise is that consumers are untrustworthy and/or criminals.
In effect, it states I don't have control of my property, and logically means to me I don't own it.
I DO have products that are DRM'd, today (Apple iTunes). The only saving grace of which is that I can burn them to CD and be rid of the DRM.
For the past 4-5 years, however, I've been limiting my CD purchases to used CD's on HALF.COM and elsewhere, and I've been totally avoiding the online digital music scene (preferring instead to concentrate on slowly ripping my collection and burning it in MP3 form to data CD's).
Why should I continue to support an industry which (a) treats me like a crook and (b) won't give me what I want?
What do I want? Digital music files that I can play, store, and convert however the hell I want to. I paid for the right to use the music -- GIVE ME THAT RIGHT.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
is still just as stupid. When I purchase an item I expect that it is mine to do with as I please, not to still be at the whim of whatever company made it. I certainly don't expect http://www.ragold.com/ to come by and tell me what to do with the Dilbert (tm) mints I purchased from them. I also don't expect Honda to dictate to me what to do with my Accord. Why should I let the RIAA/MPAA/Apple/etc tell me under what terms and conditions I can enjoy the music/movies I purchase?
As for Jon's end run around Apple's DRM (twice), I applaud his efforts. It certainly shows that DRM can't stand up to people who want to control the things they buy. I no more want my music to be limited to a single computer or iPod in my house than I want to be limited to what TV I can watch movies on or which DVD player I can play a DVD on.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
DRM is okay in some situations. If I buy a cd, drm is not okay on cd. If I download it online, I would accept DRM in small cases. If I buy a dvd, DRM is not okay. Downloading a movie from a pay site, DRM is okay in some instances. I think that people who pay for music at best buy, circuit city and other location do not share their music as much as a person who gets their music from P2P.
I would accept DRM when once I purchase something with DRM encoded I can: 1) Play it as many times as I want 2) Play it on any technology regardless of whether or not it is 'supported' or 'approved' by anyone or not. 3) Copy it for my personal use as many times as I want, without having to check with or tell anyone. At the end of the day if they want to use DRM to 'mark' their copyright, so that they can claim it is theres great. However, I do not expect any restrictions. If they want to go through the process of getting a court order, and tracing where something originated from to sue or otherwise get justice then that is fine. Attempting to use technology to stop me from copying etc. is not acceptable. Who are they to tell me what I can and can not do. Besides, this is a useless battle. It has been proven again and again with copy protection remember C64 days, Nintendo games, Xbox, satellite cards .... it will always be there and it never works. /Mike.
Hmm... Nope, not a single file with DRM restrictions, furthermore - not a single file which ever had or was meant to have such restrictions.
There were some previous DRM schemes that were unacceptible. Example, CD's that would not play in PC/Mac CD drives, or that could not be ripped. Those are situations that hinder the way I legally listen to and share music.
Renting music - I just hate the whole idea. Once you are in, they can raise the rent.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
If I'm renting, then DRM is fine as it ensures that I hold to the rental agreement - however, the price for renting must be significantly lower than that of buying.
If I'm buying, then no DRM (some record companies do this, for example Warp Records). Since I purchased the music, I should be able to do what I want with it under fair use rights.
I accept DRM as it is today.
Why? Because I don't *have* to subscribe to it. If the content owners want to sell their crap with DRM on it, then I don't want it.
It's when it's forced on me that I begin to revolt. Fuck you all if you think I'm going to sit idly by about the broadcast flag ( aimed at "them" ).
Other than that, go right ahead: DRM your crap into obscurity. By all means.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
when it gives me rights to compensate me for the rights I have lost.
Alternatively, CRM protected works are not protected by copyrights. They can either use the quid-pro-quo that copyrights gives them or the all-or-nothing perpetual rights that DRM gives them. Not both.
I ALMOST think that we should just pay a rental fee in our taxes.
Wouldn't it be great if you had free access to all media (songs, video, etc)? When you download something, that could count as a popularity vote for that piece of media. The government could then distribute the money accordingly.
Obviously there are people who wouldn't like that, but I'm all for it.
If everyone paid it yearly, I can't imagine it would cost much. No DRM would be needed. Everyone could use the media however they want. No one would be wasting money on DRM or lawsuits. For the same amount that most people are paying now, they could listen to any music they want, watch any movie, or read any book. Wouldn't that be great?
DRM is a last ditch effort by those clinging to a dying business model. Those who have never been accustomed to working for their money (MPAA, RIAA) are the ones running terrified to DRMs and the like.
I'll never get anything that is DRM'd, which would restrict how I use my own property. However, if they start selling media that includes digital fingerprints (and it's priced appropriately), then I would have no gripes at making a purchase. I think the only people that would be opposed to digital watermarks where your personal information is placed on the media (e.g. name, IP address, date of purchase, etc) would be people who want to illegally share/sell their media. The only problem I see with this compromise is when it comes time when I don't want the media anymore and I want to legally sell my property to someone. (Like selling a used book/record/CD that you no longer want in a garage sale.) In that case, how do you get the new person's info onto the digital fingerprint of the digital media? That's the only problem I see with this solution. But it's a MUCH better solution than the one that the labels and studios are trying to brainwash us in thinking is the only solution.
- All "information" and "ideas", which includes music, software, text, and other unique works, should be allowed to freely flow between people in an unlimited fashion without any encumbrances of ownership;
A question... with these two statements, are you offering government or societal subsidy for content creators? Authors, artists, musicians, innovators, programmers, designers, etc., who deal in information and ideas would get paid for their labors by society in general?
Or are you not proposing that?
In which case, what incentive would any content provider have to provide content? I mean, personal enjoyment comes into it - I like to write, I like to create and play music - but I still have to pay bills. And for any form of content creation that requires capital investment (say, Pixar's render farm), with no return on their investment, do you think any of that would survive?
-T
The only time I tolerate DRM is on media downloaded for rental. E.g. if blockbuster allowed you you to download a movie and watch it for 7 days. The DRM would be used to disable to movie after the rental period was up. That seems reasonable.
For purchases no amount of DRM is reasonable. DRM on software and games is especially annoying e.g. the newly released Silent Hunter 3 uses StarForce for DRM. StarForce disables cd burning applications on your computer, intercepts IDE calls, causes system instability and sinks it's teeth into the registry, in some cases requiring a complete reformat to remove it from the system. It is borderline malware and forced me to avoid this game. Another annoying memory is HL2 and Steam, where the pirate community did a better job of delivering a working product to their customers than Valve did.
DRM punishes paying customers.
Not me. My teenage years were in the 1980's, where I was able to purchase -- legally -- "perfect" quality CDs and high quality (for NTSC, anyway) LaserDiscs, both free of copy protection. Both CDs and LaserDiscs were touted to last a lifetime, and even though that's not true, the lack of copy protection enabled lifetime chain copying to preserve the recording for personal use.
I grew up accustomed to, after hearing or seeing something I liked, purchasing it, and playing it back at any time for one of two purposes: a) reflecting upon its content, b) recalling the time and place where I originally heard or saw the recording, for the purposes of sentimentality.
I've said it many times, and almost always get modded down, but I'll say it again. I consider it a form of mind control for a publisher to present something for my consumption, and then be able to at a later date forbid me from reviewing that material in the time, place, and manner of my choosing.
As I said, I believe this attitude of mine is due in part to my Gen X demographic. Baby boomers and older -- those presumably running XXAA -- grew up not expecting reviewing capability. Baby boomlets grew up expecting stuff for free via P2P. Gen X'ers are in the position of expecting lifetime reviewing capability, and expecting to pay a reasonable one-time fee for it.
But demographically, there aren't as many Gen X'ers as baby boomers and baby boomlets. And no one seems to care that books after 1924 are rotting away. So DRM and short memories it will be from now on.
Whan I shell out hard-earned cash for something, be is physical or digital, I want to BUY it.
Which means it's mine, _forever_ or at least until I choose to resell it, or dispose it.
DRM means that I'm dependant on a combination of software and hardware, or (even worse) hardware + software + availability of a service by a supplier (for verifications purpose, a la valve or XP activation.)
It also means I won't buy it. Because later on, I want to be able to use it, no matter if the supplier company went tits up, or worse changed its policy along the way and eventyally decided the thing I bought is now obsolete and removes my rights to use it.
I owned a rocket ebook, and it was an eye-opening experience in DRM. The only DRMed thing I ever bought is a copy of Dan Brown's angels and demons.
Should my device stop functionning, I'm SOL. Even tough I paid paperback price for the DRMed ebook, I cannot lend it, and I'm dependent on the device still being available to be able to read it.
DRM means dependency, slavery to the supplier. No, thanks.
If I can play it under any OS, without any special software, and can *personally* play it anywhere i want including my car, my iPod, my generic mp3 player, my computer, my friend's computer (if i'm at his house), my stereo, and my toaster (if it has that feature). Until then, I will continue stripping DRM off any file I get. No, I'm not distributing mp3s to all my buddies. I just want to play my music, where I am, without making sure I'm using a capable or approved player.
You buy a DRMed song from iTunes, you do own it! You can listen to it all you want, you can burn it on as many CDs as you want, and you can even have it on any three computers at once. All that for 99-cents!
It's very reasonable for Apple and the music industry to not want you to put the song on the internet for a million people to download for free.
Seems to me most Slashdotters want songs, books, TV, music, and everything else for free. Personally, I think you guys need to be more respectful of the businesses that are spending the time, more, and effort to create all this great stuff.
COMIC BOOK GUY
"As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me."
BART
"What? They're giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? I mean, If anything, you owe them."
Sam
If it's an audio CD - No way in hell regardless of price. I bought my last CD about 2-3 years ago, when I discovered it had DRM on it I vowed never again. (I only kept it because I am a big fan of the artist.)
Physical products should not contain any DRM, but allow for a sales paradigm that a small'ish fee and a download allows for limited DRM or other revenue genterating ideas for the content provider.
$1.00 movie downloads, free TV show downloads with ads built-in.
Or have a quality/price ratio.
piss-poor = free
56k stream = $0.99 / video
128k stream = $1.50
T1 = $2.00
DVD = $20 + ability to rip/store and view *for personal useage only*
Movie companies want you to goto the theater & buy a ticket and then buy the DVD. How many people here can attest to d'loading a crappy cam version of a film and then wanting the "extra-value" that the theater experience offers?
I know I do all the time. I use cam downloads as my person movie critic Roger & Fatbert.
It has also saved me from wasting my money.
With the exception of bandwidth costs (And there are alternative methods that could be looked into) they have nothing to loose.
Too many times companies are stuck in the same mindset of: It has worked well for the last 100 years, why should we change now?
Hmm, dinosaurs. Fossil-Fuel.
rise-lather-repeat
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I'll never accept DRM! EVER! And I am not buying
a SONY PSP due to it's use of DRM! Maybe when there
is a hack for it to disable DRM, but for the meantime I will stay away. I've got an IPOD, but I use Linux tools like gtkpod and I only use straight mp3 format.
If you want to control every aspect of the content, then make your own products that don't allow any use you don't like. DVD was an attempt at this, but had too many political goals and not enough protection to work. See locked down content for your own locked down devices and I'll think about it. Please do not come along and try to lock down my existing devices (PC and TV in particular) that are not primarily intended as media players. I could still rent DVDs even if the encryption wasn't broken. The only reason I sometimes *buy* DVD is because the encryption IS broken - some day the format will be replaced, but I can transfer my collection to whatever comes along. If you want to sell a black box, feel free. Just don't try to turn my existing devices into black boxes. Oh, and don't expect me to buy media that will become obsolete and require me to buy again. Work around these rules and we should be fine, if you don't like my resrtictions, why should I like yours?
When they pry my music from my cold, dead, fingers.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world - Ghandi
About ten minutes after my clinical death...
I for one am completely and utterly against purchasing ANYTHING with any form of "DRM" in it.
:)
In fact, I am one of the many that will only use iTunes if I get a pepsi to go along with it. I have yet to pay for any "DRM'd" anything. The only DRM'd music I've gotten has been free with the purchase of a pepsi
Of course I then remove the DRM because frankly wtf shouldn't I be able to make an MP3 cd and play my hours of tunes in my car?
I wouldn't out of hand reject DRM, but it must be priced into my purchasing decision. Currently, $15 for a DVD that I know I can watch forever, play on any DVD player, backup if needed, loan to a friend, etc., is a good deal. Because of this I have purchased quite a few DVDs, and I think the DVD market has been very strong for that reason. Various forms of DRM, for example newer copy protection methods (might not play in some DVD drives), prevention of copying, possible other incursions to my anticipated fair use, all detract from the value of the disc. If the movie was a good buy at $15 with no DRM, I'll be damned if I would pay the same for something that essentially has had positive features removed. Things like convenience, freedom of use and fair use are all going to get priced into the total cost. If the only thing I can buy is a DRM'd $15 DVD, then I won't buy it. I think most consumers make also make this value decision. I think the problem will be when some of the new DRM systems are implemented, and consumers are not adequately aware or informed. Hopefully publishers will manage to keep DRM out of the user's way enough for us to keep shopping.
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
The discussion seems to be blurred by the fact that DRM is invented to prevent unfair use and not to impose unreasonable restrictions on the honest consumers.
:-)
I don't think that the content providers are happy with having to do this.
I would accept DRM if:
* I find price is reasonable
* Does not impose restrictions on my personal use
* DRM Expires after a reasonable time
70 years after the death of the artist does not seem reasonable to me - I happen to like stuff created by people who died 69 years ago
There is no reason that music, text books etc. should be free, just as there is no reason that software should be free. The creator may choose either, and the consumer must then choose whether to support non-free content.
If I create something, then I can choose the conditions under which I will make it available, and you can choose whether you find it valuable enough to accept those conditions.
If ends don't meet then the product disappears - It's that simple.
Quit all that b*** about the companies charging unreasonable high fees - you are free not to use their product.
Just my 5 euro-cents
Erik
...isn't really yours? You're not allowed to copy it. You're not allowed to do anything you want with it. Now why is that?
Before you dismiss the compairson, think about it.
Loading...
.. as in, it is media made for me, and me only then i would accept some form of "unique DRM identifier".
but if its mass-market media, forget it. i ain't gonna pay to be one of the Jones's, yo!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Good troll! Couldn't have done it better myself!
I do not agree, however, that, "In the digital realm, ideas of "ownership" and "theft" are meaningless." and I'm willing to bet that a lot of /.'ers don't agree as well. Even the hallowed GPL depends on foundations of digital ownership, for without these common rules it simply would not be enforceable. Copyright law has been around longer than digital media, and it also gives rights to creators of 'virtual' content such as a book, movie or song.
Anyways, your perception is not based on reality, because the reality of the world is that digital rights are here to stay, and they've been here a lot longer than you imply. As for DRM, I believe it signals a bad days ahead for computer users. And I hope that the trend of incorporating things that are controlled by a company and not the hardware owner are a failure.
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
I was going to talk about Apple's DRM which allows you to strip it out by merely burning a CD. I was also going to talk about Napster's all you can eat, as long as you're willing to pay monthly plan, which obvoiusly relies on DRM.
But then I remembered. DRM is nonsense. DRM does not stop piracy. Any who wants to infringe will infringe. Thus, DRM only hurts paying customers.
DRM is basically a screen door on a bank vault. It's like we're all supposed to pretend it's secure when we all know it's not.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I'd rather have a paper book, or a physical cd, that I can do with as I please.
I haven't bought HL2 (and it's killing me) because it's a CD with an encrypted copy of the game on it, and I don't want to play along. Vote with your money.
I don't like buying something and then having restrictions placed on it's use. DRM is not a very friendly thing to do and it makes me feel like I'm some sort of criminal and can't be trusted. Why would I buy from someone who treats me like that?
I'm pretty fed up with the way the whole music and film industry has gone in general. They asked us to stop sharing mp3 files so I did and so did most other people. That has not been good enough for them. They want total dictatorial control of something that is created by talented musicians, but owned by lawyers.
So, I only buy CDs from indie bands now. If you want me to buy your CDs, come to my town put on a show and bring CDs. I'll pay to see your show, I'll pay for a CD, but I won't put up with being treated like a criminal.
When I buy something (DVD, CD, itunes song, etc.), then I feel I own that copy and I should be free to do anything with that copy that the law allows. I don't think DRM is OK on items purchased, since DRM inevitably interferes with my legal use of something I purchased. I'm OK with DRM on rentals, as long as the terms are clear from the beginning. When I rent something, I know I don't have ownership, so restrictions are OK.
My fear with this, though, is that it could be come awfully tempting to the media holders to rent everything, and stop offering anything for sale. We could then live in a world where everything is pay-per-view/listen. I can't offer any solution to this, though.
DRM is extremely hostile towards the public. Copyright is a creation of government, and is limited in scope and duration: copyright doesn't extend to, and doesn't restrict use, private performances and displays, fair uses, etc. It only covers the specific actions enumerated in the statute. It expires, and it's subject to various exceptions.
DRM goes beyond this, and attempts to create a paracopyright that is much broader than real copyright, and which lasts forever. This is unacceptable.
In fact, not only do I not accept effectively DRMed works and I generally avoid them altogether, but I think that the law should be amended so that whenever a copyright holder publishes or publicly performs or displays a copy of a work encumbered with DRM, or authorizes the same by a licensee, the copyright should become void.
As for such copies, since the work would be public domain, the government might help fund attacks on the DRM much as they fund libraries, archeology, etc. in the name of bringing information into the public realm.
This will require copyright holders to either avoid DRM like the plague, or to rely on it alone, and forfeit legal protections, in which case it'd need to be very effective indeed.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
My biggest problem with DRM is that the seller at any later time can change the terms of the sale and I can't do a thing about it.
I do not download illegal music. I believe it is theft. I used to think this was very black and white. After purchasing a single DRM song from Walmart, my views have changed quite a bit. I still think downloading music without paying for it is theft, but I'm now seeing that there is theft on the other side as well. The fact that I could play a song for a few days until I was REQUIRED to upgrade my media player by the content provider (the one I had was OK when I bought the song) and the upgrade broke my ability to get a license to play the song and then I was pretty much told the problem was on my end. I did get them to reset the license, but I did not like being treated like a thief when they were the ones who, after the sale, changed the rules.
Music companies continue to sell CD's with music with no digital protection on it. Why do they treat online music downloads any different? Online downloads are new and different from what music companies are used to, so I suppose they are still very cautious about it, but that still doesn't explain why they would treat online downloads any different from CDs. Maybe they are just afraid of people with computers.
is not accepting it.
DRM content? Are you kidding? I can't even stand Disney DVDs because they're restrictive. I watched the incredibles last night and I find it frustrating how you can't fast forward the commercials at the beggining of the DVD. Disney is bad for this, but certainly not alone. DVDs that force you to sit through 20 minutes of junk are very annoying. It's the same idea. I bought this movie and everytime I start it, you force me to watch these company logos and commercials even if I don't want to.
WURD!!
It treats the legitimate "purchaser" of content like they are a would be pirate.
.99 per song pay per download online distribution channel can work, but unfortunately at the same time, got a large portion of the online music buying public to accept (or get used to/tolerate) DRM as an (un)necessary part of the deal.
I'm not a social scientist, but the people actually legitimately "buying/leasing" your content aren't likely to be the same people hawking bootleg DVD's on city streetcorners.
Meanwhile, DRM does little to slow or deter actual pirates who seemingly can circumvent , strip, or rip at will...
I can see why DRM is attractive to content holders as some sort of business model boon... but as a consumer it just gets in the way (of legitimate fair uses of the content)
itunes is great in that it showcases how an alcarte
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
I was going to make a similar, but much more long-winded, comment - but you beat me to the punch.
Clear, Dark Skies
What was wrong with the old fbi warning at the begining.... every custumer is not out to screw u
Simply put, I'm not going to buy products that are intentionally designed to be harder to use as I wish.
Oddly, I dont feel that I'm missing anything. The few movies I would have watched on DVD, I either saw in the theatre or caught it on VHS. The few CDs I bought in the last few months didnt seem to have any DRM associated with it.
And I'd be nucking-futs to get songs from iTunes with the associated DRM problems. If I want a song bad enough, I'll capture it from my SIRIUS subscription (ha) or eMule it.
Frankly, I dont care about IP issues when it comes to music. Why? Despite an implied contract between the Record Company and me, I never pay for distribution when I hear a song on the Radio, arguably not on SIRIUS. The problem of payment is a *distributors* problem.
I totally agree thats not an argument that has any legal standing, but, thats how I feel. So, for the time being I'm going to continue pirating via FM-Radio and/or Kazza. Its all the same from my viewpoint.
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
Digital restrictions are pointless. The whole reason the Internet exists is to enabling low-to-zero cost sharing of information. Trying to fight that with artificial restrictions is like trying to put the genie back into the bottle.
Instead of being so single-mindly focused on the bottle, Hollywoud ought to be asking the genie to grant their three wishes. In other words, they should be looking for ways to make money that leverage the zero-cost to share of information on the net rather than fight it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The issue, for me, is not DRM or not DRM. It is renting vs buying.
And DRM imposes restrictions as if you were renting or leasing the product. That would be alright if the price on the product was close to zero, but I get offended when someone claims they are selling me something when the product is not sold, but rented.
That being said, I use Linux. There is no way to buy/rent DRM products for Linux users, and I am fairly sure that if it was possible it would not be Open Source. And if you are not willing to show me the source, then I am not going to install it on my system. I require the source, the source ensures FAIR USE. The sum of this is that DRM in any shape or form will never work for me.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I'ld accept DRM when it doesn't interfere with my fair use as indicated in the offer by the content owner. ...) for an unlimited duration I demand that it is free of DRM limitations. It should just work without Internet connection, on any computer I own now and in the future; convertible to new data formats, and burned to CD, DVD or any other medium for backup or mobile use.
If I license music (or movies,
On the other hand, if the offer is "view/listen once" or another limited period offer (All you can listen to for $x/month), I'ld accept reasonable DRM that works on my current computer.
extern warranty;
main()
{
(void)warranty;
}
- continue to use my medium (music, movie etc.) even after the DRM authenticating facility ceased to exist.
- continue using my medium on a new pc, after my old one ceased to exist.
- lend the medium to a friend. Maybe even timebombed (eg after a week, the friend cannot use it anymore, I mean, he has to give back my CD's/DVD's too, after some time).
- transfer my medium to another type of storage in case CDs or DVDs are as common as 8-tracks or something.
Furthermore not having the feeling, that the DRM mechanism can be used to remotely cut me off from using my medium is a big plus, too (like for example that Napster monthly-fee thingie, where your music stops playing, as soon as you stop paying). Basically: If the DRMed medium has the same usability as a CD I bought about 6 years ago, then it's a DRM I'd accept. Apples iTunes DRM is almost fine by me, since my friends in the LAN can listen to my music. I can burn them a CD, and so on. However I don't know what happens, if iTMS closes its doors, and my PC crashes. When I'm still able to authenticate my protected music, all is well. And if not, well there is always (J)Hymn...As in beer.
If I have to pay for it, I will not accept DRM of any kind.
DRM is reasonable to me, if someone wants to give me free content and have it available for only a certain length of time, or not be copyable, etc.
Corporatism != Free Market
Keep your eyes to the sky.
The corperations like the RIAA and MPAA stop saying that sharing a file is like stealing a CD from the shop?
:p) they will get somewhere.
It's not! The CD can't now sell the CD that was stolen, but the mp3 or whatever being copied hasn't removed anything.
When they realise that their distribution model is dying (netcraft confimed
They need to stop trying to prop it up with stupid restrictions that only serve to annoy people and do nothing to stop the pirates.
The sooner they start rteating people like customers rather than thieves the better.
The industry must remember that a customer is not a guaranteed revenue stream and many are getting annoyed and just not buying the rubbish that is churned out today.
Although I'd rather have a limited number of non-DRM songs than Napster-To-Go's 'all-you-can-eat-for-as-long-as-you-pay', by the time my kids are buying music, if they start off with the idea of renting rather than owning music and software, maybe they'll have less qualms than we do. So, is there a legitimate reason for my fear of DRM, or am I just an old stick-in-the-mud?
"That will never happen"
Truer words were never spoken. The original purpose of patents was to encourage innovation. The modern purpose is to build monopoly and to discourage innovation because it threatens existing monopolies.
A "good" use of DRM is to identify the true source of a file, payment being only one of the reasons to so. But the "modern" purpose is to deliberately infringe on fair-use rights, ultimately denying them.
There is not nearly enough love in the world, but there is far too much trust.
I would accept DRM that prevented across the board copying if a company agreed to provide at least 1 copy per form of any media purchased in any form (.mp3, .wma, CD, DVD, VHS, SACD, Super8, 16mm, etc.) In addition, said company would have to guarantee unlimited lifetime replacements if any form is lost or broken.
This is answered quite aptly by the slashdot quote on the bottom of the page today:
"Never give in. Never give in. Never. Never. Never."
-- Winston Churchill
Accepting DRM isn't about how much it costs, but what I want out of the transaction.
When I've listened to / watched something and judged that I desire to own it for ever, no DRM is acceptable.
If I want to check something out (is that movie any good? I'll rent it and find out) then DRM is acceptable.
That being said, I think more media could be DRM'd than currently is. Much of the media I possess I don't actually maintain any long term interest in.
My "price" for DRM'd media is simple. Sell DRM-infected media to the hopeless masses at a discount. While I will pay full price for premium (read: unrestricted) content. If five years from now everyone's buying DRM-infected music at 20 cents per song, I'll still be willing to pay the full dollar for the good stuff.
I won't pay much MORE than I'm paying now mind you. But I'd be willing to forego the impending cost savings that comes when we finish our plunge into digital distribution.
This price, is non-negotiable.
- prevent me from "using" the content anytime and anywhere I want in any way I want
- prevent me from selling what I bought like I can do with a DVD
- prevent me from making a full copy
- track my usage in any way
- have an artificially created "lifetime"
I shall accept it when it doesn't restrict my choice of playback device.
This probably means requireing a open source solution (probably more likely to be BSD style than GPL in license).
If you said "when I have no other choice". WRONG! Sorry that is what the companies whats you to say. YOu will always have the choice to get "black market" versions so you do and will have the choice.
+----------------- | What is the question!
You don't buy music anymore than you buy a story; This view of the world is simplistic and childish, as possession is not 9/10ths of the law, and names will hurt you plenty. The reality of intellectual copyright laws is that you buy a CD or a BOOK, but the rights to the contents thereof are still reserved by the author. This used to be the defacto arrangement, and it still makes sense today, although the industry is having trouble mapping this paradigm to new content delivery mechanisms. Why would anyone spend years writing novels and songs if there was absolutely no way to profit from the effort? Sharing knowledge would be defeatist, as the efforts of a lifetime would be lost as soon as they were published. Get real, people.
How come lawmakers fall over themselves to protect IP rights holders but drag their heels when it comes to protecting the rights of the Public.
Any DCMA or EUCD act completely unbalances the situation unless it makes DRM that removes previously enjoyed freedoms as illegal as circumventing that DRM DRR. The same goes for WIPO treaties that favour the West outlawing and outpricing drug treatments without balance.
Prohibition led to the rise of Organised Crime as has overzelous copyright extensions, DRM and the DCMA.
But now it is Mass Crime.
Unjust Laws Need to be Broken.
Here's the thing kiddies: the music industry tried a solution to provide content with no DRM (it was called CDs). Some enterprising folks figured out how to rip CDs into digital audio. Then, "services" like Napster and Kazaa sprung up whereby the people who PAID FOR the CDs allowed others to copy the music for free.
So, all of you wanting a DRM-free world, the fact is you had one and you f---ed it up. Thanks a lot.
The current DRM restrictions on digital media aren't really that bad. If you don't like them, you can always buy CDs and rip them, like we used to do.
I for one, think that a buck a song is a bargain (I don't have to buy a whole album if I don't want to), and the DRM restrictions are not a limitation--especially if you consider the fact that under the DRM restrictions you can burn an audio CD, and, duh, once you have an audio CD, there are no more DRM restrictions. You can make archival back ups, etc. etc.
Unless what you really want is the old napster back where you get music for free and the people who produce it don't get paid.
Offered by Slashdot at the bottom of the page: ""Never give in. Never give in. Never. Never. Never." -- Winston Churchill"
Anyway, no DRM is OK. When I buy music, I want to share it with people. Music is a communion and it is absurd that it should separate people (into owners and non-owners) instead of bring them together (making and enjoying it). I personally feel that no artist should be as ridiculously overcompensated as they are now. If they lose their incentive, then let them not play their music. It will find its way and bubble up regardlessly, no matter what anyone says. But turning it into an industry was a bad move. It happened over the millenia, mind you - I don't blame the eighties and the rise of the gung-ho economy for its downfall. Nor do I think RIAA is the devil - it is humanity's fault and a sign of our times that things should be as they are.
Anyway, freeing the music is equivalent to destroying it. And we should, every one of us on a personal level. I still listen to it, just have no hang ups about getting music from others and sharing it with them and I try to compensate the artist if and only if they seem to lack the money - bought two Ozric Tentacles CDs at their concert even though I had them in MP3 already.
Who do the sounds belong to, anyway? Who does the experience belong to? Who is to say that the current industry provides better, more inspired music, than the communities millenia ago did? OK, you got me monologuing, seems I'm a typical evil pirating mastermind after all.
The Only DRM that I will support is Personal DRM. If I make a file and I want to be the only person to be able to open it, Great. If a Bank wants to use DRM as a way to protect it's customers from ID Theft, Great. The way I look at personal DRM is that it's another security layer to protect myself (or my company's) personal data.
Commercial DRM I don't support at all. If I buy a CD I expect that CD to play in anything I have for as long as I own that CD. Commercial DRM limits that. The Best Example is Windows XP. Yes I have to register it to use it and it works. Now what happens when MS decides to not support WinXP anymore? Can they guarantee that I can install WinXP and use it 20 years from now?
Both Personal and commercial DRM have issues when it comes to system recovery. I see this problem in WMP now. If you buy music on WMP and WinXP crashes, I hope you backed up your Encryption key, otherwise all your music is now worthless. The same goes with the Encrypting File system in WinXP, although that can be handled and minimized by a Domain server in a business environment.
so in summary:
DRM in my control = Good
DRM in Someone Else's Control = Bad
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Why would I buy a car and then be told where I was allowed to drive it by the manufacture.
There are laws that tell me were I am supposed to be driving and how, but I am quite confident that everybody is not following them to the letter.
Is there a private organization of car manufactures waging war against the consumers?
No.
I'd only accept DRM in the case of a low priced subscription sort of service, but if a media company is going to do that then they had damn well better make ALL of their catalog available and not just certain more popular or more recent titles.
I find myself more annoyed at the large number of things that have gone out of print and are about impossible to find in any other format than mp3's than I do at about anything else when it comes to music. I don't mind buying CD's when I can find what I want to buy.
Mord
Notice to the humor impaired: the aformentioned statement is intended as humor, not a realistic statement of intent. All derogatory replies questioning my logic and civility will be ignored, which is what you should do with this post if you are the sensitive type.
DRM is fine for a day a week, a month or even a year or two... however at some point you have to say that everyone has heard the song folks! 70-90 years after death is rediculous! I propose giving artists a year after release to make money off of a recording, and only performances after that. Use it or loose it. If for some reason the recording doesen't take off the first year... great they still get to tour and make money on concerts! And don't tell me that they don't make enough money ... I won't buy it. They will do fine.
I can't foresee any occasion where I'd accept DRM, ever. Allow me to explain:
DRM only works if it's supported right down to the hardware, and I fundamentally object to my computer having a different agenda to mine. I will not buy hardware that I'm not in control of, and I view it as irresponsible and invasive to even try to control or artificially limit something I've paid (my) good money for.
If you don't understand this attitude, ask yourself why the government fines people for speeding but doesn't install mandatory speed-limiters in cars, or makes murder illegal but doesn't ban guns outright. Precedents both.
DRM without end-to-end hardware support is essentially impotent unless you are prohibited from cracking it by law. Legislating against technology like this is like legislating against bad weather, or against the tide - it's coming eventually whether you like it or not, and you only look stupid and/or put yourself in harm's way by trying to get between it and where it's going.
(As an aside, can anyone think of an example where a popular technology has been legislated against, and it's died there and then? I honestly can't think of one. In contrast, I can think of several cases where legal proceedings (and the attendant publicity) have launched a new piece of techology into mainstream usage, but I can't think of one counterexample. If anyone else can, please let me know...)
Short version - end-to-end DRM is fundamentally invasive and tramples on your rights as a consumer (First Sale, Fair Use, etc). Vulnerable DRM propped up by dubious lawmaking both cheapens the law and retards technology as a whole (e.g. banning P2P networks unless they pro-actively filter for copyrighted software effectively bands P2P as a useful technology).
DRM represents an attempt to graft concepts and precedent from physical property law onto digital "property". They are not alike, and this sets a false precedent which will (and is) harming both our technological and cultural development.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
DRM is about power. It's about taking power away from the consumer, removing the consumer's power over the box in front of them, and giving it to a big company in $LAIR. Now then, let's look at previous attempts of the aristocracy to control the masses by using their money to buy power.
French revolution anyone?
Okay, so that's a fairly extreme example. Look at the collapse of the soviet union; look at Gandhi, apartheid in south Africa; apartheid in America, the protection rackets of the 30's....etc, etc.
Quite frankly, if there is breath left in my body, ink left in my pen, and fingers attached to my keyboard^H^H^H^H^H hand, then DRM will not be on my boxes. All my ITMS purchases are DRM free; and will never be any different.
My UID is prime. Is yours?
If I have control over the drm or at least in the sense that I can personalize the encryption scheme so that any device that I own can all be synched to use the same encryption key, so that I can play my media on any player I own. I don't have to ask permission to play my cd in my car, my house, at a friends house. I should not have to ask permission or buy a song numerous times to do the same. DRM is for the most part a useless plug to stop a sinking boat from sinking. If the industry can't adapt to the new world, let it burn down, and a new one will take its place. BTW I strongly feel we should stop subsidising the stupid airlines that won't evolve either, but that is a topic for another thread.
1. ...for use of my hardware
2. ...especially for wasting my hard drive space with junk that I did NOT order.
3. ...for use of bandwidth that I paid for when I downloaded that other stuff I did not order. ...you think this is a free ride?
4. ...for thinking they can get away with it.
5. ...because they won't.
I don't mind as long as I get to listen to it how I want.
DRM might be useful in order to "Watermark" media to show that it is the original recording. It would be good for stopping lower-quality bootlegs from flooding the market (the "China" problem), just reencoded onto a DVD or a 2-channel audio stream for someone else to make a quick buck from a brand.
Apple's current usage to encrypt the media to stop you playing it on too many
devices is a little OTT. Infinite iPods but what if you leave your iPod at home
and want to play it on your laptop in another country?
DRM should be about protecting the interests of artists and consumers, and not
restricting their rights. Remember it's meant to be rights MANAGEMENT, not
removal. The suits just didn't catch on yet but they will.
Neko
Personally, I take the view that if a song, movie, book, etc. is DRM'd then it isn't truly mine.
It not YOURS unless you CREATED IT. Otherwise, it belongs to somebody else and you have only the rights to use it as the OWNERSHIP of the content allows.
This sucks, but it's the reality of it.
You DO NOT OWN the music you buy. Nor the films, nor the TV shows. You don't own any of it. You have purchased a license agreement for viewing the content, and even that is limited.
You cannot, for example, buy an in-home viewership license and then go broadcast it to a theater. There's a separate license you need if you want to do that.
You do not have distribution rights.
Now, there's no question that copy protection schemes and what not are making it difficult to exercise rights we do have (e.g., Fair Use), and the DMCA has criminalized the process of circumventing copy protection to exercise those rights. These are Bad Things and they need to be dealt with by our nation's political leadership (fat chance).
But all of this bitching and whining on Slashdot boils down to _one_ thing for the ungodly majority of you: you want to be given everything for free. You don't want to pay for software, music, movies, nothing. You want some amorphous Very Big Corporation of America to spend ITS dollars creating stuff and then just give it to you.
I know, dozens of you will respond to this telling me what a moron I am because you personally aren't like that. You pay for your music, and you just want to burn a copy to play in your car or at work.
Well you aren't the majority. If you were, none of this would be a problem. I think the Content Cartels are clueless, stupid, and exercising poor business decisions here too, but they have a point: most people won't pay for something if they can get it for free with little risk.
Lodge all the complaints you want about legal bullying (I agree, that blows, but it's a flaw in our legal representation system, not in content distribution), claim all you wish that you WEREN'T GOING TO BUY THE CD ANYWAY so you haven't really cost them any money.
You're stealing and they have every right to protect their property. You and I disagree with their methology in their but the bottom line is that the Slashdot mentality is that once I pay for it I should be able to do whatever I want with it.
I believe that Apple (or whoever) could sell entire albums for $5 and no DRM and most of you would still complain about it, and most of you would still go grab songs for free off P2P networks, and then have the nerve to plant your fists on your hips and wag your finger at the content cartels and the government for wishing to dismantle or regulate the P2P networks.
I know. You personally reading this right now aren't like that. But most of the rest of Slashdot is. And moreover, most of the rest of the filesharing community is.
I think that is the whole point. The content ISN'T yours. It belongs to the group that produced it. Too many people think it IS theirs, so they come up with the DRM crap to make sure people don't use it like it is theirs. A bad deal all around - but, when people act like the stuff is free and steal it - what should we expect? DRM sucks, thieves suck...
I am fine with any DRM as long as it is easily removed without degrading the quality of the original file. The CSS protection on DVD's for example.
To respond in a general sense to multiple posts:
I'll only allow DRM on rentals, not on purchases
Reasonable - if you purchase, you have first sale right, format shifting rights, reverse engineering, etc. However, you have no right to distribute. People do distribute, however, and DRM is a reasonable way of stopping or limiting that. Another would be remove the DRM, but watermark all files with a generic tag, and have all ISPs monitor your uploads, looking for that tag - and when you do, they immediately notify the feds and shut off your stream. Would that be reasonable?
DRM is never acceptable. All ideas should be free
Which is a great idea, if ideas never cost money to implement. But, because they do (Pixar's multi-million dollar renderfarm, an author's bills as they take a year to write a novel, a programmer's Fritos and Coke as they program a new game), idea creators need to be subsidized for their ideas. Either that can be society or government subsidizing them (would you accept that? Or would that be too much like "communism" for most people?) or by charging consumers, which is our current system. DRM allows them to retain control such that consumers have to pay for use - which subsidizes the artist and pays their expenses.
Removing DRM removes their source of income which removes the incentive to create.
I know most Slashdotters will say "I don't pirate movies, software, or music. I don't distribute it" - in which case, they'll be solidly behind the first idea, right? Or, they will say "I don't want to pay for it, I just want it". In which case, they'll be solidly behind the second idea, right?
TANSTAAFL. Can't get the content if you can't pay the creator.
-T
DRM is ridiculous in any form... Yes, Any
When I have the choice between a not DRM and legal stuff I prefer buy it (cause it is the simplest). But if I can get only a DRM stuff, I prefer download it from illegal P2P.
Sure, I talk more than I chatter online by at least two orders of magnitude, but I'll agree with the grandparent here. Computers buy us abilities that would have been superpowers (or straight up godlike abilities) two generations ago.
Hey, what, we can do *even more* than we have been doing? Cool? Oh, it's not in the best interest of some companies? Well, let's lose that ability.
I see a lot of technology right now is people scrambling to find a ubiquitous use for different aspects of progress, knowing full well than unless everyone is doing it soon, the general populace won't be smart enough to say "No, you may not take that freedom away" when it clashes with what a government considers appropriate or when it clashes with an existing business model.
... I, personally, will not work if I do not get payed.
Until someone will figure out how to pay to some honest artists and/or producers for their work. Then there is only few possibilities:
a. DRM
b. sponsorship
c. not publishing
Options b and c will kill all kind of professionalism.
DRM is suitable for 'rental' such as pay per view, but NOT for 'purchase'. The problem is that idiots such as the RIAA and MPAA (and Micro$oft) tell us we don't buy the software, but rather a license to use it and get a copy of the software on media that we do own (the media NOT the software). That would be ok as long as they agree to REPLACE said media when it becomes un-readable due to it wearing out, or because of hardware changes (IE: CD's obsolete, now need SADVD). Problem is to separate the cost of the media (nominal) from the license. Don't tell me I need to buy the whole frag'in thing all over again!!!!!!
Did you know the UK parliament still writes all its bills onto vellum and stores them, at a cost of about 80kgbp/year? It's still got the original bills from 1200 onwards as a result. Sadly the current misbegotten idiots want to stop it, to save 80k a year. Pah. No soul, these New Labour wonks.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
I'd accept DRM if (assuming an audio file):
It's quite possible that those are incompatible. Well, then don't use DRM if you want to sell to me, Ogg or mp3 are fine. Note that iTunes (with its ability to burn to CD) comes close enough, but iTunes isn't available in my country.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
It's very clear that most Slashdot readers have not really ever made a living from the creation of content. If you made your living from a book you wrote, music you recorded or made a film you made would you still feel the same way? People suggest that they should just trust the consumer, yet when you do you end up with things like Napster. How much of BitTorrent traffic is for legitimate use?
Apple's DRM addresses "fair use". I have made quite a few mix CDs for friends without any problems. I can also back up my music by making a copy of the file to another disk. I can't however put them on my FTP site or share them on a P2P. Supporting the argument that making your entire MP3 collection available for free public download in some qualifies as "fair use" simply shows peoples intentions.
Many of you will argue that by contributing to OSS you have invalidated my first point. First, the GPL itself is a form of rights management that stipulates exactly the terms of how you use the code and software. Secondly, I bet I could count on one hand how many Slashdot readers have actually been able to make a living off of writing/creating (I don't mean supporting, setting up or using) OSS.
It's rare that you can buy anything without strings attached. You aren't supposed to drive your car too fast and you're not supposed to pass around your CD for all your friends to make copies of. These rules have always existed and it was up to us to follow them. If we got caught breaking them we got in trouble. What's different now is that we are not trusted to follow the rules on our own. The rules are automatically enforced for us. As a practical matter this shouldn't effect me since I was already a law abiding citizen, but on general principle it pisses me off because I wasn't part of the problem (although now thanks to the DMCA I'm probably a criminal). It stinks of prior restraint, which used to be forbidden in the US back when we followed our constitution.
This DRM issue isn't the fault of the online music stores. They have to DRM their stuff in order to be in business so in that sense it's a step in the right direction (buying music online, not DRM). The big problem is much bigger than Apple, Microsoft, or Real. The big problem is basically the way the world is run. Big corporations conrol everything, including the government. Since I doubt we'll get a constitutional amendment requiring the "seperation of corporation and state" we're stuck fighting this out guerilla style.
Feh.
When you accepted Citizenship in this country, you ACKNOLOGED that our govt can issue LEGAL tender and back up with laws that prevent people from duplicating..
Well, before there was an equal amount of Gold to dollars, but that changed.
Still, I can go to the super-high-def color-laser with special cotton-fiber and chemicals so it reacts correctly to those pins.. But when I show that I want to fake somebody and try to use my ILLEGAL TENDER, it breaks what few laws should be ONLY federal.
There should only be 2 fed crimes: Treason and Counterfeiting, but that's a whole another "Your Rights Online" article or 2.
I just bought a new VW Jetta and I see my iTunes songs in kind of the same light. My Jetta has a special key that only the dealer can supply me with, just like my music has to be authorized on computers by Apple.
If I lose my key and the dealer no longer supports it, then I'm screwed. (Obviously with cars there's a little more protection, you wouldn't want a $20K+ car to be inoperable simply because they upgraded key machines). Likewise if Apple stops supporting iTunes music and I upgrade my computer I may lose all my music.
I own the music the same way I own my car. I can do whatever I want to the music, but without the authorization it might not play. I can do whatever I want to my car, but without the key it might not run.
We accept the special keys for cars so that people don't steal our cars. Why don't we accept DRM that doesn't get in the way if it keeps people from stealing our music?
Find me in ~/.sig
I agree with the previous posters - any DRM is too much DRM.
If I *buy* it, I want it.... on my terms, not some RIAA jackass terms which translate to "you'll have to buy it a few more times before you die, pretty much any time any of your equipment dies, and maybe even before that, if our profits aren't enough that quarter."
So, I simply boycott anything that goes out of my way to restrict my rights to use it as I see fit for my own personal enjoyment.
This boycott is made easier for me because I frankly don't see much of *anything* coming out of the RIAA nor the MPAA that's worth owning these days.
I have bought DVDs and CDs- but directly from the artist. Who usually is glad to sign them. No media mogul middleman involved. The artist gets the full profit.
It's like Negroponte said about "What's wrong with standard (meaning analog, non-HDTV) television? Is it the sound? No, the sound is fine. Is it the picture? No, the picture is certainly adequate. It's the _programs_, stupid!"
I don't even bother to P2P. There's nothing out there worth my time downloading it.
Yes, I *have* spent time working in "the media", and it's not that money is the most important thing to these people. It's the ONLY thing. They make Big Tobacco and Big Oil look like the Red Cross and the Unitarian Universalists.
I boycott the MPAA, the RIAA, and I encourage others to do the same. Buy from local artists, buy direct from artists; create on your own. The system will change when it's no longer profitable for them; we simply need to hasten that day.
The reason? Because you have less rights as a buyer than as someone who just downloads the movie/song/whatever.
And that is IMHO the big problem with for example the recording industries: they treat their customers as criminals.
On each and every CD I have bought the last couple of months, there's a bit DON'T COPY MUSIC notice, while I'M THE ONE BUYING IT! Please do not point out that it would be rather hard to reach the downloaders this way, but hopefully you get my point.
http://jcsnippets.atspace.com/ - a collection of Java & C# snippets
My biggest issue is with the lifespan of the DRM schemes and authentication backends.
I am okay for short lifespans. If I rent a video from the local BlockBusters I am perfectly okay with a DRM scheme that blocks access after a fixed period of time.
Over the long run I have see many problems:
1. Lifespan of companies like the new Napster. The music is only playable as long as Napster is around to authenticate the DRM scheme. Napster goes out of business and its dead.
2. Lifespan of the DRM scheme. If I buy (not rent) a title, the DRM scheme better allow me to use it as long as I have it. I don't want to find out its not compatible with Windows 2020 or Linux 10.4, and told I have to buy a new version.
3. Valid expiry dates. If a title has a copyright expiry date of say March 1, 2054, then the DRM should reflect this, not 2038 (UNIX time_t value) which I expect to be around for, or infinite (which means the title will be copyrighted well after the Sun goes nova).
DRM means I don't have control over it.
If I don't have control over it, I don't see why I should have to pay.
Kinda like movies now: why the hell should I pay...... to see commercials? I can do that at home.... for free! (well, almost, I do end up paying to see them on cable)
AC comments get piped to
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It is reasonable for a subscription model where you do not actually purchase the music, but pay for the right to listen to it for a set period of time.
I pay $15 a month for a Napster To Go subscription. It allows myself and my wife to put songs on our computers and our mp3 players... and the songs play for as long as we are subscribers. We like the kind of music they provide.
Without DRM, we would have to buy all that music, and we would not have the option of merely subscribing to it.
OTOH, if I am buying (as opposed to subscribing), DRM is unreasonable to me. If I buy something, it should work forever. With DRM, the songs you buy will not last forever... they will last as long as you have a computer "licensed" to play them.
Sure, you can burn to CD. But the songs are compressed lossy... if you want to listen to them on an mp3 player again, you will have to reencode them and deal with quality loss.
DRM makes NO sense for something you buy. It is a fraud and is likely to piss off a LOT of uninformed people when they realize that their entire music library must be burned to CD to avoid losing it. Noone is going to keep the same computer forever.
When there's DRM around something, I can not consider it mine. Thus I'll consider a DRM'd product to be only a rent, and expect it to be priced accordingly.
That's the catch people don't get. So you 'bought' something from iTunes? No mate, you *rented* it for an unlimited duration.
That's why it's cheaper than buying the CD.
There exists is a hole in the marketplace for acquiring songs which you can then do whatever you want with. That hole has long since been filled by P2P applications. They can never be replaced by commercial apps, because they're plain cheaper.
There are some interesting thoughts on the subject at DRMblog
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
In almost every other business, there are limits as to when copyrights or patents will expire. Music may be something like 50 years, but I don't really think that is true.
My point is that I have no problem with a company discovering a band, paying for marketing (obviously only horrible music needs marketing), etc and charging a premium on their brand new CD or whatever. However, after a few years, why can't some other company now come in and make that same damn CD and actually compete with the music company on price? The artist can still get their $0.01 or how ever little money the do get. This would actually allow competitin among the same product. Britney Spears is not competing against Dream Theater and therefore these copyrights have turned into a monopoly...
For example, after 5 years, the song is "owned" by the writer. The "rights" to distribute it can haded out to different people if the own so chooses. Obviously this is not how the industry works, but I'm not going to pay for DRM to support their monopolies and BS!
However, traditional copyright would still apply.
What if I'm "renting" a DRM'ed thing? That should follow current conventions. I never could watch rented VHS movies in the given time; I used to rent and copy for timeshifting purposes (though that is illegal). I've trashed all those copies since, though.
This question is being asked backwards.
The question REALLY is: "At what PRICE POINT will you accept DRM".
The best example I can think of is DVDs. Most popular new releases cost about US$15. At that price point, the ratio of value-to-money is pretty good. Most consumers don't care to go through the trouble to crack copy protection to copy DVDs because the price is reasonable, so they accept the DRM. Why do people download films? Because who wants to pay $10 to take a chance that a film is shit? If movies were a dollar, it's virtually risk-free.
Now, ask yourself: would you buy a DVD that only worked on a certain player, or had other draconian DRM? Not for $15, certainly. What about for one cent? Yes, it would cost one cent, but have Super-Palladium DRM. Many Slashdotters would answer no. Many, many consumers would answer yes.
That's why DRM causes an allergic reaction in most consumers- the price point is way too high. If I'm paying $20, I want to own it. For 5 cents, DRM all you want- I can afford many more choices. DivX failed because it was still too expensive. People don't mind lots of cheap charges (ringtones, anyone?). They HATE $3/pop to watch a movie after they already paid 6 or 7 dollars to "own" it.
Record companies might be willing to give content away for free if they could DRM it and make money in other ways. For example, they could collect demographic or marketing information instead of taking cash payments. It would then be (cash) free to download, but they would still control distribution. Etc., etc.
No one is going to pay $1000 for a computer they don't really own. But I would pay 10 dollars for one, it will probably give me a marginal benefit that is larger than that even with a crippled machine.
The problem is that Software and Media companies want it both ways- they want to charge you the price of unrestricted goods for restricted goods, but want consumers to suddenly get stupid and pay more for less. Nuh-uh. People are surprisingly smart about value-for-money.
Let capitalism work- charge a lot less, get more control of your content.
Since, if it's not mine, that's about what it's worth.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
I think that expecting the record companies to stop their price fixing is unrealistic. They've already settled one case out of court for peanuts, so of course they're going to do it again.
The only type of DRM I accept for electronic media is DRM that is easily cracked, ala songs purchased from the iTunes music store. I'm no pirate, but if I pay for something, I want to make sure it's going to work in the future should the company that I purchase it from go out of business. You wouldn't purchase a CD or DVD that could only be played in a player produced by a single manufacturer would you? The same goes for any media I buy and then download that has DRM. If it can't easily be cracked so that I can be sure it will work in the future, regardless of what happens to the company I purchase it from or to the technology used to decode the DRM'd media, then I won't bother buying it.
The only copy protection I accept on physical media is copy protection that is easily circumvented because it is essential for backup purposes. I had lost a small fortune in scratched CD's that were no longer playable before I began ripping and making backup copies of them when that technology first became available. With digital media that's downloaded, it's easy to make backup copies, but when I'm buying some kind of physical media that has some form of DRM to prevent making copies, that DRM better be easy to crack as well if the media itself can be easily damaged (CD's, DVD, etc.). I never had to make backup copies of VHS tapes or the music tapes because they were a heck of a lot harder to damage accidentally , but I make sure to make backups of all of my CD's and DVD's now because of how easy it is to scratch them. Sure you can use that gadget to peel off a layer and that sometimes works, but I've noticed that when I do that to my scratched CD's some CD players can no longer play them.
I consider music, movies and software that I purchase to be an investment. I have no intention of defrauding those I purchase it from by making copies and giving them away or selling them, but I do want to protect my investment should the company go out of business or decide the technology is obsolete and stop making the software and/or hardware that I need to make the DRM'd media playable, listenable, or installable. When you buy something with uncrackable DRM, you're not buying anything, you're renting it.
It's worse than that - they are spending approx. 300K GBP on a committee to discuss the idea.
Given the UK Governments record on IT projects (including a PM who says he can't even use the internet!) should webe scared?
DRM isn't about geeks. It's about the lowest common denominator.
Case in point. I complained to a fairly senior manager at my company that putting DRM on mobile phone ringtones and games was a nasty thing to do. "What happen when the customer changes phone? They won't be able to keep any of the stuff they've paid for!"
"Ah," said the manager, in velvety tones, "They won't care. The average kid changes his ringtone every 2 weeks. The average game isn't likely to last more than 2 months. By the time customers change devices - they've gotten bored with the content they've purchased. We've never had any customer try and transfer a protected ringtone from one device to another."
And that's when it struck me... he's right. Most people will be happy "renting" DRM'd products because their attention span is so low.
For geeks it's a big deal. We want to know we can always use something we've paid good money for. But the average customer is part of a disposable culture that celebrates throwing away unfashonable goods.
DRM is to the software business what changing specifications is to the hardware business. I can't use my ISA modem in my PCI motherboard - I can't play last year's songs on this year's iPod.
T
If a square is really a rhombus, why aren't all triangles purple?
And falls into public domain eventually. This is the intent of copyright. That said, copyrights last too long. If I have to wait 70+ years, then I won't accept it.
Indeed, and the rest of the quote is equally appropriate:
"[...] Never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense".
Which seems to fit the question very well - at what point does DRM become a "good sense" proposition to which we can give in?
I personally don't mind the idea of DRM in a limited form. For instance, if I "buy" an .avi with the clear understanding that it's a "watch 5 times only" (at a knock-down price) or that kind of thing.
:
I do resent people preventing me doing perfectly legitimate things like making a backup of a CD or film - especially if I am being charged full-price (or over-price!) for the media/content to start with.
For instance, I bought a TV-series on DVD a few weeks ago and converted the video to a bunch of mpeg's and burned the resulting files to a DVD. I sit and watch those on my PC and keep the DVD safely away in a drawer.
Unless the DRM can be devised which can distinguish between mass piracy and personal backups (or even, shock! a single copy for a friend) then I think it's doomed.
Sooner or later enough regular people ask themselves "why can't I?" and it becomes a problem for the industry. Fending off some nerds and d00dz who can be dismissed on TV is fairly easy, fending off "concerned parents of Utah" is another matter.
In any case, this always reminds me of a quote from William S. Burroughs
"To sell out your sons forever! To sell out the ground from unborn feet for ever?"
First RIAA Hitler comparrison troll.
.... there is alwasy next time.
We all know killing Jews is as bad if not worse then using draconian tactics to enforce copyright.
You woudl be modded up faster is you coudl manage to compare yourself to Rosa Parks in and somehow make the Civil rights movement and copyright infringment connected but
DRM is just a money grab. I haven't even given it much thought, but I simply don't buy songs with DRM on them, it is just not worth the trouble. Why pay more money for a worse product? The music industry would be better off by charging a fair price for their wares and not doing DRM.
It sucks no matter what. The two things about DRM pissing me off right now are:
1. DRM keeping me from burning legitimately downloaded music to a CD to take in my car.
2. The MLB allowing only three licenses for their clip/game videos that they "sell" on their site. So, once I use those three licenses, do I not have access to the video ever again?
When I had VHS, LPs, and Cassette Tapes, I had none of these worries. And I didn't steal any sort of media. Granted, some people will steal it, but how about punishing them, rather than punishing the rest of us?
I mean, put this into perspective. DRM is the equivalent of, say, selling a book to someone. The book would have a lock on the front. The only way to get the lock open is to have a certain key. That key can only be used by the person who bought the book, and can only be used in three different locations. If you read the book at home, at school, and at work, and then you try to read it in the park, you're suddenly violating some law/copyright. If you lose the three keys, you cannot read the book any longer, so you have to buy a new copy of the book. It doesn't make sense.
Fuck DRM. A lack of flexibility in a product makes it less appealing. And the less flexible they get, the more inclined to not ever buying mainstream media I'll be.
Instant Karma's gonna get you...
1) is cryptographically unsound, and
The problem is that the average non-technical Joe doesn't know what it is and doesn't seem to care. Maybe it's just time to join the "determined to pirate things" group?2) inconveniences honest people while making next to no difference to those who are determined to pirate things.
That Jon 'DVD Jon' Johanson became famous for cracking that DRM?
So truthfully what you portray, even if you aren't saying it, is that you will accept any DRM you never notice.
Check it out. Do the DVDs you own have CSS?
You seem to fit your own criteria perfectly, of a consumer not adequately aware or informed of the DRM system implemented in DVDs!
GPL Deconstructed
if you are buying a hard drive, do you accept that at some date in the future your hard drive will no longer be playable because some company went out of business or no longer supports your OS? think, hollerith card readers- or, PDP hard drives?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
is the parent a troll?!?!?!? Jesus H. Christ. Can we stop having the fucking 13-year-olds as moderators please?
You do own DVD's don't you?
Well, the only step left is the outlawing of non-DRMed hardware. But anything breaking DRM is illegal under the DMCA so we are almost there.
Get your Unix fortune now!
When you 'accepted' citizenship? I was born here. I didn't accept it.
In any case, how is your argument anything but support for my original reply? LOL.
You stipulate that to accept the benefits of a country's citizenship you must adhere to its laws.
Ergo, to accept the benefits of a product you must adhere to the legally applicable wishes of its producer.
I'm still trying to discern your point (being confused by the part about how you can counterfeit money when the OP is about DRM.)
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I guess when 99.9% of music and movies are one-off throwaway bullshit, people just don't care. We've become a culture of lazy, apathetic, drooling clods who suck up whatever we are handed. Witness the rise of the iTMS, a whole market of people mostly buying single tracks instead of albums.
Good artists produce good music, generally a bunch of tracks which make up a whole(ie., an ALBUM), that are worth keeping forever. Good movies are worth keeping forever. Good books are worth keeping forever.
Acceptance of DRM is just a sign of how pathetic our culture has become. Apparently, modern culture is for sale, and CHEAP! Only $.99 at the iTMS.
Fuck this shit...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I will never accept Digital Rights Manglement. DRM predefines my use for content, usurping my rights.
Imagine if you wanted to take a magazine to read in the bathroom, but as soon as you cross the threshold, it bursts into flame. Too bad, the publisher doesn't consider their "family oriented" material suitable for bathroom reading.
Other people can choose to live in that world, but given a choice between DRM-free content and content with DRM, I choose DRM-free. If the content is only available with DRM, then I choose to do without.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
I am in favour.
Though I do not much like current DRM systems.
Life will be better when you can listen to what you want, when you want, anywhere you want.
A few things that must happen first:
1. Distribution systems - digital streams anywhere, anytime
2. Payment systems - pay as you go
3. Forget ownership
When you buy a CD, you are only purchasing a licence to listen to the music, or use the software. That little plastic disc is just a silly, outdated, impractical distribution mechanism (we all know this). You own nothing.
Personally, I would rather pay for my content $0.025 at a time. News, music, "TV", software.
For the record: I have never, nor currently, nor have any plans to, work on a DRM system or content.
You will never take me alive, commie scum!
On a more serious note. Never. I don't want the media I buy to be crippled in any way, shape or form. I purchased it fairly and I how I choose to use it is my business.
If there really needs to be DRM, then ... since I paid for it, allow me all my fair rights and the ability to transfer those rights while disallowing anyone who isn't the proper rights holder. That would truly be Digital Rights Management.
...
Too hard? Impossible? Not my problem. Maybe if they'd spend less time on shift-key-defeatable "DRM"
Who doesn't like free music?
The guy who steals your used lawnmower would never have purchased one and certainly isn't going to be cutting any grass with it.
The same goes for the guy who is going to steal a copy of 'your' older music or film. He never would have purchased it and odds are he's not even going to listen to it more than once or twice. If he was really keen he would have purchased it when it was 'fresh'.
On the other hand, if I purchase a copy, I expect full enjoyment privileges with my purchase. If I want to make some copies on my laptop hard drive to view or listen to on a plane ride, I should be able to without jumping through hoops. IMO, any DRM is gonna make me jump through hoops and strongly discourage my interest in purchasing your media from the git go. Hell, there are plenty of other things I could be doing with my time and it's just not worth the hassle of working around your DRM crap in order to view or listen to your material. This is BAD from a business POV as you'll not make a sale and your paid product placements will have less value to the advertisers.
You think one guy won't make a difference? Well I'm not one guy. I'm your fucking middle class wads of disposable income target market!
Copyright holders say they won't release content into the wilds unless it is protected with DRM.
CALL THEIR BLUFF!
If we never buy DRM'ed content then they'll never be able to sell us DRM'ed content. The only choice they'll have is to play nice, or fold their tents and go away.
My University provides me with free DRM downloads from Napster, which I enjoy because I don't have to pay for it, but I dont think I would ever PAY for any DRM'd media. I find that a lot of the songs I download from napster even lag a little when they are playing (under any of my media players) which is absolutely rediculous consider my comp can run HL2 fine without lagging. Not suprisingly I can also run mp3 and ogg without any problems. Then again its all free to me so I suppose I can't complain much.
when he mentioned the retail fee. We're all used to buying/renting physical items and don't get upset by it. We understand the rules.
When I pop into Blockbuster to rent a DVD for £3, I understand that I've got his film to watch for a couple of nights and then I have to return it.
People don't protest against this, I've never heard of anybody refusing to rent films as they have to return them.
We're also used to the model of buying CDs and DVDs. I go into a shop, I give them some money and they give me a piece of entertainment to take home and put on my shelf. It's mine. I can make a thousand copies of the CD and rip it to any format I want, whenever I want. In reality I can't remember the last time I copied a CD and I just rip it once to m4a - but I know I have the option to if a friend wants it, or I upgrade to a non-iPod.
The problem with DRM is that it's being offered with similar terms to physical media with additional restrictions imposed and no real advantage. I can buy an album from iTunes or a physical CD - the CD usually works out cheaper, so why on earth would I want a DRMed digital copy?
The two models I can see working for DRM are rental and subscription (or a combination of the two). Firstly we have the Real Rhapsody system up and working - I pay a fixed price and get all the music I want. This is offering me something that wouldn't have been possible with physical media. Secondly we could have a film rental system. For those days I feel lazy and can't even be bothered to leave the house, it'd be nice to be able to download and watch a film for a couple of pounds.
I think my point is that most people have nothing against DRM, it's jus that currently it's not offering us anything better or cheaper than what we currently have.
DRM comes down to how much is it worth to me(don't get into some philosophical selling out to the man).
I own a DirecTV TiVO, iPod Shuffle, and a number of computers, so I'm pretty much "indentured" to "the man" in terms of DRM. I can't get content off of my TiVO(not possible with a DirecTV TiVO). I own 6 songs from iTMS(all of them thanks to Mountain Dew). All that aside...
I would like the opportunity to be able to see TV shows on demand(ex. 80's and 90's shows that aren't in syndication). I wouldn't mind DRM, as I wouldn't keep them, as long as prices are similar(or less) than PPV movies. If we ever get to the point where there's enough bandwidth to support it, I see TV moving to a PPV system on top of a regular broadcast system(additional, direct revenue stream).
I don't mind Apple's Fairplay, they tell me how to get around it. If I want a good archival copy of a song, I'll buy the album from my local music store.
Long story short, I'lll live with DRM as long as my exposure to it is minimal. If I do have to encounter it, it has to be worth what I want to deal with/pay for. However, if I can't play a music cd in my car, or a DVD in my Powerbook, that crosses the line.
Nope, id never willing accept something that has been DRMized.
If i buy it, its mine. If i cant do what i want with it due to some stupid 'protection' then i dont want it.
Sure, if i dont have a choice, then i have no choice. But today, i do. And i choose no.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And a majority of the recorded music is rotting away because it isn't available. I too grew up in the 80s. What if I want to listen to a group that I liked, but my tapes are worn out? Can I go out and buy their CD? Maybe, if any store will carry it. There is a lot of good (and bad) music that will be lost because the record companies don't think they can make money on it anymore. They own the right to it, and choose to let it die.
The same goes for lots of things I guess. We are definitely a nostalgia generation. If it weren't for the enthusiast community, a lot of the video games from the 80s would be extinct. I was into arcade video game collecting for a while, and one of my friends (who was into it WAY more than me) cobbled together pieces from several different video game boards to resurrect a game that nobody had anymore in working condition. (Zektor) Now you can play it on MAME. Now you can play LOTS of games on MAME, and big companies had nothing to do with it. Music and movies are the same to some extent, I am afraid. I don't want to hear crap that is on the radio, I would like to hear the old stuff I used to listen to when I was growing up. It is getting harder and harder to find.
It is part of OUR culture, it is still up to us to preserve it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
That is the key to the DRM argument.
If I am renting then I do not have a problem with DRM. If I am buying then I do. The only way to protect the consumer who buys in a DRM world is to have a disinterested third party holding the keys should the seller vanish. Even then this is not a great solution as it still means a delay.
The reason DRM exists is because too many people cannot be trusted to not give away COPIES of stuff they do not have the right to distribute copies of. Its the bad apples that make it easy for companies to justify DRM.
I would accept watermarking provided they was an absolute method to track it back to my purchase. A personal watermark that all media I buy online being tagged with would be a better solution. That key would have to be transportable between different types of hardware, have to be unique, and have to have a way I could prove its mine beyond doubt.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
What's this "when" thing?
No offense but the reason there wasn't copy protection on CDs when you "grew up" wasn't because it was some ridiculous golden age of fair play but because it was extraordinarily difficult for you to do so.
Guess when copy protection in the music industry started to become an issue...? Right when CD Burners became affordable.
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"DRM in any form is ridiculous", ofcourse...
I'm never going to buy anything (again)* that has DRR in place, without a well dispersed crack out in the open.
:P
Renting is something else. I could agree to DRR on rented material. After all, if I rent it it isn't mine to begin with, and the timescale of the ret is fixed, so I don't care.
For streaming you could look at this as being the same as renting. DRR would be ok, were it not that I absolutely hate being forced to watch content without being able to skip parts or timeshift. So there DRR is a mixed issue. It would take a heck of quality material to make me spend my strong Euros on DRRed streaming material.
(*) I once bought a DRRed WM HD disk just to test out 1080p resolution. The box also contained a standard DVD, so I can forgive myself
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
It should be noted that in some countries, DRM could even be considered illegal, depending if it broke some basic consumer-rights (fair use, backupcopy, personal copy, etc.) or not.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I would accept DRM only if I have the option to buy with or without DRM. Or with different DRM levels.
What would it means.
When buying DRMd content I would have almost no rights upon it, basically I could access it through a few certified media. Of course it would cost much less.
When buying no DRM content I would be able to copy into other media, my computer, print it, but only for personal use, maybe personal redistribution (no P2P networks), and it would cost the same as today.
Of course ther would be a third level, that gives you the right to copy, redistribute (including P2P), broadcast, but not for commercial use (which would require another license). And this would cost much more then today.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
For Example, I own 2 DVD players and have the ability to set the region code and turn off macrovision on each of these players. I bought the players primarily for their ability to play back non-DVD formats such as SVCD, Divx, and Xvid. I do a lot of downloading and don't particularly care to watch downloaded media on the computer.
I am in the market for an Ipod, but I have no interest in DRM encumbered Itunes. I just want a hard drive player to playback unencumbered mp3s that I rip from CDs or obtain from download.
I couldn't agree more! If the company goes out of business, your screwed. If the company decides the technology is out of date and quits supporting it, you're screwed. Buying something with DRM amounts to renting.
Great post except this:
As I said, I believe this attitude of mine is due in part to my Gen X demographic. Baby boomers and older -- those presumably running XXAA -- grew up not expecting reviewing capability.
The ideals of those running the FooAA have nothing to do with their generation, their upbringing, or anything of the sort. It has to do with money and control.
As long as they can continue to manipulate the public's understanding of fairuse and can continue to sucker the public into buying shit quality recordings that are crippled with DRM then they are happy.
Once they stop making money they will start to realize that it's not in their best interests.
Sadly, people are sheep and believe whatever the latest media hype on TV is. They seriously believe they have no right to "steal" from the FooAA and listen/watch media however they want.
It's sad... Stop supporting the FooAA.
and the person who rips it off gets a better product?
If I buy something, I want the right to use it. If an individual entity or company wants to control my rights, they can't have my money. That's the choice we have as consumers.
Fair use rights are imperitive. For example, my right to take a song from a cassette and put it on a CD so I could listen to it in my car or a friend's car, or to play it if I threw a party, or to play it under Linux or Windows or my MP3 player.
I'm an American and I live like one.
after x86 wasn't executed "deep" in the cpu ... it all points to the ... it's all ... so it's ... we
anymore, but akind of a "virtual cpu" that
emulates x86, but isn't really a x86 chip anymore,
then we get windows the 90% market share monster.
then we get mono and other virtual machine
languages and now we drm
fact that the computer industry has gotten so big,
it's a whole new branch in economics.
there's no way back: radical new cpu, radical new
os, radical new programming language
layers and layers of history.
i guess this was all okay as long as moors law
held and computers were a geek thing. now
computers, software and media are "feeding"
thousands and thousnads of families
truely not a hobby thing anymore. if this drm
takes off, an enormous amount of money will be
generated (*) and it will be likely that the
computer types will once again fork to the media
center/walkman/ipod/tv (DRM!) branch and the
high-end super computing (ANYTHING GOES!)
will see.
(*) this is soft money, it doesn't really do
anything, it just changes hands = DRM money VS.
a farmer earns HARD money.
Here, we're going to give you a file thats locked and encrypted. We're also going to give you the keys so that you can open it and actually use it. Oh yeah, please don't copy it while you have it unlocked.
WTF is the point?Kiteboarding Gear Mention slashdot and get 10% off!
I'd accept DRM technologies... for corporations, that is, to use our personally identifiable information in ways that owners deem fit. This paper suggests that DRM might work (though there are obvious difficulties wrt getting corporations and government to use it):
Korba, L., Kenny, S. "Towards Meeting the Privacy Challenge: Adapting DRM," 2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management, Held in Conjunction with the Ninth ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. Washington, District of Columbia, USA. November 18-22, 2002. NRC 44956.
Thoughts?
With iTunes you can either use Hymn to remove the DRM or burn to CD and then re-rip. Either way, your investment is proctected. With DVD's, there is software avaialable to allow you to make backup copies. I'll accept DRM but it better not get in my way often and it better be easily crackable.
In theory -- just in theory -- why should we accept *any* DRM if we can all go to any public library and check out a book for two weeks without DRM?
Why should books be DRM-less but all the rest of my media is full of DRM?
Yes, I understand that "books" are different than digital "files" -- but there are Xerox machines for books, and last I checked, if you have a garbage bag full of dimes, you can Xerox to your heart's content.
Or, better yet, *read* the book and then return it for another. And another.
Moreover, not only can I check out *books* from my local public library -- I can check out CDs and DVDs and video tapes. So it's all there -- all for free when you're a resident of the city/town/village in which the library exists and -- here's the key, I think -- you pay taxes.
I fail to see why the media companies don't understand this -- that some sort of library tax made much larger -- a media tax would probably -- probably -- solve everybody's problem. If you pay the tax, you have access. If you don't pay, you don't have access.
I understand that there are differences -- media is controlled by corporations whereas libraries are funded by state, federal, and taxpayer monies. I understand that.
But a book is media, too. And if I can borrow a book and read it and return it -- all without any DRM whatsoever -- I fail to see why I can't have my iTunes songs DRM-less -- whether it be for the 99 cents I pay, or for an all-you-can-eat subscription -- which, of course, makes sense if you look to the library model. (Here's a clue, Jobs: You don't *own* the books you check out from the library, and that's been going on just fine for, oh, a couple thousand years.)
Jobs is wrong when he says people want to *own* music. I'd like to own all the books I check out from the library, but I can't. I can't afford 'em, and I don't have the space. So I do what everybody else does -- I pay my taxes, check books in and out, and am happy.
I don't know. It's early. I've not had enough caffeine. Whatever. DRM sucks, and screw the greedy corporate execs. Screw Fairplay, too. Apple's as bad as everybody else.
Kids, I'm using my real name on purpose. I want you to know who I am. First, it's monotonously obvious that IP media wants to go digital for ease of use and portability. Great. I like it too. For those of you who think that just because someone has kept you from distributing their art at your boorish whim, you might consider that your indulging in a simple-minded supposition about what is yours and what is not. That I have to explain this to you is so completely dumb, I can't hardly keep typing. If you bought the item with distribution limitations (i.e. DRM, physical mediums (like a REAL book) or what ever) it is yours. You bought it as is. So, you can't instantly make a billion copies of a physical book? Good. It isn't yours to give away. It's yours to read. It isn't yours to forget at home and upload magically to your hands on the plane. It's a book. It has purposeful limitations built in. You bought this from someone who it does belong to who wanted it to have its limitations. It's still yours. You knew the limitations. Do with it whatever you want within the purposes it was made available to you for. That excludes giving a billion copies to your newsgroups or your delightfully utopian tyrannical idiot friends. Good. Too bad. Deal with it. You snides should understand how luck you are to have access to the thing at all. You are taking this too far and taking it for granted. The same goes with music. If it has DRM on it and you bought it, it's yours. To say, it isn't really mine is foolish whining. Grow up. Those failure, idealist, socialist dolts who gave you the impression that you should be able to do anything you want with whatever you bought can meet with you in their economically depressed, stupid, little worlds and bitch about it. Have fun - get nowhere. Get this kind of drivel out of my world. The void of logic it takes to say something like "if it has DRM it's not really mine" and the lack of respect you have for the artist to take that position for itself and not for what it really means, (ie, I can send the information wherever I want), is numbing. Go write your own song, book, or movie. Then choose to give it away however you want. If you decide to attach DRM to it, great. If not, great. If you are the buyer though. Whatever you buy is yours. You knew what you were buying when your undeserving little fingers pushed your lazy mouse over the purchase button. I'm not an artist. I, however, pay my artists for their art and don't complain on principle that I can't make a billion copies with the BS principle that just because I can do with it what I want doesn't mean I'm going to distribute it. Quit fooling yourselves. I hope they make it so you can never steal another song again. I hope it makes you mad. I hope this makes you mad too. That being said, healthy competition is another matter entirely. But you socialists living within the protective bubble of capitalism JUST WOULDN'T UNDERSTAND THAT. Don't pretend you understand. You don't. You won't. You DON'T WANT TO UNDERSTAND. It's an outrage. Please be upset about this. Be real upset. Then in a few years you'll spin enough circles until you break new ground and you'll grow up - or you conspicuously won't.
I'm happy with Apple's DRM. I'd rather not have to deal with the DRM at all, but for 99cents a song its the right price/DRM ratio.
* can listen to it on all my desktops.
* can burn it to a cd as many times as I like (and then rip it to remove the DRM so that it will play on my Neuros)
* can back it up to cd/dvd in its original format
* Only have to purchase the songs that I want, and not the whole album
If it were any more expensive per song, say $1.25, it would no longer meet my my price/DRM ratio and I would probably go back to buying CD's.
That many of you have already accepted DRM.
To my surprise, even a DVD recorder can't copy Hollywood produced tapes. This goes back to the 80s with a technique created by Macrovision.
Ironically, I can record anything on TV today (pre-broadcast flag of course.) Yet, I can't do a backup of a cheap old VCR tape, clearly a fair use right.
Since I and you are primarily interested in purely legal fair uses for copying, it's clear that Hollywood has never and will never respect you or I or our fair use rights. DRM has only one end, and that's the removal of our fair use rights to the farthest extent they can over the course of time. Even if they temporarily roll back their restrictions due to consumer backlash or competition, it's only until they can gradually creep them back.
Accepting DRM is allowing Hollywood to decide what's fair use. To them, it's only fair if they can get more money from you. That's my humble opinion.
I have boycotted the RIAA and its labels for years; then I added Windows Media, iPod and Tivo (due to compromise on commercial skipping.) I'll continue to boycott large companies that choose dollars over people, and continue to encourage anything that threatens the power of companies that undermine people's rights.
Open Standards Portal
When the shove it into my cold, dead hands.
But that violates the DCMA!
I personally don't want anything to do with DRM. I run an online music store and we don't have DRM on any of the songs, because A)None of the Artists on our site want it, and B)How can a consumer feel that they truly OWN the song if there are limitations on what they can do with it. The files in our store are in Ogg Vorbis format, but we also provide tools and utilities for consumers to re-encode the music into any format that they want. So there is freedom for the consumer to put it on their iPod, iRiver or whatever digital media player they want to use. We also have an Internet Radio station that plays all of the Artists on our site. The hardest thing for me to understand is that all of these companies are saying they will lose money if they don't DRM everything, but the same argument (well almost anyway) was used against radio back in the 1920's and the Record Industry tried to shut Radio down as well but they didn't succeed. We can see now that Radio had and has such a huge influence on Music. The internet can be the same way, if we utilize it. Artists stand a better chance of getting their music out by using P2P and DRM-less music files, if they can share it with people, but we have to shake this mentality of "This is the only way it can be done". That is a load of crap. Music will continue to evolve and the internet is fastest, cheapest way to do it. The point that I am trying to make is that you don't have to DRM everything because you will "lose money". If you give people some freedom, then you will be surprised at what can happen.
I have nothing clever to put here...
I can NEVER accept DRM, but not on any grounds that there shouldn't be SOME control over distribution, etc., of media, but more on the premise of the absolute certainty DRM can NEVER be implemented perfectly, i.e., there are always going to be those who can circumvent DRM.... and THOSE are the people the DRM folks are going after.
On the other hand, the honest, trusting OTHER customers are the ones who, in addition to now having to understand how DRM works, and how to use it, will fall prey to the unexpected glitches.... (family gathering to watch digital home videos.... uh-oh... for whatever reason, the DRM mechanism on the player won't let them watch THEIR OWN VIDEO! (I know some would argue that a good thing... :-))
The hapless unsuspecting users now don't know if their equipment is broken, or they've broken some law.... so next they turn to:.....
The NEXT victims of all of the DRM craze, the technical support people! (i.e., lots of slashdotters....). Now I'll be getting calls from my neighbors because they can't figure out how to get their dvd to play because of some glitch with DRM? Give me a break..
And, don't underestimate for a moment that these glitches aren't going to come up -- they always do -- and we are always left as the ones to provide solutions and support.
Meanwhile, the thieves and crooks will continue with their sport. Go figure.
Assuming that the constitution of the U.S. is valid and that works will eventually enter the public domain, what happens to the DRM material. I am not all that confident in the content providers to magically make a non-DRM version of the file available. Of course I guess we could conceed that the idea of the public domain is dead. Copyright has become a vertual strangle hold on the entery of new material into the public domain as it is. I see no evidence that this will change anytime soon. It is necessary for a version of any work to be available in an open non-restrictive form if the public domain is ever to succeed. If these works are locked away under DRM then we are about to enter a new dark age of humanity.
I am fascinated by this particular topic and I think it will be interesting to see how it plays out. To me, it reminds me of the old "irresistible force meets an immovable object" conundrum. The market forces here are pretty close to irresistible. The record and movie companies certainly seem to be immovable objects. My biggest concern is the government's role in this and the fact they seem strongly biased toward business instead the citizens themselves.
Tim O'Reilly had a great quote in a podcast I was listening to the other day. To paraphrase, what he said was "The internet grew into the worlds best record store. It had everything!...except a cash register. You couldn't even pay if you wanted to. Meanwhile, the record companies are sitting on the side saying 'These people are robbing us blind!'."
Personally, I don't really mind DRM as long as it lets me do what I want to do. I don't like iTunes because it tries to force me into certain hardware. Ironically, Windows Media isn't so bad for me because it works with my player. The winning business model will recognize this.
It is strange being in the center on this topic because so few people are. Mainstream consumers are shocked when I tell them I've used hymn on my iTunes music (they will understand someday when they finally feel the pinch). On the other hand, I'm not willing to deny businesses their rights to their intellectual property. They just can't expect to keep a stranglehold on the distribution mechanism...those days are long gone.
It is an interesting age we live in.
Why should I as a consumer, lose any rights I have to what I purchase, simply because the big companys have found new ways to limit those rights?
I'm ok with digital watermarking to a point... As long as I can re-use it in any device/medium I see fit, with no limitations, I could learn to live with a watermark. I wouldn't be happy, but I could stomach it.
But to tell me "Give me your hard earned money, and we'll let you play with our toys - But only as we see fit" is laughable!
- Such DRM is easily circumvented in most cases. If not 100% digitally, then by sampling the analog output as a new mp3 (or wav, or whatever). True, you'd arguably lose some of the fidelity that the digital copy has, but realistically, that'd be only high quality mp3's we're talking about here (320k). Given a clean analog path (ie, no cheapie no-name soundcard, and good connections/cables) the average 128k mp3 will still sound inferior to a good mp3 ran through such a conversion. It ain't perfect, but it's a foolproof circumvention. Similarly many platforms have software already available to let them sample the output before it ever leaves the PC, negating the need to re-route/sample
- I still have to purchase additional equipment to use their DRM'd piece of crap. The day that the big media companies start furnishing me with free audio equipment is the day they can start dictating how I use their media on their equipment. And realistically, it'd be a hard sell to get me to give up my rights just for a free stereo in the 1st place.
- There are alternatives already in place to get non-DRM'd tracks. If you force DRM down my throat, I'll just go elsewhere to buy my music. For example, many overseas dealers are offering non-DRM'd tracks. If the RIAA wants to force DRM down our throats, I can guarantee that they'll only hurt American online music retailers, as there' no laws, and likely won't be any, for purchasing music from an international source. True, they may eventually get the whole world to cave to their will (unlikely as that is), but at that time, individual trading, and swap meets would take off. This is something that's already being discussed, and pursued by such software/companies as Delicous Monster's Library app - The next version's supposed to let you see and contact others with similar tastes to swap and trade. And I don't think you'll soon see America limiting public gatherings based on what music they might be listening to, and who might loan a CD to whom
Seriously, this whole DRM thing is so out of hand. You now have Senator Orwin, who already has been proven to be in bed with the big media companies, all set to head a committe which, for better or worse, will determine our future rights. Tell me this isn't proof that our government is currently controlled by big money interests.Long story short, No DRM for me, thank you. If you force it on me, you'll force me to get my media from alternative sources, from which you may, or may not see a profit.
DRM : Digital Rights Management
Management : acte of managing.
Whose rights exists ?
- Author rights.
- Producer rights.
- Public rights.
Show me a system that manage (not restrict) public rights.
Show me a system that remove all protections once a work fall in the public domain.
Show me a system that help me to parody, or quote, or permit me all fair right uses, no matter where I'm in the world.
No SCDRMS (So called Digital rights management system) manage rights.
Presently, DRM is inexistant. What exist is public perception manipulation and brainwashing. And this, too, is unacceptable.
Well, I suppose as long as the DRM didn't require me installing any software on a computin' box, and it was known that I was just getting a "time limited rental" of such media, it may be ok. Would sure eliminate "late fees", if such a product would self destruct after X:XX amount of time. It would make me steer clear of it, though, as I usually prefer to packrat things. And Stuff. Woot, WOOT, woot. - T.G.S.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
-portability is compromised. Will it work everywhere, anywhere? Will it work with new technology? the latest thing is MP3 players in-dash in cars. Will it work with those? Will you need a key? Will it work with your "airport-equivalent" technology? Your TIVO music streamer?
-If it needs a new key, who provides the key if your provider goes bankrupt? Who says the fine print doesn't allow them to change the terms of service on you and invalidate what you thought you owned, after their conglomerate buy-out? (I.e. who will provide all those XP re-install keys when MS doesn't want to support XP any more?) Every DRM should have a what-happens-at-end-of-life or -opt-out explanation clearly spelled out.
Can I run it on any of the PC's in my house, or just one? (hey, I have 5 plus the work laptop)
-usually includes stupid restrictions - like "use our software to load your player"; which is stupid. Microsoft went through a lot of trouble to treat USB devisces like ordinary disks and now some bozo disables that feature for no good reason?
-will it be some stupid service like "it will stop working if the unit can't connect to the authorizing site within 24 hours..."? There are still some places that are not readily net-accessible. How about the Apple crap that stops working if you tell them you've moved to Canada? ("Sorry, not licensed for there...")
The physical presence model - CD, Book, DVD disk - is the most acceptable compromise because we all understand it; as long as nobody can plug the analog hole, music in particular will never be easily constrained. Online books, which typically have anal DRM, have been DOA; but then, even reference books are not as user-friendly as a physical book (except for searches). Meanwhile, specific documentation has in fact migrated online and on-disk, typically without DRM, and seems to be doing fine. DVD's have just about the right amount of DRM - the time and inconvenience make it a pain to copy any except the most valuable DVDs.
I see a future shortly, when online trading of music has been stamped out, but multi-layer blu-ray disks are incredibly cheap. Instead of downloads, we will see "collector editions". 100Gb Multi-layer BluRay disks, costing all of $1, circulate friend-to-friend. They are "all the great jazz", or "all of the 60's", or 80's; as each person get it, they make their own copy, update with their own material, and pass it on. The samizdat revolution reborn!
Were poll taxes right when they were law of the land in some states? No, and neither is the DCMA. Every time I use Hymn to remove the DRM from a file, I consider it an act of civil disobedience. Just because it's law, doesn't make it right. Laws get updated and overturned all the time. If they didn't, Mickey Mouse would already be public domain. The common man doesn't have enough money to line the pockets of politicians to extend fair use rights to digital media, the media companies, however, have all the money in the world to increase copyright lengths ad infinitum and to slowly but surely eliminate our fair use rights.
Well call me crazy, but fuck the DCMA and fuck the media companies and the politicians they've paid off. I won't steel from them, but I am sure as hell not going to let them usurp my fair use rights.
In many cases, I'd be happy to buy something that is of interest to me but at the same time something that I don't really intend on adding it to my "collection", at reduced functionality and at a reduced price.
That's actually one of my bargain hunting strategies. I look for things that are somehow inferior in the minds of others, but just happen to fit my need well. Usually such things can be had for a bargain.
However, paying full price (or sometimes even more) for limited use content is something I'll never do unless I'm forced kicking and screaming. I've actually stopped buying music since all this DRM stuff started becoming popular (my last straw was when SONY started selling SDMI enabled MP3 player for more than non-SDMI player, then they phased out the open ones, leaving just the more expensive ones.) I don't steal music, I've just decided not to be a customer any more. I borrow CDs, record from the radio for personal use and acquire music from other legal sources.
This thread is now closed.
DRM in any form is totally silly. Even if I'm renting something. The only thing that's in that price range that I would ever want to rent is beer.
I've watched various people and organizatinos over the past 8 years attempt to tame the internet and all things digital to be under their way of control. They realized eventually and gave up. The latest candidates out there trying now, IMHO, are Bill Gates, the RIAA, and MPAA.
As long as DRM hurts my rights as a consumer of goods and services, I'm not interested. When I purchase something, I want to own it without restriction. The ability for something to play on up to 3 systems "forever" does not work with the consumer model. Systems fail, get reinstalled, and upgraded. This breaks the DRM and you usually left with the SOL scenario.
"...the shortest distance between two points may be straight line, but it is by no means the most interesting."
I can only truly accept digital rights management if I can own a license for the copyrighted work I have purchased until the end of my days.
For example, if I purchase a CD, I want to pay for the rights once, and thereafter only pay for the medium the work is contained on.
If I am truly buying a license to listen, read, or view the material, then I should be able to retain that license if I run over the medium with my car.
Using this framework I could buy a CD, MP3, Tape, etc. and whatever future medium is released for the price of the medium without having to pay for the license over and over and over.
-JWR
That's why I repair all of those silly "flaws" in the DVDs I rent and instantly copy as soon as it shows up in my mailbox. DVDShrink removes all those annoying "flaws" in DVDs.
Now, while we weren't paying very much attention, the deal has slowly been changed by commercial interests who make money by regulating the flow of information. They've used their superior access to government to extend the length and scope of their IP privileges. At the same time, technology snuck up on them and changed the deal, by making information easier to share and ideas easier to disseminate. Copyright, as a pragmatic matter, depends on the technology for copying to be either expensive or imperfect, or both. Otherwise enforcement of copyright is impractical.
Thus, we have DRM. But DRM, as a class of technologies, gives the copyright holders the ability to make other kinds of changes to the deal using their control of the software, such as effectively extending copy protection forever by never expiring.
So, to answer your question, now that DRM has got our attention, let's talk about the deal.
I will accept DRM as part of a deal that more or less restores the status quo ante. Waaaay ante, although I'm not opposed to using new technology to improve the old deal for all parties concerned, or to make the old deal more enforceable. Here's a deal that would get my enthusiastic thumbs up for DRM to enforce copyrights:
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
... and since "ask slashdot" seems to prefer "how do I get a girlfriend" type questions, I'll post it here.
What's the best non-DRM, free or cheap music player for a mac mini?
The sound hardware isn't exactly great (though better than the average corporate desktop PC). Whamb sounds pretty horrible when playing CDs on it.
Every time I insert a CD, OSX brings up a license agreement for some useless POS called "i-Tunes" (I don't have an Ipod or a Shuffle, I don't want to buy music on-line, and I already own hundreds of CDs that I bought directly from musicians).
I don't want to enter into a legal arrangement with Apple just so I can play a frickin' CD. Even if I did, there is a firewall between me and the Internet that I do not wish to puncture.
If you would like to do me the kindness of replying, please keep in mind that I do not want or need iTunes (and you are unlikely to convince me that I do) and I prefer to operate within the law.
DRM is just another way that the corporations are trying to play us for chumps.
It doesn't work very well at the moment, but why on earth is it not possible to devote more resources into creating some sort of undetectable (quantum?) watermarking instead of the pointless pursuit of locking by encryption?? Watermarks, or signatures, do nothing to restrict fair-use, copying, format-shifting or whatever. However, if watermarked media is illegally released on P2P or the 'net, it's easy to determine where it came from and apply the full extent of existing legislation to the perp.
The problem currently is that re-sampling or otherwise altering a watermarked resource breaks the mark, but I would certainly go as far as to agree to allowing transcoding software (e.g. rippers and so on) to maintain the watermark whatever I do to the media (obviously, one would still be free to compile a bespoke version of OSS without such a function, which is a bit of a loophole). The reason? It doesn't restrict my use or re-use of the stuff I've bought in any way. All it means is that if I'm naughty and put it on P2P, The Man (tm) can come and get me.
It's too late for me to die young
If I rent the media, I can accept DRM. If I buy it, I expect to be able to have full consumer rights to it (backups, playback on any chosen type of device, transfer to other formats, etc).
The only thing keeping everything from being locked down and DRM'd to the upmost level is the fact that the media (dvd's, cd's) has to play on the host devices that were manufactured and purchased before the electronic lockdown boom.
It's not a matter of what we will accept or not accept. The publishers would in a second lock down everything if they could do so, and still support the millions of legacy host devices that are the thin line providing us with the last vestages of perceived "fair use" rights for the consumer.
This is all represented best when I as a paying customer to a movie along with 100+ other paying customers ($9 no less) are forced to sit through a 2 minute sob fest/condemming/accusing public service announcment talking about how movie piracy hurts the little guy.....further delaying our ability as paying customers to enjoy the movie we had just paid to watch.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I think this is one of the few threads I have read that has,IMO, used Hitler without invoking Godwin
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
Is if the DRM'd media is free and is used as a marketing tool for the non DRM pay media.
Nah to easy
I will not accept DRM any more than I will sit through a presentation where someone reads their PowerPoint slides to me.
DRM gives someone else control over the gateway to information.
He who would deny you access to data thinks himself your better.
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
I can VCR TV and give the tapes to friends and/or view them for the time being. If I can't do that with DRM media they must cost significantly less. I live in Italy and I have to pay a tax of about 100 Euro on TV sets. It covers all TV sets in a household and it is supposed to fund state-owned public-service channels. To be fair, add to that figure another 500 Euro per year that many people pay for satellite channels and that's a total of 600 Euro per year. Given the radical functional loss of DRM media I expect an order of magnitude reduction in price, so I won't be willing to pay more than 60 Euro per year. Divide that by the number of movies, episodes, songs I'm expected to buy and you get a very small amount of money per item.
Truthfully there is a easy way to end all this DRM crap but people will never do it. Stop using P2P services. THATS what started this mess. But no people hadto download and download and download and then tell their none techy friends who told more freinds and thus where we are today.
Courts are going to rule against the public on this one, its already happened in multiple cases so its no long a issue of if you WANT to accept it, its a issue of quit bitching and find one that gives us the most rights cause DRM is here to stay.
You want companies to move into the digital age, but more than half of you abused their move by stealing things. Instead of bitching about DRM, why dont we all bitch about the insain cost of things instead. At least there we actually HAVE a case. Sorry but the history of our stupidity with napster pretty much garenteed we lost.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
DRM is a wrong solution to the problem of granting artists the reward that they deserve.
It is wrong because it denies the freedom of consumers to copy and share their music.
IMHO, the right solution is to build a system where music (and software, etc) are paid by consumers before they are released to the public, and, thereafter, can be freely used, copied and shared by anyone.
All needs to be done is to build a central place where consumers can donate to an artist before he releases his next work, based on their reputation, or on a sample of his work.
Even better, where consumers can directly sponsor the development of albums or films, before they are worked on. This way, producers can be bypassed completely.
It is no wonder that companies are not proposing this model.
"Give me liberty, or give me death." -Patrick Henry
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!
it seems fair to ask, what DRM would you accept as a consumer?
This consumer says none.
With part of the money I spend 'on media' going to MPAA and the RIAA, I refuse to buy and thus consume 'their media'.
Why is it the people of Slashdot complain about DRM yet are still willing to BUY these products?
While downloadable TV shows are a good start, I'm not so much interested in watching these more than once. As such, I'd rather pay less, and only be able to watch it once or twice, or maybe only for 24 hours after I first start playing or something similar.
This means I can download the TV shows I want to watch, and watch them on my schedule, without having to pay for the abililty to watch something over and over again, that I won't want to. This also side-steps issues like losing the file, or the company whose DRM it is going out of business, as I won't have the file long enough for it to be a problem.
DRM isn't a bad thing if it did what they said it does as opposed to doing what their investors want.
The ONLY thing DRM is good at right now is keeping us locked into a device or proprietary service.
I have over 8000 mp3's. Three-quarters of them are ripped from cd's I legally purchased and the last quarter was ripped from friends, downloaded from napster (way back), winmx, or some torrent.
I've been adding to this collection since 1997. Over the years I've listened to it:
-on my home computer
-in my car burned as a standard audio cd
-in my car on a hacked virgin webplayer I mounted to the glove box
-in my car on an mp3-cd player
-at friend's houses streamed with andromeda
-on my archos jukebox
-on my PDA
-on my home stereo through a computer I had hooked up there
-on my home stereo through a D-link networked media player
-on my work computer
-on my laptop while travelling
As far as I'm concerned, that's ALL fair use. I WILL NOT buy music if I don't have the flexibility I had with MP3's. I really love my music, and the ability to play it anywhere with little or no effort. Initial cost aside, if I threw it all away, and bought all my music DRM-protected, how much OF MY TIME do you think I would have to spend TRYING to listen to it in all those places. I'd lose my damn mind fighting with it, and probably STOP listening to music altogether for some time.
From the other side of the fence, I can understand the record companies position. I'm sure those money-grubbing bastards can't sleep at night knowing ppl are listening to music they own for free. I can sympathize with this as I like to protect my own business interests as well, but I think they're going about it the wrong way.
Music is easily traded because there's essentially no difference between the cd I buy in the store, and well encoded mp3's of the album I can download freely. Give us added-value. Start bundling cool stuff in with the cd's we want. Some labels do this to some extent, but not enough. The last 5 cd's I bought retail were purchased because they came with bonus dvd's, booklets, or were some special edition release. I opened up my wallet and gladly dished out the 20 bucks every time.
Remember DIVX?
Circuit City attempted to market Divx as a cheap DVD solution? You bought a DIVX movie, you got 2 days to watch the movie after you stuck it in the player, and then you had to pay more money if you wanted to watch it again. The public didn't buy it. It never got ugly, DIVX just died a slow death. It really had no value.
People saw it as a greedy attempt to control users' viewing habits. It was painful. People want value, and they want to be able to take that value with them. They want something that they can hold in their hands and look at. They can put it on their mantel, or their bookshelf and look at, read, or listen to. In the vinyl days, there was a ritual. Load the record, clean it with D4, sit back, and listen to side 1. Nowadays, it's a little different, but the audiophiles among us don't mind loading a CD.
Now, fast-forward a few years. Apple is being told by the labels, "Charge the customer to keep their library." So Apple says, "$20 a month, you keep your library." Never mind that we sold you the music once, this is how it's going to be in the future if you want to keep using iTunes and your iPod.
What do you think will happen? I think people will start collecting rocks, hopping on airplanes, or in their VW microbus, Eurovan, Mini, or pedaling their bicycles over to Apple HQ and they'll tell them what they think. The labels are going to keep pushing, and eventually, the consumers will just snap. And they won't be happy unless they get a LOT more freedom back than just a simple reversion to the last iteration of iTunes. I think it'll take a lot more cajoling than that to get the buying public back. I hope the labels rot. I hope the musicians finally do an end-around on the labels and start selling their own music. Tell the label execs to go f*** themselves. There's no one more despicable on this planet than a record label exec. Wait. I think lawyers are almost as bad. Ok. The worst is definitely a lawyer record label exec.
-- No sig for you!
"Can't get the content if you can't pay the creator"
Really? It appears the record companies do it all the time. They call it "giving a band a big break". And it turns out that most band end up giving up all rights, including publishing for virtually no net money.
My problem with DRM is that I fear that if people accept any form of DRM, there will no longer be any ownership offered - all of the content producers will move to "rental" models, where you have to keep paying and paying. Microsoft clearly wants to do this with their software (so they can continue to collect cash even without releasing new products), and I'm sure content providers like the MPAA and RIAA love the idea too.
I might accept DRM if/when there is a vibrant competitive market of high-quality content providers, rather than a few all-powerful monopolies.
I say never and I mean never. ...at last never me alive.
...and I'll probably keep saying it but I still like idea of fixing the distribution system and making the money on volume sales and concerts and just ignore piracy. (as far as music goes)
If you sell albums for $5 it's so damn affordable that it's almost easier to buy it than try to track down a copy someplace and "liberate" it. The only problem is that the music industry has such a screwed up distribution system that they can't "afford" to reduce the price of the media because the whole current system would collapse.....which would be fine by me.
How about we, as a collective consumer group, stop buying music, dvds, games, etc that have any type of DRM on it? Look I know it's hard to go through life with out your Half-Life 2 fix and you can't imagine living without your Lil' John ACC formatted song that you paid Apple for. But, if it's such a big issue then just stop buying it. There are other things in life to entertain and take up your time. Please correct me if I'm wrong but people who bitch about DRM think it's their God given right to have full access to all their entertainment that they bought. In a perfect world I would agree. But, at the end of the day all of your entertainment is made by a heartless corporation that is bent on making money. It is a product that they produced and if they want to make some crazy stipulation on how people use then fine let them. I don't download MP3's anymore on P2P and I haven't bought a CD in like 2 years. I don't want to deal with the music industry. and you know what my life hasn't fallen apart because I didn't blow 15 bucks on the new Ja-Rule CD.
-Dipster
For the majority of us we are actually "insulted" by the media companies whom imply that we are dishonest by nature. We are in fact assumed guilty before we even try to purchase a product from them, and much to our dismay we are often shafted after the fact by the DRM they use, when it prevents us from using the product in the way we intended when we originally purchased it. Insulted and then screwed? Is that a way to treat the hand that feeds you? The media companies need to start thinking about how to treat their customers better because they are a MONOPLY by definition. People hate monopolies to begin with, so it does not take much to make them find something else to do with their time and money. The only way to sell their single source product is to show their appreciation by the way of "value", and then people will gladly buy it, providing of course they have not been insulted first.
The whole DRM concept is technically flawed. To implement DRM of any kind you need to have a "secret" which will enable the product to be used. Unfortunately these DRM'ed products have to contain the secret in the product or the software algorithm for it to be usable. All it takes to listen to some music is to use the software provided to unscramble it. If the software is running on a general purpose machine e.g. a PC, then any competent programmer can reverse engineer the process and undo the scrambling permanently. What the media companies do not realize is that we have both pieces of the puzzle already, so no matter how they deliver it we can always get "the music", and it only takes one determined individual to make all their DRM efforts (millions of $$) all for nothing. Just one very determined, perhaps insulted and poorly treated, individual! Its not rocket science! Its just a computer program that is easily taken apart with the right tools. The only way to keep "the secret" a secret is to force everyone in the entire world to use a special piece of hardware just to play the music, but even then the low tech methods (e.g. A patch cord and a sound card) will still work for generating a good quality sound file that can then be played on that same old PC we wanted it on in the first place. They can't win as long as one "pissed off" consumer with technical talent still exists in this world.
Given the desire I could un-DRM anything they could put out there, but fortunately for them I am an honest person. My money is my vote, and I vote no-DRM with my wallet. In the mean time I will listen to music I like from any other legal media where I do not directly fund their DRM efforts.
DRM just devalues the product so much that I doubt anyone would sell me anything at the price id be willing to pay..lets say buying an album online in WMA format was 20$ with drm.. i'd consider MAYBE buying it at 1.5-2$ cos then it would be cheap enough I could buy multiple copies and not feel like I got completely screwed..... cos thats mostly the reason I think people pirate so much today.. not really that they wouldnt want to buy it if it was reasonable priced but the relationship between what we know the product costs to make and the price ur forced to pay for it WITH all the strings attatched are so completely out of proportion people no longer feel its worth their money and that you like have to accept to be screwed by the industry.. and they just steal it instead.... at least thats how I feel.. I'm also sick of being discriminated against so much because I live in europe.... if I want to watch a movie.. and it comes out on DVD in usa and released as DVDrip and DVDR like a month before it even premieres on cinema here.. do you seriously think I'm gonna wait?.. hell no.. the only cases I would wait if it was some REALLY special movie.. (LOTR type) but that happens like 5 times a decade..also getting fed sub-par versions to whats sold in USA i also find totally unacceptable esp when its almost twice the price here..
So his machine got "hosed" by spyware and that is somehow the fault of DRM? Last I checked, you can back up your songs from ITunes just like any other data.
I've played the download songs from the internet game and went back to buying CDs.
The simple truth is that at 10meg/min for CD quality, nobody's gonna download. I don't care what people say, I DO NOTICE A DIFFERENCE WITH AUDIO COMPRESSION.
For now at least, I can still rip the songs from CD and create my own MP3s and DRM be damned. For background noise, MP3 is fine, but for home entertainment, I pop in the original CDs.
"silly, outdated, impractical distribution mechanism (we all know this). You own nothing."
Oddly enough, that silly, outdated impractical CD gives me significantly more flexibility and lets me act like I own it.
If I buy a CD for $11, I can generally sell it for $5.
If I buy $1,000 worth of iTMS music, I can generally sell it for, well, $0.
This fancy new distribution method can't even match the sonic quality of that creaky CD.
I can't play it in my car. I can't put it on the device of my choosing. I can't stream it to any random device in the house.
Its apparently good for...uh...listening to on my iPod and PC.
Great.
I think I'll stick with obsolete for now. It appears to be a better deal by an order of magnitude.
is that if I buy (operative word here being "buy") a tune from iTMS, then I really ought to be able to play it on any device I want. As it is, I have to do some file conversions to get it to play on anything other than iTunes or an iPod.
If you buy a CD, you're not limited to one brand of CD player.
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
If it's a rental, DRM makes sense... so that it can't be copied. But if I buy it, DRM makes no sense to me. Why? If I buy a bread, can I share it with others? Of course I can. How about my car, can I lend it to my sister's boyfriend? Of course I can. How about a song? Of course, it's digital so I can make a copy of it. That's within my power, the same way making millions of copies at virtually no cost is within the power of the entertainment and software industries. They took the step of distributing it in that particular format, now they should be prepared to accept and adapt to the power of the new technology.
While I'd never be happy with DRM I'd probably accept it if it didn't include restrictions on (legal) copying or use.
The stated purpose for DRM schemes is so you can't buy a song from iTMS and upload it on KaZaA or whatever. Of course it's my suspicion that an equal or larger purpose is to sell the same song more than once after your HD crashes or whatever and you can't use your DRMed backup of your music anymore.
What if the DRM only identified who the original "purchaser" so if the software was found in an illegal distribution channel they could track it back to the purchaser and potentially hold them accountable.
Now the big problem with that scenario is what if your PC is stolen or hax0red and someone takes your stuff and uploads it, possibly even to get you in trouble. Still IMO it's a better system than the current DRM schemes that are out there and might be enough to get people like me to adopt it.
Of course I may be an anomaly. I have a stack of CDs, still shrink wrapped that I purchased just to legitimize the MP3's I had downloaded off of P2P.
"Following on the heels of Zaibatsucorp closing Johnathan E's end run around its C4-ankle bracelets and a British holo station offering free downloads attached to explosive collars it seems fair to ask, at what point would you accept placing a locked explosive collar around your neck in exchange for listening to a song?"
The only DRM that I would accept is one that I had full controll over, nothing less. I mean, I do own the computer it runs on, don't I? Maybe I should change 'them' to run their stinkin DRM on MY system.
zenray
When will I accept DRM?
Hmmm... Let me see...
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
All these people who say they don't or would never accept DRM do when they buy video games. A game CD or DVD has DRM (or something similar) and can't be copied. You happily buy those and play them on your PS2 or gamecube. The difference is that they come on proprietary distribution media, which can't be copied, but which can be traded on played on other similar devices. People cry that they need to back up their Spiderman DVD but don't seem to care if they back up their GTA PS2 game. It's only when people discover they have the ability to copy things do they get up in arms.
(I also don't hear too many people complain that they can't listen to their new hardback book from their car's stereo.)
I have bought DRM'd DVD's, but do not plan to download anything DRM'd to my computer. I refuse to compromise and accept DRM while there isn't a clear statement of our Fair Use rights. I want to show myself trustworthy and to be trusted for the art I make use of. I suspect that the nonviolent revolution of not using Industry-Association works of art is needed.
Let's sit the content providers and the consumers down to discuss the licenses under which this stuff comes; the present system is too vague, and while DRM is helpful a way to protect content providers from users overextending the boundaries of fair use, it is not a satisfying compromise for the end-users.
However, as a consumer, I would happily accept DRM free stuff if it came with a clear statement of what I am licensed to do with this (which would push the content distributors to explain what's allowed and not, and then to trust me -- they can choose not to sell me their wares).
For the pirates, why don't the content distributors undercut their cheap copies by licensing the present-pirates to produce and market the copies themselves? DRM doesn't stop people bit-for-bit copying disks.
Then we face another question: would you buy stuff that isn't restricted to what you do with it, but is identifiable to you -- so you can be caught for sharing around what you aren't licensed to share? (Yes, what's the point? The system will be broken and people will ignore it, but we continue to need to find a way for artists to have their work recognised and be reimbursed for their efforts.)
I've got a great idea! How about using a warning message instead of DRM. Users of a particular product would be verbally or visually warned that violations of the copyright law is a federal offense and carries severe penalties. The consumer could then make an informed decision about how they choose to utilize the product. Sound familiar? What kills me is that all of the digital distribution companies are constantly worrying about DRM yet, to this day, I can go out and buy a C.D., copy it 50 times, and hand copies out copies to my friends and this is perfectly legal under the fair use provisions of copyright law.
Sorry, but DRM isn't going to go away. So if it must be here, then it will have to be something that doesn't detract from the end user experience. Most people aren't interested in massive piracy of copyrighted works and will interpret obtrusive DRM as broken media and return it to the place of purchase. In this sense, the market will sort out what the best way to implement DRM is going to be. So far, I think Apple's scheme is on the right track because it lets the consumer (the average consumer that is) do pretty much all of the things that he or she might want to do if they bought a CD at physical retail outlet. This is just fine for 9 out of 10 people. Yes Apple's DRM can be hacked by those determined to do so, but that is true of any DRM and will always be true. Nothing is going to stop determined pirates. That's just a fact of business.
In the end, I think DRM will evolve as it should as long as the government keeps its hands out of it. This is a market issue, nothing about public safety or national security is at stake, so they should stay out of it.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Personally I'll not accept any form of DRM protected contents. I'll just have to find other stuff or live without it - no doubt in my mind about that.
none.
Why should I? I bought it.
iTunes / iTMS works fine.
I can buy a traditional CD then hear it on my home stereo, a portable, my computer.
I buy a song from iTMS and I can play it on my home stereo, a portable, my computer.
What am I missing? How has been harmed by agreeing to those
Ditto movies. As long as I can view a DVD on my computer and or home player - that's what I need to do. Again, what am I missing / what harm has come to any party?
And before anyone says it, "information wants to be free" is only half the original quote.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
"DRM that doesn't get in the way of fair use is acceptable."
So, since there isn't any DRM that doesn't infringe on fair use, is none of it acceptable?
Well, yes. But ironically, I have a game console and I use it to both watch DVDs and play videogames. Now, there's DRM all over, so since I paid good money for these things, I clearly accepted it. But I don't like it. It has gotten in the way of my fair use: Had to circumvented the DRM in order to simply WATCH it! That shouldn't happen.
You can't take the sky from me...
Perhaps the simplest, most effective DRM I've seen is the one used in the Palm Reader where your credit card number is the key. There is an inherent tendency not to give that out willy-nilly, yet nothing stops you from moving it around other than not wanting to give out the key.
That kind of DRM is effective for the publisher and yet loose enough that I can move the content around on my own devices without restriction.
I have also purchased books with the Mobipocket DRM. I don't like it because it restricts the number of devices I can transfer it to. This is problematic not because I want to run it on a lot of devices in parallel, but instead because the reader device itself is somewhat ephemeral. I have had six different PDAs since I bought my first ebook back in 1997 and my current PDA will likely need replacement within a year or two just from wear-and-tear. With device-locked DRM mechanisms the content becomes inaccessible once you hit the device maximum even if some of the devices no longer exist. This I don't like.
Once I purchased a book in Adobe's ebook DRM format because no other format was available. That pointed out the most serious weakness in DRM: It only worked with Adobe's reader, and Adobe's reader is almost unusably horrible. To describe all the things it does wrong would take a whole article in and of itself, starting from an unreliable download process to a very time consuming transfer process to reader display that was so nonsensical as to make you wonder what they were smoking when they let it out the door. On top of that Adobe has even more restrictive device locking than Mobipocket. I hated the experience so much that I will never, ever buy another book in that format no matter its price.
That experience also led me to wonder if part of the problem with the acceptance of ebooks was that the mainstream businesses (B&N, Amazon) who offered ebooks only did it in two formats: Adobe's and Microsoft's. Adobe's has the benefit of working across a fairly wide range of devices but is so horrible that I just don't want to use it. Microsoft's is locked to a very limited set of Windows devices. I don't know about you, but I haven't found anyone who likes reading novels on their PC or laptop, so that pretty much limited the market for Microsoft DRMed books to PocketPC devices. A few years ago those were few and far between and even today that means spending several hundred dollars (whereas a PalmOS PDA can be had for under $100) and has only a few hours of battery life. If that's what my DRM choices look like I'll opt out entirely thanks.
I've also considered a number of dedicated ebook readers, but those have historically made the PocketPC scenario look good. Until a few weeks ago I'd never seen a dedicated ebook reader for less than $300. Today you can buy one for about $100 from fictionwise.com, a big improvement, but not enough to work around the other huge problem with these readers: Document portability. I have probably about a hundred ebooks at this point, in something like four different document formats. Not even one of those formats is supported by any of the dedicated ebook readers. Not Adobe. Not Mobipocket. Not Palm Reader. Not Palm Doc. I'm supposed to pay money for that?
If given the choice I would prefer no DRM if only because that gives me greater flexibility in which software I can use to read the books (or music, in the case of something like iTunes). But if you're going to use DRM, and frankly I can see why many publishers demand it, there needs to be a tradeoff between what is good for the publisher and whether or not the DRMed document will be long-term usable by the consumer. I worry about stuff purchased v
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
The problem with DRM is that it allows the publisher to control not only my storage and usage of the media itself, but also what I play it with. I use an Empeg, Freevo, AmaroK, and other products that the RIAA and MPAA actually care about enabling to play this content. I don't want to rely on hacked or otherwise altered content just to play them on my chosen media players.
I don't mind DRM itself. It's the implementations that I hate. I can't see how anybody could create an implementation to get around this. If you can protect your content but still let me play the files on my chosen devices, then we'll talk.
Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
If I have to have a device connected to the internet and rely on some company still being in business and supporting the product in order to use, move or store the product, then it's not acceptable. That's why I don't use Turbo Tax anymore (even though it's no longer an issue ... they lost me as a customer).
...Digital media should be treated the same as physical if I go to the store and purchase a DVD/CD/ETC its mine. I have access to it I can do what I want with it, I can copy it, listen to it,etc (though sometimes I need a little help from DVD jon to accomplish these things admittedly)....
DRM has to go...its sad that iTunes is so successful in peddeling DRM'ed media...a failure of something like that due to the DRM would have shown the world that its not desired. The problem is that the average "cow" people who have not idea what rights are being stolen from them are what drive that business.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
What we are talking about is Digital Right Restriction (DRR), not DRM, it doesn't allow management of anything, its simply restriction.
Given that, would i accept DRR? Perhaps, once i am able to make a decision based off the fact that i may bot be able to do what i want with the digital work, i can place a value on it. eg, i might be willing to pay $2.00 for a song that is unrestricted, but only$0.50 for a restricted one.
Once we start using the correct terminology to describe what we are doing here, it makes more sense..
2) It has to be inexpensive. $0.99 is too much, when I can get used CD's for about that price with better quality. We should be getting a break based on the fact that we're buying a poor quality copy with essentially zero shipping costs. We're not.
I don't buy iTunes, though I'm still using their initial 5 free. someday I'll burn a CD of my purchases.
... grumble, grumble, grumble, mutter, mutter, Millenium... Hand... Shrimp, I tol' 'em, I tol' 'em.
I definitely don't agree with the people here who are against DRM for rental of content, but that's neither here nor there. The purpose of this post is to point out a company that's selling unrestricted, un-DRM'd mp3s and making money off it. If you go to www.4ad.com you'll see that they have a wide selection of digital-only EPs available for download for 3 british pounds, and you can pay by text messaging over your mobile. 4AD is not a tiny, fringe company. Hell, they released the pixies' albums in the 90s, and they've got some great stuff. I just bought the Mountain Goats' Dilaudid ep and am very happy with it. All that said, the reason their model works so well is that they sell these eps in digital format only, and a lot of them act partially as previews to forthcoming albums. You could get on a high horse and say that these are glorified ads that you're forced to pay for, but I don't think so. And I'm one consumer who has chosen to support both music and artists that i really love, and a content distribution model that I believe in.
I'll accept DRM when this occurs.
A. When the playback ability of the media purchased ends, I get my money back.
On another note, where's the equivalent Analog Rights Management? (ARM) Oh, that's right, we didn't think that was a good idea... what makes DRM any better?
I already buy music from iTMS, let me say that off the bat. But I will fully accept all DRM and such when all of these proprietary formats (Apple included) open their authentication (probably by court order) so people can use the songs that they paid for on whatever medium they wish. And yes, I know about allofmp3. I'm not talking about them obviously ;)
Mike Pacific
One thing people tend to not notice is that DRM never expires. As such, copyright holders will be able to control distribution even when a certain song or a movie has lapsed into public domain. With mickey mouse acts this could take a while, but it happens eventually.
If that means I do without, then so be it. My rights are not for sale, period.
I hesitate to post a counter-opinion, since doing so on these threads seems to be worth about (-2, I Disagree So You're A Troll), but what the hell. ;-)
What if the alternative is not being able to download legally at all? I don't know whether it's officially acknowledged or not, but it's a good bet that legit services like Napster's or Apple's are only allowed to distribute the content by the recording industry after agreeing to apply DRM technology to it. If they gave up, or the DRM proved to be ineffective, there probably wouldn't be any legal download services at all. At that stage, some people reading this may be quite happy to break the law and risk becoming a statistic/example case so they could still download music, but a lot of people would lose out through being unwilling to commit a crime.
Not everything in this world comes down to absolute ownership. The rental model has been working well for videotapes for years: if you just want to watch a film once, but don't want to keep the tape, you can pay a smaller amount but you have to give it back a couple of days later. Most of the arguments in posts like the parent would basically rule out such a model, despite the fact that it is welcomed by many and of benefit to them.
And I know two people, completely independently, who had trouble securing book publishing deals after draft content that they put on their web site temporarily for the benefit of those who were interested wound up republished (without their consent, or even notifying them) on so-called archive sites that have decided they are above copyright law (which I suspect may become an expensive mistake the first time they try this with a megacorp).
Neither of these people publishes anything whatsoever on the web any more, because the resulting tedious negotiations with their publisher's lawyers over distribution rights just aren't worth it. Ultimately, it's not the authors who have lost out here, it's the people who were benefitting from having their content at a much cheaper rate. That was the very distribution of work that copyright and similar concepts are intended to promote, and when copyright wasn't respected, it stopped. Go figure...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Before CDR/DVDR, before P2P, when we purchased a CD, cassette tape or album we thought we owned it. It appears that these days, when we buy a CD or DVD we are only purchasing the license to view or listen to it according to the wishes of the copyright holder. It is this difference that is creating this battle over control over media.
C'mon now!
Where are all the Apple zealots now? Just two articles ago were I was reading the spouting of how much they don't mind DRM. How iTMS is so great that they don't mind a little slice of freedom being taken away. How Apple is just sooooo consumer-friendly, and they're trying to convince the record labels to be more digital on our behalf.
It's a lot harder to chime in when the question posed is tantamount to "When is it acceptable to give up your freedom to a company"
Just because Apple says that it's DRM is the best it could do for the consumer and still appease the labels, doesn't mean it's something the consumer should accept.
Usually, the bulk of a given artist's revenue is not from recording, but from concert tours and live shows. If you wait for a recording contract to put bread on your table by itself, you will have a very bare table in most cases. I don't disagree with artists making money from their recordings, the sad truth is that they usually see little in terms of royalties, after the advances and auxiliary services are repaid. Personally, a record company would have to really court me to get me to sign, I like being a live musician. Plus I get to keep my money.
I have accepted DVD, and with it, I have accepted CSS. Forget about the fact that I can remove CSS very simply now, when I picked up on DVD I knew the video was encrypted.
Why?
DVD video quality is leaps and bounds better than VHS. The media doesn't degrade. On a dual-layer, single-sided disc, there's room for multiple audio tracks, special features, or just twice as much feature video. The video doesn't degrade when you watch it. You can store it in the case and it takes up half as much space as a VHS, and only a fraction of that inside a CD case. DVD players can also double as CD players without any extra hardware.
Plus, it's the same price for all these features as a VHS (VHS prices have since dropped due to their sudden deatrth in popularity).
You starting to get the picture?
Now, let's go over what iTunes Music Store offers. First off, to use iTunes Music Store, you have to own a computer, and have a copy of iTunes. So let's make this very clear:
Today, with iTunes installed, you can rip any CD in excelent quality with no DRM in a matter of minutes. So, the same amount of work to prepare to download iTMS tracks can give you a system that even a retard could use to digitize their music.
So what do you get if you go the iTMS route? Little to no price difference if you actually want the full album, and individual tracks with a reasonable but not outstanding price. Forgetting the DRM, you have a few other problems with iTMS tracks:
* 128k ACC is quite a step down from CD quality (~160-192k CBR mp3 quality), and you get no other options. Your best copy of the music is sub-par.
* With iTMS tracks, you have to make your own backups or risk losing your entire library...with the ripped CD, you already have a backup in the CD itself.
So, no major price benefit, no major feature benefit, except that you can have it NOW, and you can have all the little pieces you want.
To be honest, I don't find this to be a benefit. I think per-track pricing is stupid, because most of the artists worth listening to know how to make a good album. It also doesn't help that you pay the same for a three-minute Green Day track as you do for an 8-minute Metallica romp.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Only if:
(1) The right of first sale is preserved. 'nuff said
(2) That the DRM has a time limit encoded into it, pursuent to the constitutional decree that the copyright be for "limited times". If I buy a recently-published book today, I know that my great-great grandkids will be able to use it however they wish (as long as the copyright length isn't extended again). With DRM, there is no legal way to do this.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
As long as the rights holders are using restricitve DRM they're essentially judging every potential customer and finding them guilty of theft. Worse still, if customers are continually treated like criminals it will only be a matter of time before even honest ones start acting like criminals.
DRM on purchases is a direct insult against my honesty and integrity.
I can manage my own rights perfectly well, thank you.
..... movies are too expensive. Probably something to do with Hollywood actors and actresses losing the plot with their champagne lifestyles. Anytime soon, independent film-makers are going to break through.
Seriously, copy protection is mathematically impossible. That's not a limitation of present technology -- it's a limitation of the universe. At some stage of the process, the "protected" signal must be rendered into a form perceivable by human beings {and therefore copyable -- hopefully into a DRM-free format}.
The only way of stopping people making copies of material is to sell it at a low enough price that it's not worth the effort of making a copy. Whatever they can make blank CD-Rs for, they can make stamped CDs for the same price or slightly less {there is one process fewer with a stamped original}. But the blank CD isn't really the main issue: it's the time spent mastering and burning, plus the value-added stuff you only get with a store-bought original: a nice plastic box, a shiny booklet with the song lyrics and sleeve notes, and so forth. And the fact that record companies can afford to sell Walkman cassettes -- which cost more to manufacture than CDs -- at a lower price than CDs, should set a few alarm bells ringing.
DVDs are too expensive, watching a film in a cinema is too expensive
In the case of TV programmes, people have already paid for a licence which allows them to watch -- and record -- them anyway. So downloading them ought not to be illegal, provided your TV-licence is paid up. Even if your licence is not paid up, it's hardly different than having an eidetic memory and so not needing a TV-recorder to be able to re-watch any TV show you have ever seen, or inviting a friend who has not paid for a TV-licence in to watch your TV.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I will never fall for ditigal restrictions management and I already vote with my wallet against it, boycotting those shady manufacturers who try to push DRM on us.
We, the people, will prevail.
Everyone just loves to hate DRM cause it's so controlling and limiting and 1984 and blah blah. What about the fact that DRM allows Napster to offer an excellent service like Napster-to-Go?
Unacceptable they can offer the same service without DRM...DRM is NOT a requirement for doing business. If the companies like Napster refused to give in to the record companies we would not be in this situation. It comes down to this...you can either sell the music through this service without DRM and trust the consumers. Or you can not sell it, make no money and the consumers will still obtain the music, but you will not get a dime for it.
Or how about DRM allows video producers to have a video be playable only from their web site and for a certain amount of time before it expires?
Again I call shenanigans...you offer it up I should be able to save it to my machine to then play it back in whatever way I deem comfortable. If I want to play it back in a format like the video out to my TV because I want a larger picture I shouldn't be restricted to the medai player window in a web page. Or perhaps even to watching it using only a particular OS.
Does anyone care about the valid and useful DRM applications before screaming human rights violations?
There are no valid and useful applications DRM just gets in the way...there is no reason for it...
END OF STORY...if you believe in DRM your a dumb "cow", who doesn't understand just how your being screwed...
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
You're missing the point. If both parties don't come to an agreement then there is no contract to abide by.
I don't use crap designed to break my computer, I don't accept industry's right to buy laws like the DMCA which make the citizen into a criminal, and I don't approve of companies treating customers like thieves.
The only DRM I would find acceptable is "DRM" which is actually that: Management software. I'd be perfectly happy if files came with a copyright description field in some standard form, explaining who owns the copyright and any extra rights above those given in fair use that are granted in the license. I'd even be happy if the big media companies hired some programmers and funded various software programs to process these tags, and say things like:
That would be an acceptable form of Digital Rights Management, as it would be purely advisory and would provide polite assistance to citizens in navigating the complex legal subject of copyright. Citizens who do not need this assistance could merely turn it off.
So, what DRM would I accept? I'd accept something that (1) was guaranteed to work into the future and (2) allowed me to do whatever copyright law allows me to do.
Both these have problems -- under (1), when the MS Monopoly eventually collapses under its own weight, what will I do with my iTunes music?
And (2) is exceptionally hard to encode as DRM. Gross infringement is fairly easy to deal with -- the case where I take a new music CD under copyright, make a copy of it and sell the copy. But, there are a lot of cases where infringement is not as obvious. Let's say, for example, that the CD contained a mix of public domain stuff and new stuff and I just wanted to extract and copy the public domain items. Or, it was a phonebook and I wanted to copy it. (Under a SCOTUS case, Feist v. Rural, Copyright does not extend to raw collections of facts. A bunch of European countries do have a pseudo-copyright in such works.) Or, I want to make a parody. These things are legal but extremely difficult for DRM software to deal with because it would require the software to look at the intent of what I'm doing.
Rights holders are trying to replace the rules of copyright with the rules of contract -- "I'll let you listen to this music if you agree to only listen to it 10 times." And, the main enabler for this is contracts of adhesion -- those shrink-wrap/click-through agreements that nobody reads but that courts generally enforce. Getting rid of these contracts will break DRM's legal foundation.
Since I think DRM is the enabling technology that gives a lot of old-school media people the warm fuzzies they need to put things out in digital format at all, I have a love/hate relationship with it. I love that people will give me SOME access to things in digital format as long as they can control it with DRM, but I hate that these people don't tend to have a forking clue what kind of control they really need.
I think the best way to handle DRM is to ignore it entirely. Some artists are scared that we want to steal their work and not pay them for it, and when we whine about DRM, they think that's really what we're complaining about. They aren't clueful about how DRM really does make our lives more difficult, so they think we have a problem with DRM because we're trying to steal their work and we can't.
That gives them two dangerous messages: first, that the world really *is* full of pirates and thieves; and second, that DRM really is stopping piracy. DRM is only going to go away when these artists feel secure in the idea that they can put out unprotected work and still get paid for it.
Of course, that's how they always did things, but somehow they think the rules have changed somewhere along the line.
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
Libraries are online for a long time now, but one cannot read the text online. When libraries could lend whole books digitally, we could all have an incredibly big chunk of knowledge available instantly, and mostly for free or a very small price.
Libraries don't do this because they are reluctant, but - in general law terms - because they are allowed to lend exactly 1 bought book to 1 person at a time, and when they would lend you a digital copy of a book, they could lend a book to 100 people at a time while only having bought 1 piece.
Now with DRM, one could devise a system where you had to "bring back your copy" before anybody else could check it out, therefore combining the digital advantage (speed, ease of use) with the library advantage (big selection, near-zero-price).
So, at least in this case, DRM can actually bring value to the people.
There's only one DRM'd item I've ever purchased that I didn't know in advance I had the tools to decrypt. That's my metric for what DRM I accept as a consumer.
I didn't buy a single iTunes track until PlayFair came out. After that, I've bought lots of music, so Apple's directly benefitted from PlayFair/Hymn's existance in my case. I know that I have my music as nice decrypted AAC streams. Even in the worst case of Apple watermarking the actual digital stream, I know I can always play my music in any number of open source players. That's good enough for me.
The only other DRM I've ever found acceptable is the one used by Palm Digital (aka PeanutPress) for their eBooks. The books are encrypted, but you can read them on an unlimited number of Palm, PocketPC, Symbian, Windows, or Mac devices. They use your full name and credit card number to encrypt a session key for the book. Once you enter your name/number, the decrypted session key is kept on your device (so your credit card number ISN'T store on your Palm!). There's no limit to the number of devices you can unlock the book on, and there's no call-home function to authorize the unlock process -- it's just straight crypto. The hook of course, is that if you want to distribute the book (without breaking the actual DRM), you need to include your name and card number. Probably not something you want to do on the Internet, and of course the leak can be tracked back to you with appropriate consequences. On the other hand, if you want to let a friend "borrow" your book, just beam it to his Palm, email it to him, etc. and enter your name and card number on his machine. He can't transfer the book to anyone else without re-keying the name/number, yet he can read the book for as long as he wants without having to worry about "losing" one of your precious authorizations. PeanutPress will even re-encrypt all your books using a new credit card number (once you use it to make a purchase), so you don't need to remember which card you used for which book -- you can always redownload all your books with your current card number.
If iTunes and others decided to go the route of PeanutPress, I probably wouldn't even bother to break the encryption. As long as the seller maintains control over me after the sale, then there's no way I'm going to buy something I can't break.
As far as a "rental" instead of a purchase, if I can't rent/burn/return, it's pretty unlikely I'd go for it. We'd have to be talking REAL cheap for me to consider it.
It's unacceptable. I should be able to use my music as I see fit.
Copy to CD? Sure. (Yes, iTMS allows this)
Listen on my portable device without transcoding? (No, iTMS doesn't allow this unless you use THEIR product - iPod.)
Transcode to other formats to save space/play on devices that don't understand the source format? (Nope, iTMS doesn't allow this.)
Now some form of watermarking that didn't affect audio quality, that I wouldn't mind. I don't care if any music I buy can be tracked back to me if I share it, since I don't plan on doing that.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
1)DRM is OK as long as they're not Nazi's about your use (like burning CDs from iTMS)
2)If you don't do MP3, you have nothing. (sony)
3)Nobody gives a crap about OGG.
I know these things are painful to hear, but that's what HAS happened. I know some people think of creative work as the common property of all mankind, but [sarcasm] "high quality" [/sarcasm] media production costs big bucks, and they need to recoup that investment. The options to do so are
1)DRM (sorta works)
2)Prevent all digital distribution (didn't work)
3)rethink your business model. (record companies know they are obsolete, this wont happen)
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Would be the only real non-evil use that I can think of. The ability to do "inter-library" loans over the net would be pretty cool.
Basically a given library could buy a electronic copy of a given book and through whatever DRM scheme they can dream up allow you to borrow/return it over the net. And thinking of it it would be pretty cool to be able to "lend" somebody a copy of a book off of my Safari account. Of course there are ways to kind of do that now. But to be able to really do it would be cool. That's really about the only use that I can think of. Include in that maybe being able to rent CDs/DVDs the same way.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I think this is one of the few threads I have read that has,IMO, used Hitler without invoking Godwin
He compared DRM to the invasion of Polland.
You forgot Polland!
You can't take the sky from me...
DRM is perfectly acceptable on rentals, totally unacceptable on purchased goods. When I rent something, there is an expectation that it's only for me and that I will return it within a number of days - I am paying for a short-term license. When I purchase something, I am explicitly paying for the right to a single instance, and shoud therefore be allowed to do with it whatever I want within current legal bounds.
Jw
Ideally, never.
I *might* accept DRM if there was no other alternative and the DRM'd material was free-as-in-beer.
I'd also accept it if it was easily circumvented.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
If companies can't sell their products, because the marketplace is flooded with free copies, how the hell will they afford your employment contract?
Are you really so dumb? Money flows to the artist/programmer now simply because it must. Whether it flows as a monthly paycheck or a lump sum advance for completed work is totally irrelevant.
If the system does not protect the flow of money, you will not get paid. Whether that means you get turned down in your negotiations for your precious employment contract, or whether it means you fail to sell your completed product to the distributor, makes no difference.
What matters is a system of commerce that protects value. Without that, no one is going to take the risk of paying you.
There's a lot of strange people here who seem to think they "own" what's on a CD and have every right to do what ever they want with it. Well sorry, but you have the right to listen to it, whenever you want, as often as you want. And that's it. What's on it is not yours. Picture this. One copy of a CD or DVD is sold. It is shared on a filesharing network. No other copies are sold. How much would you have to charge for that CD or DVD? It would be quite expensive. This scenario is what frightened record and film companies into backing DRM. If everyone stopped filesharing tomorrow there's be no more DRM within a year. You may think filesharing is OK, but I don't see any difference at all between it and stealing CDs from Tower Records. What is the difference?
I use Amazon.co.uk's DVD rental system. Very nice selection of films, and because the cost per month is fixed, I can basically treat Amazon as my personal DVD library. I actually prefer it to pirating - physical DVDs are more convenient and they aren't messily compressed down to a postage stamp size.
Since I could rip DVDs, the "rights management" is physical (have to return the disk) but not digital. But why would I rip a DVD and waste disk space keeping a copy, when I could just pick it up again the next time I felt inclined? Thus their "rights management" of DVD borrowing and return makes sense. I never lose freedoms. I gain convenience. It would be a viable business model even if copyright ceased to exist.
DRM by contrast both requires me to go to the bother of downloading, and then locks me out of the very bits I've downloaded. It is absolutely based around reducing freedoms. It's as though someone were to sell me food which disappears from my stomach after five minutes, requiring me to eat again. Economists call this "rent seeking", an attempt to charge money for nothing. Not only is this profoundly anti-natural in an adaptive, inventive free market, it's also a recipe for conflict of interest between seller and customer - exactly the opposite of a healthy business relationship!
This is a natural consequence of trying to make a thing behave like what it isn't. Rental is a mechanism for making temporary use of physical objects. Data is not physical and "renting data" is semantic garble. The copyright holders are basically trying to impose a contradiction: "information and not-information". As a result, every form of DRM must eventually lean on government force to impose compliance. It's not a business model - in the end it's nothing more than a Mafia-style extortion racket. "Gotta pay the Family if you wanna work in this town", same thing.
You leftish types who dislike the free market, be happy that one exists. It's the free market that will sweep this nonsense aside.
Not to mention that iTunes will let you download it again onto the same PC.
But I see the grandparent's point-this is the beginning of a slippery slope to the point where you can't back up or download what you bought. We have to stop it now before it's too late.
He had already lost some $100 to ITMS because spyware had hosed his machine once and ITMS support told him "tough luck" when he wanted his songs back. Strike one for DRM.
So by this reasoning, if a burgler breaks into you house and steals your CD collection, BMG should replace it for you since you bought it from them? If you buy a song/album from iTMS, burn it to a CD or back it up so this type of thing can't happen.
There are 2 types of people in this world; those that have lost data and those that will lose data. If you don't prepare for the inevitable, don't blame the distributor for the failure.
...I would say, "What's DRM?"
And that should answer your question. To paraphrase Bogart in Casablanca, 'The problems of a few small geeks and personal freedom advocates don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.'
Most people when educated will care - but not many will take that time. This issue to too difficult to fit in a 10 second sound bite and so gets lost in all the noise.
The real question is - will they know who to blame the first time they need to move files off of their old machine or share them with friends? THAT, is something we should be ready to 'clue them in' on.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Isn't this a silly question? Most people buy music and movies and don't even think about copyright and copyright laws.
the problem with all these drm things, and digital content in general, is future access. If I buy a book, I will always be able to read that book. Once it gets more mechanized than that, useability starts to drop, you become dependent on a static hardware/software config with zero guarantees that you'll be able to access the content at some future date. We already have tons of older software out there that is getting harder to access as machines change.
Our media in the past you were able to upgrade, for instance, I was personally able to go from vinyl or over the air analog to reel to reel, had to skip 8 track, then to cassette. On to CD but some of them only look like Cd's. Storing on hard drives, OK, what file system and what operating system can read it in the future once your older stuff wears out, which it will.
Vids went from super 8 to VHS (never bothered with laser disk) and now just left it there, haven't bothered to digitize any old stuff I have, seems a right hassle but I know it's doable, just got annoyed with it, even though this is considered somewhat easy. The forced upgrades are a PITA for your OLDER stuff. Static pictures, same deal, have boxes of old photos,Cost some for the equipment and film and developing, etc, 'the industry" made their money from that, the mark I eyeballs still work, after that, nope, pretty much a bogus task to try and store them electronically now.
For newly produced media, it doesn't matter, it's designed for that, but once you drop coin on it, by two generations down the road it's a hassle. Now add in DRM and that's it, the design is to lock you out of your own stuff, stuff you bought from them in the first place in most instances
At least with non DRM you have a chance of upgrading your content to a format you can still use, you can probably follow along with hardware upgrades, but you don't have (much of) that option with heavily DRMed stuff,short of immediately "breaking the law". They are forcing you to rebuy the content in the new format, of which it appears the industry wants a new version of every few years now.
Sorry, just not going to purchase the same song over and over again because the industry wants me to do that. Not going to re buy a movie I bought on VHS just to view it on the new laser optical uber dvd/hd/hologram VS 7.3 of the future. Nope, sorry, this has gotten to be annoying.
If they don't care if I can re transfer my stuff to the new hardware and it's made relatively easy to do that, swell, but once you force/lock me into a hardware/software scheme with ZERO guarantee of future upgradability and use I just ain't buying it, literally or figuratively. The industry basically lost me in the 90's, I just almost completely stopped buying electronic media.
Price/format/bogus restrictions,ongoing never ending payola and industry illegalities and scandals, etc all combined to a big fat NO from me. That stuff just ain't worth it. The content itself isn't worth what they ask for it. Maybe to some hollywood or NYC doofus making a minimum of 150 grand a year on up 15-20$ for a CD or DVD is chump change, but it's not to me. And then they want me to REBUY IT AGAIN five years or three years down the road with the new shiny format?
I have so much just stopped listening to music or watching movies it ain't funny. When I was growing up I dropped serious folding money on those sniveling weasly lying congress bribing millionaires, but not any more I don't. I don't support closed-monopoly OS jerk companies, nor do I support "infoentertaintainment media" that has as it's primary goal to just keep gouging my wallet. I don't rent cars, I buy them. I don't rent my furniture I buy it. I don't rent my books I buy them. I don't rent my clothes I buy them. I can resell, modify, exchange, trade, swap any or all of that stuff. If I want to yank the chrysler motor out of the jeep and drop in a ford motor I can do that. They are MINE after I buy them and I am not going to rebuy
Nobody is just going to give you another copy of commercial work just because you lost yours
It would be nice if ITMS would allow you to redownload stuff for a small fee much in the way Adobe will sell you a new copy of a program you have registered for $10 or so. But unfortunatley I don't see this being very possible due to the complication of the copyrights being owned by the record companies who would want there cut.
RULE #1 BACK-UP
RULE #2 SEE RULE#1
Honestly I'd prefer a world without DRMs too. Unfortunatley there are too many people who think that because it's there they have a right to it. Except for a few independent artists music is owned by labels and the people behind these labels naturaly want to protect their property. As has been pointed out before, when you buy music what you are really buying is the 'right' (I'm not sure that is the correct word) to listen to it). If online legal download services are going to exist then these services have to come to an arrangement with the labels that protects their rights. That means we will have to accept some sort of DRM and Apple's DRM is VERY reasonable. If you don't agree with it then don't use the service and for GOD sake don't try to circumvent it and spoil things for the more reasonable among us. The music is NOT and never was) yours, just yours to listen to if you follow the rules. Again, Apple's DRM is quite lenient and permits reasonable use of the material which is all fair use ever did.
DRM is being abused by the content suppliers. If they do this because they are forced by the copyright holders to do this, is beyond the scope if this reply, as I only see the content suppliers use it :)
I'm a big movie fan. A big music fan too. I'm also a student and can rarely spare the money to buy a CD and/or a DVD every month because the prices are so outrageous. So yes, you can say, I *DO* download music and movies. I have a few subscriptions to rental sites, so at least I give them back *some* money. Or at least, I *had* subscriptions. All of them have started implementing DRM. An sich, I have little trouble with that - I'm not a warez spreader. So I get the movie, and DRM allows me to watch it for 7 days. If I payed something like E 1 for that 'rental' that is fine by me. Still cheaper than going to a real rental and a lot faster (lightning fast university network). In that case, I could accept DRM.
However, in reality, I cannot accept DRM. Why not? Because I can't transfer the movie to my harddisk/dvd player and watch it decently on my tv because that is not allowed. Even if I want to copy it to my laptop to watch it in another room that isn't possible because most of the buggers require you to reverify the license everytime you watch the movie. Requiring you to have a working internet connection on the device you are watching it on.
As for music like iTunes, I think DRM is simply absurd. If you pay E 1 per song, you should own that song. Seeing the costs that are cut by not putting it on a CD, dividing the result by the number of songs typically on a CD, you pay the correct price and it should by all means be yours to do with as you please.
DRM's idea is good and can in certain situations be justified, but the implementation is far to restrictive. Because of that, I will never accept anything DRM'd. IMHO, they had their chance to protect their stuff in a reasonable way, got greedy, and screwed up. Bye bye DRM.
Added to that, I have to use WMP to play those files. Can't play them on *nix. Can't use a decent media player. Yeah right! I've even tried to build my own player to support DRM by the official libraries - guess what? Microsoft controls who gets those libraries and who doesn't. Absurd.
Now back to CD's and DVD's. New copy protections come out on a regular bases. They all have some form of copy protection making it difficult for you to play them on your PC unless you use media player X. Don't know about you, but my PC is my music center. And yes I do rip every CD I have to MP3 and put it on my harddisk. There's no shuffle like a shuffle with 10000 songs on it. They try to prevent that to! You know that is actually illegal in some countries?
I'm sorry dinosaur media companies, but you're going extinct. Nowadays, you leave me no choice but to use P2P to get my music and movies, because if I give money to you to get it, I won't be able to play it everywhere and anytime I want to. You know, until one or two years ago, if I downloaded things I really liked, I really did go out and buy it! Since they started pulling all this crap I stopped doing that. Give us back our rights to the things we buy and maybe we will actually buy something.
And the worst thing is, that all this stuff is based on the rediculous notion that if there was no P2P everyone would buy all that music and movies! Surely they must realize that the heavy downloaders who get a hundred songs or movies a month don't have E 2000 lieing around each month to actually buy it.
(Ok this has gotten a bit long and unstructured, but I hope you all get my point)
... it's properly accounted for against the value of the product.
I am no an economist, but to me those issues present a substantial degradation in value of the content. Perhaps 1/20th that of equivalent of non-DRM content, maybe less.
Alos, PLEASE STOP CALLING IT DRM! That acronym is merely a euphemism for the more accurate Fair-Use Circumvention Kit. Calling it "Digital Rights Management" is a tacit endorsement of the scheme.
No. I will never accept it in any form.
The following conversation with my yet-as-unborn child:
- Dad, why can't we watch that movie that you liked so much as a kid?
- Sally, that's because it was content protected with a 4000-bit key. But the company that served the keys went out of business, so that movie is lost forever. Since watching this movie would be against federal law, it's illegal to ever see it.
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
First let me say I didn't RTFA -- I hate to let the facts get in the way of a good argument.
Now, with DRM, the content distributers are really blurring the line between purchasing media and renting it.
When I purchase something, it's mine -- it belongs to ME. I can copy it (fair use copy), I can consume it, I can destroy it.
But take away those rights and I'm left without protection.
This already happens! Go buy yourself a Nintendo GameCube or Sony Playstation, or XBox. Each of those systems rely on some form of DVD media. if your DVD (which you aren't able to copy (wink wink)) gets scratched and becomes unplayable, then what recourse do you have? The media companies want to treat the transaction like you own the material and are just out of luck...but you don't really own it, do you? You can't make backup copies. They should be required to sell you, at cost, replacement media upon forfeiture of the original.
Greedy bastards!
I think there needs to be some give on both sides.
The content creators and producers want to be compensated for the work they do. We as consumers would like to get the most bang for our buck (or in some cases no buck). Therefore, the content creators and producers need to find a way to continue to generate revenue without driving the consumers away.
With that said if you as a consumer do not like what a creator or producer is doing, do not give them money. Give your money to those who respect your beliefs on what you should be able to do with the content you pay money for (or don't pay money for). Content creators who publish under the creative commons license are an excellent example and are deserving of our $upport. Yes I know, you are not going to find Metalica or Britney Spears there, but there are many good artists you will not hear on your local Clear Chanel station.
I am sitting here in a cube, reading the posts on this DRM discussion, and suddenly it hits me...Is this really important?
Is there any video or music that I want bad enough to worry with DRM's? If I want a video, I will buy it, and (IANAL but)I think in doing so I am agreeing to whatever license is stipulated. But is it worth all these arguments and stress...endless discussions, etc.?
I look out the window and see trees and a lake and I can walk out and watch and hear the eagles that are trying to catch the fish in the lake. There are geese on the shore of the lake...and it is better than any video...
GOODBY, SLASHDOT...I think I will go spend some time on important stuff...
I am also an ebook reader. I tend to use the Microsoft reader format, only because to the restrictions on the Adobe format. I don't like being forced to use a non-MS platform to read books (as far as PDA's go, Adobe ebooks cannot be read on MS OS PDAs) anymore than I like being forced to use one. Regardless of my choice(s) I have one big issue with ebooks, ownership. I have always shared books with other family members and vice versa. It is not a shady ploy to avoid purchasing books, but to share our experiences in reading books by particular authors, that we would not otherwise purchase ourselves. The exposure to new materail often leads each of us to start purchasing books from the new author or series. Even the major publishers acknowledge the market power exhibited in this type of 'book sharing'. It has been proven to drive sales, by the publisher's own words and as the result of studies by them. Why then is this ability removed with ebooks? I like the convienience very much, but still prefer to buy real books because of this one reason alone. If we have priveleges associated with an established format, then why do they question why a new format is not readily accepted when the priveleges for the new format have been severly restricted? Seems like a dumb question on their part to me. Printed books will not ever diminish in sales as long as the newer formats continue to remove the availability of that material from the purchaser. This publisher's ploy to try to regain ground from an established venue only serves to open the door to theft that did not exist before. Inevitably they will throw up their arms and point fingers at the 'thieves' as the music industry has, but they alone are responsible for the inequaty in the formats, simply due to thier greed.
Publishers take heed, Just make the new formats as accessable as the previous and you won't run into the same problems as the music industry. When is the last time you read about 'Book Thieves' in the papers and FBI crack downs and public outrage at commercial stances in this industry? It doesn't happen. Why start now? It mystifies me.
It seems to me that DRM is akin to buying a book only for the shop limit the places I can read it.
When viewed in those terms I find it wholly unacceptable and Apple won't be seeing any of my money as a result.
Yet there is inevitably conflict, because if I'm the creator of a work, then I have a right to benefit from it's creation. Whereas other people seem to feel they're entitled to my efforts, without compensation, simply because it can be easily stolen.
Or to put it another way, my right to do whatever I want stops the moment my fist touches your nose...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Wow that's a loaded question. (Donning the asbestos suit and vowing to not respond to any replies)
DRM is the result of people trying to find a way to contain the powers that digital media afford the end-user (note that these are not rights granted, only abilities):
1. Copying
2. Widespread Distribution
3. Alteration
4. Inclusion within other works (think the Gray Album)
These abilities that were once "protected" from end-users by factors such as cost and level of difficulty have become extremely easy to acquire.
Copying: In the past, if you wanted to make multiple copies of an album, you had to purchase a reel-to-reel or cassette deck, purchase tape, and then sit down and actually make individual copies of the album that would take the full length of playing the album. If you were a "big time" pirate who sold bootlegs, you could invest in duplication hardware which would cost a lot. Both of these approaches presented significant barriers to the average person from easily copying an album. Today, it's as simple as ripping a CD to some lossy format and then dragging and dropping those files to your shared P2P folder. At most, you might spend an hour on a slow machine waiting for your CD to finish ripping. In most cases on modern PCs it's more like five minutes per CD. The financial and time expenses have disappeared.
Widespread Distribution: In the past, you needed to be able to make each individual copy yourself or sink a lot of money into a duplicator. This was again a set of financial and time expenses that most people with the exception of real pirates weren't willing to deal with. In the digital realm, the time spent is minimal (ie. dragging your ripped files to your P2P client's shared folder) and the expense is justifiable since the "duplicator" is also your word processor, game system, entertainment unit, personal information manager, etc... Where you wouldn't have spent $5000 or more on a tape duplicator and the recurring cost of blank cassettes to distribute, You'll happily spend $1000-2000 on a system that will do a whole lot of other stuff too.
Alteration: Not only has it become easy to copy music, but to alter it as well. Again, in the past, if you wanted to edit a recording, your only option was a reel-to-reel deck, splicing block and splicing tape and a LOT of patience. Having a four or eight track reel-to-reel deck helped as well. But the cost for investing in these tools and the time required, not to mention the possible errors made audio manipulation something that the average person wouldn't be interested in doing. Today, you have many options. There are commercial audio editing programs, some of which have multitrack capabilties. The average PC is more than enough to do eight or 16 track work. There are also free audio editing programs (Audacity, Rezound, Ardour, Protux) that can do far more than the old reel-to-reel decks. Again, the cost is lifted and the only investment a person needs to make is time to learn to edit. This means that producing programming is no longer the exclusive realm of radio. This is why internet radio took off in the early 90s. Now... we have podcasting as well.
Inclusion: Combine the abilities to alter and copy and you now have the third ability for more enterprising people to include previous works in their own work. Most people aren't aware of the intricacies of copyright law, so the potential for copyright violation is extremely great. Considering that copyright law has been perverted to protect the interests of the large distributors rather than those of the creator of the work, it's easy to see why DRM is so desirable to them. It allows them to limit or take away the abilties that comptuers give them. Sadly, in the case of inclusion, this prevents new and interesting works from being built upon older work.
I am not a proponent of piracy or DRM. Personally, if DRM is going to keep me from being able to build my own devices, then I have a problem with it. Just as I should be
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
DRM strips my customer rights - I will never ever accept it - period.
I buy a movie with an expiration date every time I go into the cinema. (D)"RM" consists of the guy who will at first politely and then forcefully tell you to put your damn video camera away.
The simple fact is that you ACCEPT RM in something as simple as going to the movies because you understand the economics of the exchange. That you can not somehow translate this basic idea into an equivalent exchange involving purely physical goods (rather than an 'experience') is sad.
The hypocrisy of a few people is starting to bug me: if people want to use, for example, Apple's Music Store, fine, let them - their choice. (I enjoy the service, and being able to back up by burning audio CDRs, even at less quality, makes it OK with me - this is how I listen to my iTunes purchases under Linux).
If you don't like DRM, for example Apple's version, then don't use it.
What part of FREEDOM don't people understand?
This is similar to GPL vs. Open Source, vs. proprietary software
I release my little open offerings under the GPL because I like that - it is my stuff and I can release it under whatever license I want.
I also respect people who prefer BSD, Apache, MIT licenses - their stuff, so they choose the license.
I make my living (mostly) by having people pay me to write proprietary software that the own the rights to - they pay the bills, they get the licensing that they want.
People who make the investment and create movies, music, books, etc. own what they create - they call the shots.
Copying is an unalienable human right endowed by my creator. Keep DRM away!
'Education and religion are two things not regulated by supply and demand. The less of either the people have, the less they want.'
- [Charlotte Observer, 1897]
Online porn still makes a ton of money even though you could easily download the stuff off P2P or newsgroups.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Publicity is one thing, but polluting air-play with RnB when the whole country is completely not liking that American crap is downright offensive, and imho, one of the reasons why Europeans are thinking Americans are all offensive and aggressive. I`m not kidding. The image of music stars pushing their video`s on all tv channels, pushing their stupid ramblings about 'da getthooo' through our radio`s 24/7.. Europeans simply do not like RnB, yet it is all they get to hear.
It`s not so difficult to see that because of this, Europeans have but 2 other options to get commodotized airplay of their favourite bands and music these days: buy the cd, or download from the internet. And obviously you don`t buy every cd just to have commodotized airplay..
my cents..
With great power comes great electricity bills.
Thats because its due process that even one person of a couple who is a citizen who has sex with and creates a child, the child has full citizenship rights.
In older times, it was common to revoke citizenship in the stead of death as a punishment. Now, the only times citizenship is revoked is when someone has dual citizenship and is "kicked out".
On the other hand, if you wished to gain citizenship in Russia, you would REVOKE your citizenship here in the US. You can deny it, as Hubbard fo Scientology fame, has done. YOu just better NOT step foot on our siol, or we might consider you as a invader.
Digital Rights Management. In other words, "We :)
re the MPAA/RIAA. We will digitally manage your rights for you!"
"Can't get the content if you can't pay the creator."
Ha ha! I just got your post for free! Without paying you! ha ha! Sucker!
AFAIK Laser Disks are an analog medium, like FM. Copies would not be perfect.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I think I would be inclined to accept DRM if it didn't impede my ability to use the media how I saw fit. Perhaps something that would code my name and/or account info to each media file so that if I were to make it available for redistribution they could tie it back to me.
Personally, one of the the things I hate about FairPlay is that if I put a song on my iPod that is DRM'd and try to play it while my iPod is hooked up to someone else's iTunes, it asks me for my account information. Having multiple machines, I already have three machines registered, so I have to unregister those and it is generally a pain. Yet, the odd part is, I can use my iTunes to put songs on as many iPods as I want and their owners could listen normally, they just won't be able to play it through iTunes. The whole thing seems slightly flawed.
I also am unimpressed with iTMS's 128kbps encoding rate, but that's another story.
Never.
Although as I've said before the point is moot as any human created technology can be reverse engineered/cracked/bypassed by other humans.
Always has been... always will...
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
"4 weeks in a good local studio for about £3000" seems cheap to me" Dude, if you can record an entire album for three thousand pounds stirling, then I have about 100 I'd like you to produce! Reality Check everyone. I work in the music industry, and I have been working on ONE album since June of last year. We work in the studio 3-5 days a week, every week. We will be done sometime around Oct - Dec. The COSTS for making this record (which I think should be awesome, but I can't talk right now . . um . . but I want to . . .) will easily exceed $500K USD. Hiring musicians, singers, flying them in, putting them up, and working thousands and thousands of hours with gifted professionals adds up.
The MONEY to recoup these costs will ONLY come from media sales (CD, MP3 etc). Touring does NOT make money, except for the mega-acts. No income from CD sales, no new CD's.
I can guarantee you that *Those* morons who think music should be free - if all music is free then this album, and any one like it would NEVER get made and you folks out there who are decent people and music lovers would NEVER get to hear it.
Where does this idiotic attitude come from anyway?. You don't expect the book in your hand to be free, you don't expect the latest X-Box game to be free, so what is the big deal about PAYING to BUY a recording that some group of people may have spent a huge personal fortune and spent YEARS to create?. If it's good, what is the problem with the CREATOR getting paid for it? So some dickhead can rip it off? Uhhh No.
Let me state right up front that I am NOT against musicians, movie makers, and other media authors receiving fair compensation for their creative work. Far from it! I have a deep respect for those who have given us such gems as (just two examples) "Monsters, Inc." and "Spirited Away."
With that said: I would not accept any form of DRM as it is currently implemented. The idea of DRM, in its current form, seems to be designed to do two things.
(1) Protect the profits of industries that refuses to change their business models to reflect reality (notably the MPAA and RIAA, which are rapidly becoming four-letter epithets).
(2) Trump consumer fair-use rights that have been around for decades. More specifically, I see the current implementation of DRM as little more than a weapon to try and overturn the Betamax ruling of 1984.
It's clear to me that Hollywood wants us to pay for the privilege of letting them tell us what we can and cannot do with movies and music that we buy. I also find it ironic that the MPAA and RIAA are so quick to accuse others of "piracy" when their own business practices are questionable at best.
Honestly, I think DRM right now is a bad idea. The media industries seem to be treating everyone as potential criminals from the get-go, taking a "Guilty Until We Decide Otherwise" approach.
Something I've noticed about human behavior: Treat people like (copyright) criminals from the start, and that is invariably how they will behave. The U.S. government has been treating the population of the entire country, collectively, like a bunch of rowdy eighth-graders for years. Hollywood hasn't done any better.
In other words: You have to show respect to earn it.
I don't pretend to have all (or even any) of the answers. I do know that any DRM scheme, if it's going to be acceptable to Joe Six-Pack and Jane Soccer-mom, is going to have to operate without disabling their ability to record a TV show or movie off the air, or make backup copies of DVDs that they've already bought.
Two things that I suspect would be a big help. First, better quality control on commercial DVD's! Disney, in particular, seems to have more than their share of defective discs (in terms of sudden freezes or pixellation).
Second, the music industry would do well to cut prices on music CDs by 50% across the board, AND to stop assuming that their sales drops can be blamed entirely on piracy.
The possibility that the dropoffs might be due to the fact that much of what their putting out is utter crap, and that their customers will actually pay for real talent as opposed to homogenized pop, never seems to occur to them.
Keep the peace(es).
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I'd accept DRM on music if the price dropped to around 25 cents per track.
If the price dropped to under 5 cents per track, I'd probably accept "pay per play" pricing. In fact, my ideal solution would be the Celestial Jukebox: have all the world's music available at 5 cents per play per track, and just stream me what I want to listen to when I want to listen to it. I wouldn't need to "own" anything.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I remember it as well and yes, those days are gone. It has been years since /. has been good for more then rehashed new from other sites and the occasional funny troll.
Long Live Sig11
I accept DRM now. I use iTunes, I buy because it's convenient, and I don't use PyMusique or Hymn or anything like that. If I really, really want redistribute a song to a friend for listening, I burn it to a CD.
The restrictions aren't onerous -- about the only thing that really bugs me is that I'm not allowed to stream over a local network without entering a password.
Tweet, tweet.
I would like it so I had to keep putting coins into a slot to use my operating system, then when I opened a file, I would have to increase the rate or use higher denomination coins.
Files I created with proprietry software would be cryptographically locked unless I kept paying the hourly liscense.
My hardware would lock out unsuitable hardware, software and media that the trusted initiative consortium did not approve of.
The computer would sense if anyone else came in view of the screen and they would have to pay as well.
It wouldn't really need coins I could just use my DRMed 'Trusted PayFriend' account so my hardware and software could automatically take my money, and I wouldn't be allowed to make purchases that were not part of the 'Trusted' Schema.
My Appliances would run on the same trusted OS for my convenience and so if I needed to open my fridge my account could easily be debited.
To avoid 'Issues of Intellectual Propery' the whole system would freeze and lock me out if it detected an unapproved tool such as Pymusic, Linux or a Pencil.
This would be for my protection so I did not inadvertatnly break any of the Rights Management Directives of Hollywood.
I think this would lead to cultural diversity and artists getting paid, yesdoubleplus.
Exactly! this point NEEDS to be further understood.
The short version: if you can hear it with your ears, you can copy it with your computer.
I wouldn't be AS unwilling to accept DRM if (and only if) it reflected the rights I have with conventional copyright. That is:
Those concerned about DRM invading computers should check out this article on BBC News Website, which says that computers available now from Dell, IBM, Toshiba, HP/Compaq or Samsung already contain an extra chip called the trusted platform module (TPM) that can be used for a range of hardware-based security features, including DRM.
Their strategy is to get the public to unknowlingly buy hardware with these chips before the DRM is activated. Once the hardware DRM is widely distributed among the public, they will activate the DRM through software upgrades.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4360793.stm
I won't accept anything at all in DRM. I bought it, it is mine.
If I choose to violate copyright laws with it, then I should be punished. But I am free to make that stupid choice.
Record companies: I will never purchase anything in DRM. You won't get a cent from me in that case. You'll lose more money to DRM than supposed "warez kids".
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
I take the view that if a song, movie, book, etc. is DRM'd then it isn't truly mine.
It's not yours either way. It's copyright holder's.
If you want it to be yours with all the nice consequences, propose to purchase copyright. Just don't expect that to be cheap.
"They that would give up essential file-liberty for temporary copyright owner security deserve neither."
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Yes Ridiculous! Never succomb.
"Technically you generally do have the right to use that content in another form, unless the terms of the license agreement say you don't."
.MP3 or .AVI so I can take it with me more conveniently?
But I didn't agree to any license. I went to the store, they offered a CD or DVD for sale for a price, I accepted the offer and paid the price and took the disc home. That is the entire agreement. Why should I need a license to listen to or watch the disc I bought? Why should I need a license to rip it to
Yes I do think that distributing it over a p2p system would be a violation of copyright, and illegal, and wrong, but what does "license" have to do with anything?
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
How'd you hack your player? I would love to skip the ads and play the movie. Hell - I payed for it, didn't I? If I wanted to watch ads, I would watch TV. So, how do you hack your DVD player to skip the ads?
There is no incentive strong enough to get me to support DRM in any form. If that means doing without television, music, or movies, then so be it. These things are by no means necessities. I deeply resent Hollywood's attempts to strip away my rights, and I refuse to knuckle under to them.
I have no problem with the entertainment industry protecting their rights. What I have a problem with is how they are doing it right now. I am a DRM hater because I have been screwed by it more than once. I've purchased legit music online, only to have the licences all of a sudden disappear and the backups I created then don't work. The only way they can have me accept DRM is IF and only IF I can play it on anything that accepts that media (like the DVD or CD) and does not limit how long I'm able to view it (no expiry). If they don't do this, I only see them promoting piracy because they are screwing the purchasing consumer. I purchase both CD's and DVD's because they are both a media that work whenever I need it to. They need to build on the CD and DVD media find some way to protect their rights without screwing the consumer because it does work both ways. Consumers are not going to spend their money which limits their rights.
When you buy a hammer, you can reasonably say that you own the hammer and it is truly yours. When you buy a book or song it's more accurate to say that you own the media containing the work. In that case, you are certainly free to do whatever you like with the media, but it is not necessarily true that you are free to do what you like with the contents. It may be true that you are, but it's certainly arguable, and it is not a given.
Starting with 'Good Charlotte - Click' and about 700 songs later since release I've been buying on iTMS.
I've lost a hard drive in a machine - it still works.
I've lost an iPod (screen failure three years after I bought it) - still works
I've got 6 CDs in my changer in the car - no problems burning those
I've got multiple CDs laying on the floorboards of my car, in the side pockets, some with songs that are on other CDs, never had an issue where my 'rights' were restricted.
To me, everyone that bitches about how restrictive iTunes is are just that - bitches. I view you as theives, whiners, and just overall scofflaws because your bitches and moans are as lame as 'What, no OGG', 'If it's not FLAC it's Crap!', 'I can't run it on linux' or other countless WHAAAA type cries. That's not meant as flame bait, troll, or whatever. I have an opinion, everyone doesn't have to agree with it, matter of fact you can all hate it, but that's how I view Slashdot when topics like this come up.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Sometime after Hell freezes over...and I'm not talking about that small town in MI
It's simple: I want to be able to exercise *all* my rights and use the content in any way that I am allowed to under the law. To give an example: under German law, it is explicitely permissible to make copies of media for private use, and that specifically includes giving copies to friends, for example. The copyright owners (for lack of a better word) are compensated by a fee that is automatically charged whenever you buy a CD (media), or a blank tape (empty media), or a VCR (appliances that can be used for copying media).
Unfortunately, while it is specifically not illegal to make copies for private use (including for sharing them with friends), the law does not give you an enforcable right to do this, so the industry is free to use technical measures to prevent you from doing this (while still reaping the compensation the law requires).
As such, it's pretty safe to say that for me, no kind of DRM or copy prevention is acceptable as long as with every purchase I make, I automatically compensate the content industry for my right to make copies. For example, I do not and never will buy songs from iTunes; I do not and will not buy CDs that contain copy prevention mechanisms; and I do not and will not buy DVDs or any other media that contain built-in copy prevention mechanisms that are designed to keep me from exercising my fair use rights which I am not only allowed to exercise under law but which I in fact PAY GOOD MONEY FOR.
As such, any DRM is fundamentally unacceptable for me. Period.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
I agree with a lot of the comments here about the need for recuping the initial cost of investment etc etc. However, isn't the eventual sale contingent upon some form of hard currency which is more or less of a permanent? (yes yes barring inflation vs. cost averaging, profit margins etc.)
OK so if companies want us to pay on a subscription model (so as to generate a revenue stream) but please don't pass it off under DRM. Call it for what it is - a subscription model.
On the other hand, if DRM is going to stop me from getting what I already paid for (or require me to pay up again & again..) then that is something else.
Lastly (and I admit I've missed a lot of other issues), I'm also increasingly unhappy with all the intrusions of privacy that come at the behest of DRM. When did such small commmerical transactions begin to require such inspection of the buyer?
bah!
We've learned that there *is* a sweet spot for DRM.
Example of Failed DRM:
Circuit City's DIVX format which totally stunk. It was too restrictive and too expensive when compared with DVD's.
Example of Successful DRM:
Macrovision on VHS. Supposedly stopped you from copying tapes, but you could buy two high-end VCR's that were able to bypass the macrovision. This is when I stopped buying VHS tapes and just became a renter.
I say DRM's fine for rental features, but if you expect me to purchase something you better not cripple it. Apple's iTunes DRM is closest to that sweet spot. 90% of users never run into DRM problems with it, but it is still there.
At the end of the day though, we have alternatives (radio vs mp3s). The only one that concerns me is the TV Broadcast Flag/DRM coupled with movie DRM leaves no real video entertainment alternative.
But I don't think extreme DRM will last. At some point, some exec will come along and remove all DRM, see the company's success skyrocket and be hailed as a genius. Then everyone will copy him. The last 20 years have been the most consumer-hostile movement by industries (Music/TV Provider/Movie) I've seen. And they're proving they're more stubborn than the software industry which has generally cut back on their insanely-complicated-and-broken software activation systems.
In Short: It'll be a rocky 10 years, but DRM won't last. Especially with people in other countries continually breaking it.
I dont' mind iTMS DRM. Of course, I've never actually paid for a song, either. (Mmm... tilty Pepsi.)
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
all others are merely bacteria trying to degrade the environment.
So, just as I buy my music and videos from local stores that give the artists a higher cut, the only DRMs I'm buying into are artist-derived, not the intermediaries.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Unfortunately we've already accepted DRM, DVD's have it (and restrict when you can fast forward), Games consoles have it, your iPod has it, even mobile phones have it (network lock-in) all these things are widely accepted and while most (all?) have been cracked and have generated black-market support industries, its only a matter of time before hardware starts coming with hardcore protection - tamper proof chips that break if you try anything, DRM thats actually designed by competent engineers (wtf?) and real restrictions on what you can do.
At the moment the industry is fucking their cake and eating it too - not only do they have DRM but they also have the DMCA to stop you even attempting to break it, they're being greedy at the expense of my liberty and customer satisfaction they only need ONE of those two things, if that. Personally I believe that I have the right to do whatever the hell I want with my property in my home (building nuclear weapons etc not included obviously).
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Subject says pretty much everything, though DRM is just a challenge, it can never be impossible as the content has to be decoded at some stage.
But then again, I have the ability to respect property that belongs to someone else. I realize that I'm probably in the minority, but that aside, there are simply too many things wrong with DRM- ANY kind of rights management, really. I agree that authors should have control over what they create, but only from a more general perspective. This control, is, in fact, granted by current copyright laws. I'm not interested in enslaving myself to a system that monitors every single thing I do just so it can determine if I'm violating a DRM policy.
I get the feeling that the content industry wants to produce a "zero loss" environment, where every single "use" of a given work is covered by some kind of payment. From the perspective of maximizing profits, this might be an option (if not an exceptionally greedy one), but it can either negate the whole notion of fair use, or start us squarely down that path.
Actually from http://www.theregister.co.uk/Register article. A new version of PyMusique (v0.3) works around Apple's latest attempt to block it. Story http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/23/pymusique_ unblocks_itunes/here.
Of all the OS's I've seen, I like the one that runs my mind the most!
I'd accept any DRM that I can hack ...
- If the copyrighted work (such as a song or a movie) is not available for someone to buy, then it is not illegal to distribute the work to him during the unavailable period, for non-commerical purposes.
- If the distributor deliberately restricted the way the work can be used, including restricting copying with DRM, it can be considered "unavailable to buy" (unless, of course, the distributor also provides unrestricted copies, for example I'm okay with unrestricted copies for sale and restricted copies for rental).
- Of course, the price must not be exorbitantly high (e.g. the price of an ordinary DVD should be no more than $50 or $100) for the work to be considered available to buy.
- Breaking DRM is not illegal in itself, though the user must still respect copyright (subject to the two rules above) whether or not he broke the DRM.
In my opinion, distributing something only in DRM'd form is similar to (though with a lesser extent) keeping a book out-of-print, in that it makes the work less useful to the public, even after the copyright expires. We cannot restrict the copyright holder's freedom to do it, but we can restrict the exclusive rights we give them if they decide to do that. In short, if you use DRM, make sure it works perfectly; the copyright law should not help you if it breaks.With going to see a movie, we accept the fact that what we pay for is to see the film, not the film itself. As you said, it's the experience. You see the film once. If you want to see it again, you pay again.
However, there is a right of first sale in that you can resell your ticket if you haven't used it already.
With a DVD, you buy the disc, which includes unlimited viewings. If I sell my DVD to you, I don't have it in my home to see anymore. Now, you own it and can view the content. The price paid not only covers the experience but also the physical media. With a film in a theater, there is no physical media in your posession.
Now, the thing with eliminating the idea of a sale in favor of licensing is that it can be done with anything. It's a contractual issue. You could license the use of a car instead of buying it. Same with any other physical item. Thing is, we have grown used to the idea of a sale, so we reject the idea of licensing, except for events like movies, ballgames, concerts, or anything else that's experiential instead of physical.
Personally when I purchase something I expect that I've purchased control over it. So if I buy a song I expect that I can move the song from my CD to my PC to my portable player, in whatever format I prefer. Think of it this way. We all have VHS tapes around, and now that the world is going to DVD we bring those tapes forward onto the new media. Okay, now flash forward a decade - how do we bring our now DRM DVDs up to the next level? Can we? Seems to me like I've lost that "control" that I thought I bought. There will always be thieves, but treating us all like them isn't the best solution.
Thanks to assholes like that, this is what started filesharing in the first place, and this is what caused my long standing boycott of the RIAA. And by the way, even if all filesharing stopped right now, they'll still push for DRM as hard as ever. Face it. It's not about rights, it's about power, money, and control. If I was the RIAA and had their mindset, there's no fucking way I will ever let the cat out of the bag again once I've succeeded in stuffing it back in. Anybody that thinks otherwise is an utterly naive and galactically stupid asshat that doesn't know dick about what they're talking about.
By the way, there's a big difference between shoplifting and copyright infringement, so don't bother wasting your time and mine by trying to sell me the line that filesharing is stealing. It's not and no amount of spin will ever change that fact, period.
The typical MP3 with DRM gives you the right to copy it to a couple CDs, MP3 Players, and computers. IMHO, all MP3 players should be detected as a removalbe drive and not require special software or drivers. Now that Media Player thinks it's a drive, not an MP3 player, it will not allow you to copy the file to your MP3 player. My solution: Burn the MP3 to an audio CD and then rip CD to back MP3. It's a hassle but now I'm able to play it on my MP3 player, home computer, laptop, work, etc. I'm sure this is somehow illegial. I'm currently looking at mp3tunes.com and magnatune.com to bypass the whole DRM issue.
I'll accept DRM in the ~1990 United States codified form. That is, I can use anything I purchase/license within my fair use, and if I don't then the copyright holder may sue me for infringement.
Copyright law today rarely protects the financial interests of the people who created the work. It mostly protects the financial interests of the distributor who do not fairly compensate the artists. The artists themselves do not have the right to copy their own works. This is why all media publishing industries are so screwed right now. I remember when I was back in audio production school, I was told that most employers in the music business consider all work that you do (even at home on your own equipment) to be their property. This is written into the employment contract. Doesn't sound like a way to protect the interests of the people who are actually creating the works. If the creators of a work want to profit from their creation, they are far better going it alone and utilizing the power of today's technology for distribution. At worst, they could gain some notoriety if their work is any good. But as soon as they sign up with a label, they are going to get screwed. The statement you made hat I am nit-picking should be phrased:
So your proposal is to stop allowing the major labels/motion picture distributors to profit from their acquisitions?
If you were an artist, you'd "get it". Sound to me like you're a "suit" or a wannabe business person.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Why should the public pay at all when so much has been stolen from them? The very same publishers who have gotten copyright lengthened until it no longer serves it originally purpose want the public to respect this hijacking of the Public Domain and pay for those old works as well as the new. There is only justice when both sides are treated fairly. Give us the Public Domain back and we'll be much more amenable to accepting DRM.
Just wait until they find out that they are restricted. From personal experience, my Mom got into iTunes for a while until I asked her about backups of her "online" music. She knew she could burn a CD but she was assembling a "collection" of music on her PC and that's pretty much all she wanted to do. She had zero interest in burning CD's at all - for backup or otherwise.
...not for long though.
Her interest in iTunes promptly ended when I explained to her that if her hard drive crashes, she loses all of her purchased music. When she learned that Apple would not "replace" it or let you download it again, she finally put 2 and 2 together and figured out that she wasn't really BUYING anything at all.
I don't think the general public has any idea what DRM is and how it affects them. They will find out very soon once they actually try to USE the DRM material they purchased and they run into the everyday hassles all of us have (backups, portability, etc). Until then, however, the large media companies will continue to sell this crap. Why? Because people will put up with it.
The problem is that Digital "Rights" Management is an attempt by media conglomerates to create and define new "rights" over and above what copyright law allows!
Seriously, what does copyright deal with? The right to make copies (duh)! However, I've heard media-types defending UPOs (user-prohibited operations) on DVDs (that which does not let you skip the commercials) as "ensuring that the copyright holder can exercise his right to control the way in which the consumer experiences the work in order to exercise our right to protect the artistic integrity of the work."
Let me clue you in, media-types. I have searched high and low in copyright law and found no "right to protect the artistic integrity of your work." I haven't been able to find a reference in copyright law that gives "the right to control the way in which the work is experienced." The moment you sell a copy to me, I have the right to "experience the work" as contained on that copy in whatever way I freaking feel like - EXCEPT most cases of creating and distributing new copies ("Fair Use" excepted, but that's not where I want to go here).
The easiest analogy to use is... gasp... BOOKS (also copyrighted objects). If I buy a copy of mystery novel and wish to "experience it" by skipping to the last page and reading the pages backwards, that is my perogative. It is NOT your right to force me to read the pages in the order YOU would like me to. If I wish to read chapters 1-3, skip chapter 4, and then read chapters 5-end, that is my perogative. Again, it is NOT your right to keep me from experiencing my copy in any way I see fit to protect your imagined "right to control the experience." If I wish to take a sharpie and blot out every f-bomb (or every preposition, or every instance of the letter "e") in MY COPY of the book, that is my perogative - it is not your right to ban sharpies in order to "protect the integrity of the work" and make sure that I read those words in the future.
If I wish to take it to Kinko's and make copies for all my friends, it IS your right to keep me from doing so. If I wish to scan it on my computer and plop in on (insert filesharing medium of choice), it is your right to keep me from doing so. Notice in both of these instances, you're keeping me from MAKING COPIES - which is what copyright is really about. Not "controlling the experience." Not "protecting the artistic integrity of your work."
Copyright is about restricting me from making copies - and as Fair Use can trump even that restriction, DRM is fatally flawed, because it cannot by its nature make judgements as to whether or not use is infringing or "Fair Use." DRM is simply a means for media companies to stake a claim to more imagined "rights" than they actually have, at the sole expense of taking away my REAL (not imagined) rights. Thus, DRM is completely unacceptable. Ever. Period. End of Discussion.
A system which automatically notifies the copyright holder when a copy is created (and only at that time)? Acceptable, and perhaps even desirable... because those engaged in Fair Use when making the copy will not have to worry about their copying. Those *not* engaged in Fair Use (i.e., violating copyright) can more easily be caught. (Note this is not the same as, "you should be okay with an unsolicited search if you have nothing to hide;" rather, it means that if you engage in something that needs a case-by-case review to determine its legality, you should have no problem with having that review for your case - if you're legal, you're fine). And if the system contains a means of contacting the copyright holder, it makes it easy for one who owns a legitimate copy to contact the copyright holder, thus alleviating one of the big problems of wanting to license material (trying to find the copyright holder to obtain a license).
Of course, what I would REALLY like to see is compulsory licensing for *all* copyrighted works, but that's another story entirely.
--AC
is invisible DRM. I'm not a big pirate, by any means. I'm one of the few that really will go buy the CD if he likes what he hears online. (waits for laughter to ensue)
Really, the only DRM I wouldn't complain about is DRM that I don't even notice. If it didn't stop anything I'm doing, I wouldn't care that it's there.
Why do I hate DRM? Is it copy limitations? Not really. Is it that my players must be authorized, and only a few can be at a time? It's not even that, really. I hate DRM because it's all proprietary. Give me an open DRM standard that any hardware/software vendor can freely implement, so that I don't have to worry if my DRM'd song will play on my muVo, my iPod, my MediaMonkey, my Winamp, or my MP3-CD player.
Today, images are so easy to copy that they almost don't count. But every icon that you see, every image that is on the screen, and there are millions of them, represent the collective efforts of many artists working for a long time.
What if a budding photographer wanted to put his or her work on a web site? He can't, unless he plans on giving up eating.
At some point, we do have to respect that images and sounds placed on the internet really do belong to other people and that at some level it is wrong to just take from these folks without compensating them.
This is my sig.
Also, it's a public interest in making sure that nobody is giving me counterfeit money. It's not a public interest to make sure that I'm not given counterfeit music.
Lastly, money has tangible value. Music doesn't.
RULE #1 BACK-UP
...and half of the point in most DRM solutions is that the consumer CAN'T make backups. Because in copyright-holder-speak, backups are bad.
RULE #2 SEE RULE#1
Just because ITMS lets you do it doesn't mean anybody else will.
Sure, there's some technologies that have died due to legislation, just check out: http://www.eff.org/endangered/list.php
If I buy a music track I realize I'm purchasing a license of use. But if that use includes copying a CD to my computer and my MP3 player then so be it. The moment I distriute that track to someone other than myself would be a violation of the DRM in my view.
On the flip side of that, the industry needs to do something about the outrageous pricing for digital music. At $1.00 a track you're not really saving anything but the time and fuel necessary to go out and buy the whole disc, along with songs you may not necessarily like.
But I'd be willing to pay say, $5.00 a month to download all I want. A subscription service if prefer. Actually I like the fee applied to all broadband accounts. That way I could download a track, share it with a friend, etc. and the artists still get paid.
We won't ever see anything that makes that much sense though.
I won't buy DRM protected content - not because of my wearines sof the DRM, but because of my sheer hatred for the RIAA / MPAA. These anti-free-speech-NAZI-Bastards have attacked my free speech, shut down my political web sites, and sued me for running Linux (because "anyone who did not pay for their operating system is a pirate!)
I will never pay for software again. I run open source, and am switching several local colleges with me. (It's amazing what an aqgitating adjunct can do.) May thousands of students will graduate knowing everything about Open Office, and knowing nothing about "Microsoft Office" (whatever that is.)
I will never pay Holly-Weird to see their movies. I don't have a TV set. It's a war - and if I had a nuke, I'd gladly give my life as the world's firt nuclear suicide bomber.
(back to my quest to destroy the copyright NAZIs)
Andy Out!
...and I will actively avoid it.
I have a large collection of OGG files, all ripped from CDs or DVDs that I own. I don't share these with others, but I do want to use them myself in any way I see fit.
I suppose that I have DRM on the DVDs that I have bought, but that's not a big deal thanks to Jon Johanssen, so I too can watch my DVDs on my Linux box.
I'm not a big consumer of media, so avoiding DRM-enabled stuff isn't a big handicap for me. But avoid it I do.
By the way, does anyone know of a portable music player with the following specs: OGG compatible (don't care at all about other formats), 1GB flash storage, USB Connection with Mass Storage drivers (so no need to use any weird apps to trasfer files), cost less than about $100? Oh, and the Moon on a Stick too, please.
I can get something like this in the UK, but it's MP3 only.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
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It's not that DRM is inherently evil, just inherently flawed.
If you want DRM you can't have a Turing Machine. If you can't have a Turing Machine you can't have DRM... or any else computable.
The only reason I like computers is that they're "Universal Computing Machines", so DRM is not only asinine, but very boring.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
I am trying to represent what I predict would be the popular opinion of DRM in the masses....
If I can download a song, move that song to my favorite playback device (portable, computer, home stereo, car stereo, whatever) and play it, then I don't care any further. If some sort of annoying "security thinggie" prevents this, then i'm super miffed.
If the ability to make "mix tapes for a friend" is lost, many will be sad. If songs are really cheap then trading playlists with an "activate this playlist for $8.95 button" would be not quite as good, but at least some sort of substitute.
My point is to provide perspective. The success of DRM will not be determined by a bunch of red-faced-and-screaming slashdotters who know what DRM stands for: It will be determined by what the lazy-I-don't-have-time-for-this masses think of it.
To say that another way: When would we (the slashdot audience) accept DRMs? Answer: It doesn't matter. Ours is the "educated" opinion (although I use that term somewhat loosely seeing how extreme and uncompromising the opinions posted here are), and thus, the huge minority.
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I am not a crook. DRM is based on the fundamental assumption that we are all dishonest, that *I* am dishonest, and that the author of a work won't give it to me until s/he has a way of controlling me. I have music that I got thirty years ago. It is still playable. During the cassette era, I made cassette tapes of my collection; during the CD era I made CDs. Now I have MP3s. I've made a few anthologies of favorites to share with a few friends and family. All of this is perfectly legal under "fair use." If DRM had been available for vinyl, my entire collection would be useless today, even though I bought and paid for it. The chances that DRM would survive across 30 years is virtually zero, given the pace of new operating systems, DRM owners going out of business, disk crashes, new compression formats, and so on. When I buy a song, I'm buying the right to use it... forever. Period. I won't accept anyone's assertion that I'm fundamentally dishonest and can't be trusted.
I had no idea the knee-jerk on slashdot was THIS overwhelming. So many people start screaming about personal use, and others scream back about artists and get modded down, and nobody has anything useful to say.
DRM is a form of technology. It is not necessarily poorly done, overly restrictive metadata. It is simply a method by which ownership and rights can be managed digitally.
One form of DRM might be paying a company to give you universal access to your data with authentication. Another might be having the right to have unlimited personal copies of a song that you have paid for the right to listen to. Another is the crippling hardware and software restriction imposed by current DRM-ed music files. They are not all the same thing, and it's stupid to reject any form of DRM because you like to share music with all your friends.
Basic economics dictate that EVERYONE would, at some point, accept DRM given an appropriate price point and enough capability for fair use. EVERYONE. So why not actually think about what benefits would be compelling enough to accept DRM? That was the point of this post, I think...
The problem with mp3 and ogg is not that they are open formats - it's not that "the man" is coming down on you and trying to proliferate Microsoft technology. The problem is that because they are digital formats, they allow for *unlimited* duplication and spreading. If one person buys a song without DRM, that person can send copies of that song millions and millions of time with relatively little effort. That's not a good thing - artists need to make up the costs of producing the song and hopefully make some money to eat food.
The real problem right now is the way the industry is structured, and it's stupid to blame DRM for the record industry. Artists get a maximum of ten percent of album sales (and that's not very likely) and the other ninety+ cents drives up the cost of the product until it's just plain stupid.
So what do we need out of DRM in order to accept it?
-*Limited* transferability so that it is possible to easily share music with friends, but not to share with everyone on the Internet
-First-sale rights so it is possible to sell the authorization to listen to a song to someone else as used
-Unlimited transferability to other devices, modes of data transportation, and formats for painless use in any situation
-Unlimited access to a song when the rights are owned, regardless of location, so that if I am in another country I can get on a computer and listen to my collection if I want to
-A low enough price point to justify the slight limitations imposed by the DRM and ensure that it is always easier to purchase the song than to download it for free
This last point is crucial, and is being attacked by the industry stupidly. Should we drive up the cost of filesharing by pursuing bullshit litigation and circumventing due process of law, or drive down the prices so it's easier to go to XYZ online music store and buy a song than it is to get on i2hub or eDonkey and try to download it? I know, let's give our consumers a big "fuck you!" and force through bullshit legislation to restrict fair use! Hooray!
But seriously, don't be so stupid as to say that DRM is always evil. The current forms of DRM are poorly done and are overly restrictive, making them less appealing than simply using filesharing to infringe on copyrights. But with the right price point, very slight restrictions, and the potential for global scalability of owned rights to listen to songs with more ease and enjoyment than the current system provides, absolutely everyone would prefer to pay and receive a fantastic service than not pay and not receive the benefits of a well-done digital rights setup.
It is the presupposition of DRM technology that people will not do what is right, when given the option. I disagree with this presupposition, and have yet to see compelling evidence from RIAA or the MPAA that given the choice between illegally free and legally available (at a reasonable cost) people will choose the former.
There may be much more music sharing going on today, but I believe all that means is that people are sampling a wider variety of music. It does not flow that if I want to try out more music, that I am willing to pay more per year on it.
I say let people try out the music. Stop DRM'ng it, TRUST your customers, and believe that at the end of the year you'll have made just as much as last year.
(And don't expect to make *more* until the music-industry's 50% margins are more in line with the 5-10% margins on most products)
I would not have a problem with DRM if it worked wherever I wanted it to. If iTMS files worked like a DVD, there would be no issue for me. Also DRM would have to expire along with the copyright, otherwise it would just be bad.
But for Jhymn, I'd never buy from iTMS. But a very acceptable (for me) DRM for eBooks is from http://www.ereader.com/, which used to be Palm Digital Media. Considering books are much smaller in size and costs more than music, I am happy with the DRM offered there. No centralized server that keeps authenticating the client. The "key" is the Credit Card number that was used to buy the book. That, to some extent disallows putting the book in P2P networks. And the client is available for Win32, OS X, PocketPC and Palm OS. They even have an ebook maker software that can convert txt files to eBooks. http://www.manybooks.net/ makes Gutenberg books available in eReader format. That, I say is even less restrictive form of DRM than iTMS, which many consider to be the least restrictive. (The price of eBooks from ereader.com is not much cheaper and some time higher than the dead tree versions. Odd.)
I disagree. In this case the real property and IP are the same. Your friend's experience was enhanced because he got to immediately download and listen to his songs without having to trudge to the store and buy an entire album or two or three. There's no difference between him having lost the music through malware, or having accidentally sat on the various CD's. In either case, he's SOL (accident or not). The fact that we CAN easily backup on-line music is one step better than CD's. Your friend screwed up plain and simple (we've probably all lost "important" files through absence of backups--this is exactly another case). I'm not a proponent of DRM, but I would like to see it somehow transformed into something that allows primarily the purchaser to appreciate the music unrestricted or allows it's easy transfer to someone else. This would be like a physical CD. While I have physical possesion, only I can really appreciate it (whenever, however I want). But if I want to sell or loan-out the CD, I can.
Whenever I can legally do with it exactly the same things I can do with a book, including:
1. After the copyright expires, I can give copies away, or sell them.
2. Sell my copy.
3. Format shift, just like I can scan a book into a text file, and read it off my PDA screen, without loss of quality to the content. Also, I can make backup copies, as many as I need, for my own use, just like I can xerox a book.
4. Fair use copy, i.e. copy and distribute excerpts as allowed by fair use concept in copyright.
Now, I won't ask that it be easy to do all that, just like it's not easy to xerox a book. Just that it be legal for me to do. In other words, if not for DMCA, I would accept any DRM that I can break. With DMCA, however, I won't, because DMCA makes breaking DRM illegal.
Anything you acquire that is encumbered with DRM is only rented, not purchased. I'd accept it for a similar discount level to rental vs purchased DVDs -- 10% of the purchase price. If a DVD costs $20, but that includes the media, packaging, shipping and retail costs that don't apply to electronic delivery, then a reasonable price for an unDRMed download might be $10. And a resonable price for a DRMed version of the same movie would be $1. For music, $1 for a track without DRM and 10 cents with DRM. Apple and Napster are trying to charge purchase prices for rental product.
...at gun point, and even then I'll fight it.
Excuse me, point out the copyright law you're referring to. In all cases I'm aware of, a user is allowed to make archival copies. This was settled years and years ago. Used to be EULA's said absolutely no copying, but then someone pointed out that the mere act of running a program loads a COPY into RAM from whence it's run. EULA's were changed after that, as were many copyright laws.
I will never accept any DRM. But, any DRM that gets in the way of any Fair Use law (Copyright and any other related laws) should never be accepted any way. Some may argue that there is a license involved. But that's not really what the courts have upheld under the principle of "First Sale", which grants the several rights, including the right to be able to transform the media from one medium to another without having to purchase it again. If you really wanted to try and argue that there is a license involved, then you have the problem that there is (a) no license provided with the media (CD, Tape, LP, DVD or other) and (b) no contract provided with it either; either or both of which are required for there to be a license granted. Thus whatever you do with your copy is your right to do (burn it, give it away, etc.). DRM gets in the way of that, and thus will never be accepted. RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, etc, all need to learn that they need to change their business model to over come the issue. (Granted, part of the issue relates to moral and ethical principles that are no longer taught in the US schools; the doing of which would also hinder the issue, but they'd have to wait for the next generation to come of age for it to occur.)
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
"For as long as I can remember, I have had the right to record content I see on TV onto videotape"
:Just because you've been doing it for 30 years, doesn't mean you've been doing it correctly".
Do you think the court case that your indirectly refering to applies to everything else?
"for safekeeping. I have been able to keep files I download from the net (or in older times, BBSs) on my disk and use them forever I want."
As the old saying goes
There isn't a heaving hope in hell I'll ever agree to an approach that is based on labelling me a criminal and trying to curtail what I do accordingly.
;-).
I buy CDs. I borrow CDs but don't keep a copy because I fundamentally disagree with theft - simply because I agree that the creator should get paid. It's especially that reason that pushes me towards buying MP3s because it prevents certain vendors locking market access to creators as with CDs and DVDs.
But by spending the money I acquire the right to listen, and I should be left with the choice through which medium. MP3 and other open formats allow that - DRM won't. And I most certainly don't want any vendor putting an arbitrary timebomb under my paid collection. What is the DRM core key fails? What if the DRM provider goes bust and the keys time out? How would I get compensated? Somehow I don't see any insurance covering such a loss.
As long as I have been looking at Trusted Computing it's been too much focused on Distrusted Clients. I can't invest any "Trust" in something I don't control.
EOR (End Of Rant
Insert
I dont mind DRM, and i dont care if it dosent allow me to copy the stuff as far as it allows me to play the songs i have bought on all the devices i own, irrespective of the company making them.
Its just like if u buy a CD, u can listen to it in your bedroom, home theater, carry it to work, listen to it on the car, take it when ur going on vacation and listen to it in the audio system in the hotel, etc.
I can live with not allowing me to distribute it, but i would definitely like to have the media wherever i go.
"If I buy a cd or a dvd, I am its owner, nobody else."
It is still owned by the copyright holder, not you. You are only paying them for permission to watch it. They still own it.
But what if the piece of media is something I do not own? I'm specifically talking here about rental or subscription services. If the understanding is that the moment I stop paying I don't get to have the media anymore, then I'll be much more tolerant of DRM because I know from the get-go that their control over their media is part of the deal. I'm unwilling to accept that same control over something that I was told I bought, even if the weasel-wording of the contract is that it's more like a permanent lease.
It's no wonder that I patronize XM (think of the fact that it's a black box with analog outputs as a form of DRM), which is a subscription service, and iTunes, whose DRM has been thoroughly 0wn3d.
"Well, that's where market pressures come in. The music industry would be pretty foolish to ignore a high demand for downloadable music."
And letting people spread your content widely without compensation is wiser how?
"If you piss of your customers with DRM, they won't buy it (or resort to less legal routes)."
Well in this day and age of "flexible ethics", most would rather take the "less legal routes", than the much higher route of "not buying". Or to put it another way, if being good was easy, there wouldn't be evil.
"There is no moral argument here, this is simply a market reality. If you don't have a business model that allows for a certain amount of free redistribution of goods (or, analagously, the production of cheap rip-offs in other sectors), you won't make a profit."
The problem is that piracy is the wholesale distribution of free "goods", and no one can make a profit competing with a free version of themselves.
"Nothing about business is easy or a sure thing."
A poor justification for crimminal acts, and much open for abuse. "Nothing in life is easy, or a sure thing [said to an EA employee]"
If they're openly renting it to me, the way the local video store makes no bones about the fact that they're renting me a DVD for a limited time, then I'll accept DRM (provided that the DRM system works on my computers and doesn't impose itself on parts of the system not being used to view that particular content). If they want to have the transaction look and feel like a sale, then they're selling me a copy just like a bookstore sells me a copy of a book and, once the sale's completed, the seller and/or copyright owner should have no more control over that copy than they do the copy of the book I bought.
I've bought some itunes music (before I recognized they're DRMed... oops) because i thought the price is right, thinking that I can put it on a different mp3 player if I wanted to. It was worth it because some of the music that I like takes non-trivial effort to get - online sources tends to have pop music, and I don't really listen to those anymore.
So it was easier for me to buy it from iTunes. However, upon finding that I can't move this music that I had paid for to a different, non-apple mp3 (even though I don't have one), or the fact that there is no known iTunes in Linux and I won't be able to play it if I don't do something to the DRM, the whole prospect all of a sudden looks a lot less appealing.
They just need to wake up and figure that DRM will piss off their customer base no matter what. It locks people into platforms that they don't necessarily use, and the bought content becomes utterly useless.
How much would you pay for a car that could be deactivated at will by the dealer?
Wouldn't it be great if you could make something that everyone wanted, but you can sell it to everyone without spending a dime to distribute it? And then wouldn't it be great if you could make it evaporate so that the same people would have to pay you again and again?
They want to have their cake and eat it too. Who can blame the greedy shits? Greedy greedy greedy greedy greedy. You can copy information infinitely without depleting the source, and each copy can be the source for more. So distribution is free on a massive scale, and then if you could also tap into scarcity value like when you sell something that is a depleting resource the more you sell it... so you get the courts to make that legal fiction work in the markets and KA-CHING!
All of the arguments that people have against welfare and lazy people with their entitlements all apply to corporations and institutions exactly the same way. If you create a system of entitlements, watch the life get sucked out of the business. DMCA is a system of entitlements for corporations who sell DRM. It's just too bad they have to compete against non-DRM. If things that were sold as DRM start behaving unlike non-DRM, watch the Divx history repeat itself.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
I guess my point here is that there is DRM that doesn't prevent you from arciving or even from making a non-DRM copy on CD. I find this very exceptable.
DRM is stupid simply because it's impossible to make it work.
Even if you have DRM-enabled hardware, there's always the "analog hole". And all it takes is one person with some decent analog equipment to recapture the data, and begin distributing digital copies.
If bandwidth keeps getting cheaper, things like Freenet will probably get fast enough to spread digital media. At which point there's no stopping it, short of a full-blown 1984 scenario.
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." - Lord Acton
DRM not only limits your ability to distribute (which is against the law anyway), it "forbids" you from doing what you want with the product you paid for.
there is no correlation between the GPL and DRM BECAUSE you can do whatever you want with GPL'd software, no holds barred, EXCEPT DISTRIBUTE. That's why Google et. al. can make modifications without giving up the source, because they DON'T DISTRIBUTE THE CHANGES. DRM is an entirely different beast, it restricts what you can do with your purchase aside from distribution.
making arguments of this fashion is not only side stepping the issue, it's blatantly ignoring the issue in the first place, it's misleading...
Rise up in the cafeteria and STAB them with your plastic forks!
My threshold for DRM is a normal unencrypted field where a copyright holder and year of copyright may be stored, and an open (patent free) specification for the format, complete enough to implement a working encoder and decoder from.
Any more than that, and I won't buy it, and I won't even download it from P2P if people are stupid enough to encode to it (like WMP format).
Did you mean to?
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
That means: - I can lend it to a friend, not listen to it in the meantime and when I get it back listen to it again - I can copy it onto all sorts of music carriers that don't need adjusting for it, such as mp3, cd, cassette tape and so on, so I can enjoy it in any form and at any place I like to - I can modify the song to my own request - I can reacquire it without payment since I already paid for it - I can choose which songs (not albums, songs) I get - It wouldn't be overly expensive (say, 0.60 per song or something around that) Since this is all pretty impossible to do, I go for the company that sells them without copyright protection software. If they make it possible for me to do these, I will not go around these things. If they make it impossible to do any of these, I'm not going to care much about their copyright (since they don't care about my use right).
I think the heart of the issue is people who want to do something as a hobby and people that have to do something as a job. When I go fix someone's computer or build them a new one thats lost revenue for Best Buy or whatever other company that might have charged for the service I provided. I have another job so I really don't miss that money. If I were doing software development and had to freely distribute my software online then I would have to get another job to pay the bills.
That being said I think existing copyright laws are pretty rediculous. I think most if not all software patents are rediculous. These are areas best fit for trade secret, and if someone else finds a way to do a similar task or create a similar experience that's progress. Perhaps in trying to replicate something a new better process for that or something else is discovered. Especially since technology compounds on itself and 20 years or however a patent lasts leaves the product obsolete by the time it expires. If I had my say, copyright for works of art would be the life of the artist. I'm not sure what would be the best way to deal with arts that were created by a group, because I can easily see companies putting their little kids as contributors so that the copyright will last longer. I think for music could be based on as long as the band is still touring or something along those lines (still very weak).
Another point on the free flow of information. If you were in a band and you wrote a song then some company came along and decided they wanted it to be in their advertisment should you not have the right to decide the use of your work? This is even more important if it's something you don't support. Ex. if you are pro-life and an abortion clinc decides to put your music in the background of their ad or if they use your picture in a pamplet. From an outsiders perspective that implies that you agree with abortion.
Did you really mean to?
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
"The problem with "DRM" is that it will never work. The way to sell content is to make it easily available for anyone to buy at a fair price. Such that buying becomes the "easy option"."
There's no universal definition of "fair price", and any attempts to enforce a fair price (CSS) have been met with resistance. Basically the "fair price" being argued here will lead to the "Wal-Marting" of the content-industry.* A good thing? You tell me what LCD is doing, and ask again? Everyone wants the lowest price possible, but they don't want the consequences of that decision. Do you think LoTR or "The Incredibles" could be made on India's rate of return?
*There's also the little matter of the fact that "copyright violation" ISN'T just movies, books, games. Lower than "fair price" and people still violate copyright.
What happens in 150 years time when copyright lapses on the disk?
At the moment things get released into the public domain every day, DRM vs no DRM is like the church vs the King James bible.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
And now the movie companies are bringing that sort of insulting trash-talk to the big screen as well. Another incentive to get to your seat late.
DRM would make a lot more sense if it were transferrable, much like a physical object is.
When I require an artifical heart, and it requires drm, then I am there. Otherwise forget it.
Get a free ipod.
1) All of the DRM restrictions must be specified clearly before I have to accept them.
2) Once I accept the DRM terms, the terms and the effect of the DRM cannot be changed. By either party.
3) After a specific period of time elapses, the DRM terms expire and any DRM wrappers or encryption are removed. The content becomes completely "DRM-free". This means the DRM implementation can't delete content from my system even if I can't use it anymore, because eventually it will become public domain.
And slightly unrelated to 1-3:
4) I can use any DRM implementation I choose that reliably enforces the terms I agreed to. No locking me into single-source for the implementation that could unilaterally change the rules, violate items 1-3, or do other things I can't trust.
First, it argues that "they" (the recording *sellers*) have rights that we do not have.
Second, it is a slippery slope from buying a recording (with a copyright) to buying a license -- which is ALTOGETHER different.
Third, at what point will it go from a "license" to "control"?
This is the last item that the content producers want as part of law. They want to constrain the public as to what and how it will view, listen, and/or take in it's content.
As it stands now, if I want to give a CD or DVD to a friend that I have decided I don't like, I can. A license, however, can have restrictions on use and even on whether or not I can legally give it away (or sell it at a garage sale!).
And don't believe that the media companies don't understand a bit of this. They WANT total control. We've seen this week that Congress is willing to jump in to private lives to change an outcome they don't like. What is to prevent them from doing so at the behest of Big Media?
Wake up sheeple! Orwell was an optimist!
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
Interesting concept. Kinda funny sounding at face value, of course, but it raises an interesting idea: the fairness of any commercial deal and the equal power of both the vendor and the consumer. Clearly, what "disturbs" a lot of people concerning DRM is that the vendor keeps the upper hand. The deal is not fair, not necessarily in terms of value-for-money (after all, it could be seen as a form of long-term rental thing, as someone pointed out), but in terms of power. It is very clear that whoever has the right to "lock" something you buy has more power than you do. Your only power is not to buy it. True, it is a significant power in your hands, but if people choose not to buy stuff, especially cultural stuff, it's the end of not only an industry but of a big part of our cultural life. Until then, and hopefully that won't happen, DRM is a form of commercial dictatorship.
it is now less aggrevating to rent a movie, rip, remove the annoying 5 minutes of unskippable warnings and previews, and reburn, then just to buy the movie (which i've stopped doing since buying this player).
amazing.
DRM is a misapplication of encryption as such it offers little or no security. Regardless of how strong the encryption algorithm (be it public or private key) the security of the protected connect is based on little more than how well the developer can hide the key.
Normally when dealing with in encrypted content you have a sender, a receiver(s), and an attacker. Both the sender and receiver have the key thus allowing them use the content and keep others (the attackers) from using it. With DRM the receiver is also the attacker. This is like give a stranger the keys to your house and expecting them not to rob you.
DRM keeps honest people honest and does little or nothing to prevent those interested in pirating the content from doing so. I see no reason to accept DRM on content I've purchased. Companies using DRM to prop up rental business models (Napster) should have their heads examined because they're just asking for trouble. I see nothing wrong with stripping the DRM off content I've purchased (not rented), it's certainly not theft.
I would never accept DRM in any product that I perso... an iPod... for me? Wow, I've always wanted one of those! Thanks Dad, what a great gift!
Protect your browser with the Force Safe Search add-on
I would gladly accept any kind of DRM that prevented me from sharing my music with others. I dont care about that. The only thing that I want to do is be able to convert the songs to my format of choice (mp3) and play them on all of my computers (I dont even care about burning CDs). As long as I can play my songs on my main Windows computer, my Archos, my Linux TV media computer, and the Linux box in my car i am satisfied.
first of all - music is a give-away thing. the more people it makes happy, the more wellknown the artist is. from everybody knowing him, coming to concerts etc, you make revenue. that a few people don`t like my music well enough to pay for it - who cares. i myself buy albums only when they really excite me.
DRM - to answer the question - never ever would I like to have those screwjack-n-cat bastard "agent and label"- mafia to have
their hands on the record on the customer side like that. it is more than sufficient if you have to fulfill a number of record deals before you get paid and they bill you crap nonsens in the meantime, and when you get out of the contract, you didn`t make money, nope. capn screwjack-n-cat and his label hand you down a handy bill of say 50k squid per nose - sometimes more - to keep you in business to pay depts.
fuck the record industry, give us stores where a brokerage of 20% goes to the store. If i do checks and balances right, at 80 euro cent per song, i might be rich even as a starter in no time.
screw record industry slavers and their shitty DRM. it keeps people from listening to music. we didn`t need that on a radio, who needs it now ?
copy the stuff. spread the word. pay 20 for my concert ticket, thats where i get the money.
I'd suggest that first there needs to be clarification of what people's legal rights really are. At present, there are a lot of exemptions to copyright law such as the US "fair use" provisions, but most of these only say that you're not guilty of copyright infringement if you make a copy. They don't guarantee you any right to make such a copy, nor require the individual or organisation supplying you with copyrighted material not to inhibit your making of such a copy.
Now, in the days when making a copy was easy for anyone (pretty much anything pre-DRM relative to today's popular media types) that distinction didn't really matter, because it never stopped someone from making a copy legally under the fair use provisions. However, today's DRM is seeking to inhibit making those copies, and further (courtesy of the DMCA, EUCD, and other similar legislation) to prevent the consumer circumventing those inhibitions, effectively blocking that consumer from fair use by the back door. This imbalances the system.
IMHO, before any sort of legal weight (or further legal weight) is given to DRM technologies, there should first be a moratorium to consider what rights (and I mean that this time) consumers should have, which the content supplier may not lawfully prevent them exercising. The right to make a usable back-up copy of any media I purchase such that if I have to replace any hardware I can still access the content in the same way as before might be a sensible starting point. The right to transfer the data to a different media format, but still for personal use by the same individual, might be another reasonable thing to secure in law.
OK, stay with me now... :-)
As soon as we start down that path, it's going to become really obvious that copying for some purposes is reasonable, while for other purposes it defeats the principle of copyright, and it will be very hard for any purely technological solution to distinguish between the two. The closest idea I've seen so far is the limited numbers scheme, where you buy a copy of something and get "five lives" to make copies for back-ups, transfer, etc. Of course, that's somewhat flawed in itself because the number of copies remaining has to follow the content, but the first duplicate and second duplicate can't know how many times the other has been used. You could milk a total of 15 copies out of this scheme if you really wanted to, but at least it's limited, and (if it could ever be done reliably) would prevent mass illegal distribution a la P2P. This seems pretty close to what current approaches to DRM are aiming for.
Of course, if my hard drive really does crash 20 times, I should still have the right to play my content. This is where the current imbalance comes in: there was a post here in one of the recent threads on this subject where someone said after malware took out their system, iTMS support wouldn't give them a means to access the content they'd paid for again. With suitable consumer rights (not copyright exemptions) codified in law, this would be illegal, and it would be incumbent on any organisation producing content in a DRM'd form to provide a free (or at least not-for-profit) and easy-to-use means for consumers to regain access to their content if whatever DRM scheme was in place failed to honour the consumer's legal rights. It would probably also be necessary to place an open copy of the content in escrow somewhere to guarantee that the rights were never unfairly restricted if the supplier folded and took their reactivation scheme with them.
At that point, we'd have a workable system where honest consumers weren't screwed by having to repurchase the same content in new media formats and so on, yet suppliers could still make a fair amount of money (i.e., what the market was prepared to pay) from their content without fear of widespread
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Cus no one every copied a tape before that right?
I guess I start with asking if ANY property right to an idea is acceptable? It goes to the heart of patent and copyright law - if I make something new do I have the RIGHT to restrict its use in any way? I believe the answer is yes....but.
Take the example of a car. I own a Honda. I can resell my Honda and "share" my Honda, rent my Honda, all without having to pay an "Auto Rights Management" Fee. I can even modify my Honda and resell it under a new name (See AMG and Selene). What I can't do is take apart my Honda, copy every part and sell it as an original product. I can design a car, build a car, modify a car, sell a car, share a car, whatever but I cant duplicate my Honda and resell it as an original. This is good protection. I bought a product, I can use it as I see fit as long as I don't try to "steal" the thing that makes it unique. Honda doesn't have to worry about me doing that because there is no profit motive in it but they protect their IP all the same because Kia or GM could copy my Honda and sell it.
I have dishes made by Pfaltzgraff. I have the same right to use, share, rent etc without paying a "Dish Rights Management" Fee. I can buy or make napkins or dish carriers that match them. I can even SELL napkins or dish carriers that match them. What I can't do is copy the design and sell my own dishes. I can make dishes, sell them, share them whatever but I cant shape and paint them exactly like my Pfaltzgraff ones and sell them. Good protection.
All this works great in the atom world and I believe the vast majority of people feel the system works. Because of the ability to make perfect copies, the digital world is a tougher challenge.
I buy a song from iTunes. I am BUYING it. Once I OWN it I should be able to do everything I can with my car or my plates. I should be able to sell it, modify it, share it and even rent it. The key thing here is that it has to be just like my car - one at a time. If my car is rented out, I don't have a "backup copy" that I can use. I would take the car metaphor further. I can put 1 to 5 people in my Honda without paying anymore money to Honda. Once I add the need for a 6th person or need the ability to drive two places, I have to pay Honda another fee (or buy a larger car in the first place!). I should have similar rights with my iTunes song (in fact I do). I have 5 computers so I should be able to play my song on all of them. If I resell my song, I lose the right to play it at all. If I sell my car, I don't get to go to the buyer every day and drive it to work. I should also be able to use it in my own works. Here is where I disagree with most current rights fees. If you something is sold, you lose the right to determine its use. If I use a song I OWN in a movie I make I should not have to pay more for it. A fair price was agreed on and paid. I can use my Honda to make deliveries for a profit without paying Honda. Atom rights. As long as I am not claiming to have made the song myself, the seller has no right to restrict my use of it. This is only an issue in the digital world. GM SELLS cars that are rented without claiming a portion of the rental profits. Blockbuster BUYS movies and rents them without paying a portion of the profit. What I can't do is buy one copy of a song and put it in 10000 copies of my movie. I either have to buy more copies of a song or enter into a NEW agreement on a bulk purchase - just like GM and Blockbuster do. Somehow this is lost on the digital world on both the user and rights holder sides.
I accept any DRM that gives me the same rights I have over my atoms. If I BUY it, I OWN it. I should be able to resell, share, modify, rent and destroy it as I see fit. I should even be able to make a profit off its use as long as I am not making copies that I did not pay for. If I make a movie with a song and I show it and charge admission I should be able to do that without paying anything to the song owner (deliveries in my Honda). I still physically posses the thing I p
Snip another "sob story".
Tell me do you expect we would get a lot of sympathy if say the IT contract with our boss wasn't everything we wanted it to be? Everyone would all ask (especially in this day and age), why we didn't go in prepared? Is it because there's no information available? Is it the responsability of the one whom your signing a contract with to do all your homework for you?
"How can you care about a business that whole goal in life is to screw everyone they come in contact with?"
I don't care about a business. I do however care about not pretending the world is something it isn't. Do you think that the used car dealer is looking out for your interests when you buy a car from him? If you come up with a new patent, and sell in to GE? Who's interest do you think their looking out for?
"You sir,Are a dumb@ss."
And you sir, are the worst kind of naive. The gulible kind..
And why should we want to buy such an extremely limited license, when our parents, and even our grandparents, got a better deal by purchasing the physical medium?
My first reaction to the question of accepting DRM enabled media, is never. You can have my mp3's when you pry them from my cold, dead hard drive.
But then, thinking about it, I don't have a problem with DRM so much as the concept of value. The problem with most companies, is they want to sell me a lesser quality version of what I could previously purchase, at the same price. I don't mind having a copy of movie that might self destruct at any moment, but I would only pay about the same cost as it takes to rent such a movie at a video store, rather than the $20-$30 that most movies cost on DVD. My thinking is that a DRM movie is really just 'rented', and it isn't mine to shift as I wish. So, I think the problem isn't DRM, but the expectation of compaines that media with DRM is as valueable as media without it.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
1. If the DRM is weak enough that I can bypass it with modest effort but it's too onerous for large-scale abuse... something to encourage honesty, the equivalent of "rot13" or putting "nospam" in your email address. For example, burning a CD and then ripping it.
2. If the DRM only applies to a system that's cheap enough I can throw the whole system (software and hardware) away without worrying about the cost. Say, if you bought an album and you got a durable epoxy-potted MP3 player with the music in it, for the equivalent of a couple of bucks.
3. If it's more expensive, but the DRM operated as an escrow, say I bought the epoxy-potted MP3 player and it had a timer in it so that it'd start giving me the raw data after 17 years (or some reasonable compromise between copyright and fair use) and it cost me the equivalent of a popular CD now.
If I could copy.
If I could use my property on any and every device I cared to.
If I could re-sell.
If the digital content was in an open (or at least well-understood) format.
As a consumer: I am willing to rent DRMed content, be it a monthly subscription, pay per view or time-limited. I want the service to make economic sense to me, which in practice requires a working market on such services.
Besides a consumer, I also like to consider myself a creator. At least I have knowledge and experience that I wish to cash in on at some point. I don't see myself having much qualms enforcing contracts or licenses with DRM.
Granted that my single man operation won't have quite the social impact of the multi-national media empires of today and tomorrow, but there you have it.
--Flam
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
I would only accept DRM on files that are given to me for free.
I'm much more willing to accept "analog" DRM. That is to say, I'll buy a vinyl record long before I'll buy an itunes song.
So let's review. I buy something, its mine, without restriction. You give it to me for free, well, restrict it however you want, it was free.
I have no problem for paying for digital music files. But I have a big problem not being able to bring it to future PCs or various MP3 players or whatever other device I want.
If I'm renting for a limited time, I'll accept limitations, but not if I'm buying a "perpetual use" copy. When I rent a DVD at Blockbuster I don't transfer it to VHS just so I can play the tape, but if I buy the DVD I may do just that.
:(.
Of course, this assumes I have a choice in the matter. If it's something I *need* then I am behind the proverbial 8-ball and will take the information in whatever way I can get it
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The music and movie industry has turned the "fair
use" clause of copyrighted media on its ear. If
I buy a book or magazine, I own that copy of the
book or magazine (but not the copyright). I can
strip each page out of the book, OCR the contents,
and have an entire bookshelf worth of books on
my computer, if I wish. Doing that with a leather
bound first edition would not be a smart thing to
do on my part, because there can be an intrinsic
value beyond the contents attached to that book.
The contents have been converted from an "analog"
into a "digital" format that I might find more
useful. Or I could take that book or magazine to
a used bookstore, donate it to a public library,
or give it to a friend. Neither the copyright
nor the media itself precludes me from doing
that, unlike DRMed software or music or films.
If I purchase IP under such onerous restrictions,
it is no longer a purchase of media, but only
a limited "right to use" license, no better than a rental.
Considering the state of EULAs that place no guarantees
on the quality, merchantability, or fitness of S/W for
"any particular purpose", it is no wonder that the
quality of commercial software has become so degraded.
Why would I purchase a limited "right to use" license for a
painting or for a song or for a movie? With DRMed
songs or movies, I have relinquished my right to sell,
donate, or give away that property. With such a
restriction of my rights, the **AA still
wants to charge me very nearly as much as my
ownership of the media, while I give up my right
to treat it like property.
DRMed IP has stripped me of my rights even further
than onerous EULAs tied to installation keys. The
S/W publishers have, in essence, labeled me as a
thief, while in reality their EULAs increasingly
express exactly how bad their S/W is when they
claim "no particular fitness". Why should I give
the **AA any of my money, based upon the general
trend in the quality of digital IP?
Are you suggesting that analog copy protection was a realistic and affordable possibility for the music industry prior to the release of compact discs? LOL.
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Posting as AC for obvious reasons. In many countries copyright used to mean prohibiting copying for commercial purposes (i.e. charging money for the copies). Now it means artificial scarcity in the era of the internet, which, I think, is ridiculous. Society no longer needs the service of the publishing companies. They must retire, or reform. And they *are* reforming - lobbying for new laws, treating customers as consumers, pushing DRM, etc. Looks like we *did* evolve from those telephone hygienists.
Anything that hinders the proliferation, re-invention and reuse of culture gets a big thumbs down from me and I don't buy into the monopolies being good even when sanctioned.
I just don't see any benefit.
The good news is that there is almost nothing under DRM that I actually want. Almost every author or musician that has something worth saying understands that the personal rewards of DRM are far less than the cost to society. In addition, I don't feel any need to financially support any author, musician, or software publisher that is working from the assumption that I am just
1) A criminal
2) Another sheep to be fleeced
So we can both do just fine without each other.
If you watch DVDs, you're already accepting DRM (unless you're using DeCSS or a hacked player). Personally, I'm not too bothered about this, because I don't want to watch most movies more than once and so only rent (not buy) DVDs. But I'd never accept DRM on CDs, for example.
DVDs shows us that DRM has three purposes:
1. Preventing copying. This is what the industry focuses on. It limits both "piracy" and some kinds of fair use.
2. Preventing interoperability. This is the really bad thing about DRM. If you want to watch any DVD at all, you need to pay the DVD consortium a license fee or use DeCSS. This license fee is included in the cost of DVD players, but not always PCs: If you buy a new PC with a DVD drive, you can't actually watch DVDs unless you also pay the DVD consortium's license fee.
3. Reducing functionality. This is the thing that motivates people to break DRM. DVDs have several annoying examples, including region coding and unskippable commercials.
It's not that at all! I don't have a problem with licencing use of a movie on physical media and I don't have a problem with licencing use of a car.
Both of those transactions are called "rental." I can go to Blockbuster and rent a movie for a few bucks for a few days. I can rent a car for a few years and when I return it, it's not mine anymore.
No, I don't have a problem with renting, or licencing if you prefer. BUT when I licence something instead of buying it, I expect to get it for less. Go see a movie or rent one at Blockbuster -- about $5.00. Buy a DVD, about $20. If I shell out for music, say, from iTunes, and what I'm paying is about the same as I'd pay for the CD, I expect it to be DRM free. DRM reduces the value of what I get. If the price is not correspondingly reduced, it's a bad deal.
Now, if iTunes songs go at 1/2 the price of a non-DRM CD, then perhaps we've got a deal... I'd still rather buy the CD, but there should exist some price point for each individual where the DRM option is preferable (so sayith the laws of economics).
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
There is already plenty of law that can be used to bring pirates to justice and regain lost compensation.
DRM is the 'easy' way out for the media business - if they can lock up everything, then they don't have to pay lawyers to enforce their rights.
However the side effect of the DRM approach is that it tramples on the rights of people to gain fair use of copyrighted material for teaching, for personal archiving and any other non-infringing right accorded by legal precidence.
Of course, businesses would love to control all of the media on your devices - even the media you yourself have created. That way you have to pay them for their hardware and software to view anything and everything - another 'Microsoft Tax' in the making.
Just say NO to DRM of any kind. It doesn't work, and it ends up making criminals out of hobbyists - when the lawyers should be spending their time doing real investigations of the real criminals instead.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Musical content, works of art, etc. The person who creates these things should have control of how they are distributed. If they want DRM, let them have it. The notion of unrestricted access to everything is simply going to wash out any incentive for creating "works of art" of whatever format. Credit is important. Even financial credit.
Development tools should be free. The GPL is way to ensure that we all have the freedom to be creative, and to get credit, and even reimbursement in some cases...
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. -- Mark Twain
None might be a too simple answer, but somehow I feel like this. I do not believe that it will work to my needs. ... but not for the price they are sold at the moment...
Please industry, change your business model. If a good CD would cost 10 and a good DVD around the same price I would be much more interested in buying them and download/copy them less. There are many CDs I have copied which I rather would like to own as a original
Sorry.
The best thing about music these days is the ability to search and find that song you used to know long ago. There are ways to get around drm and you don't need programs for it. To me I just like to use my music personally and be able to burn as many copy's as me need. So what's the big deal! buy some blank cd's. Solve yer issue. I like being able to dl music a lot too and *if* we couldn't dl music legally anymore I might cry. And freakin put on some classical and RELAX!
I honestly don't have a problem with the idea of DRM. I understand that when I purchase copyrighted material, I'm not actually transfering ownership of what I'm purchasing. My biggest concern with DRM is that the things I am licensing may become unavailable to me for whatever reason. Say I purchase a DRM'ed WMA file. Now say that my computer explodes mysteriously and I have to purchase a new one. Even though I may have backed up my previous data, this new DRM'ed file may be of no use to me if the one who provided the file for me is no longer in existence. I don't like that.
If there must be some form of DRM, I'd rather see it be in the form of watermarking, so publishers can punish those who distribute the works they've licensed to other people. Of course, you do run into issues where someone's computer may have been hacked.
Ultimately, the works are already floating around in an illegal fashion. I guess I don't see the point of DRM anyway. The purpose of DRM is to stop you from copying the file in some manner so you can't share it with others. Since people already have access to unencumbered media files, and probably will forever, there just doesn't seem to be a point to the whole thing.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
I want to be able to download and save video I view on the net. Web sites don't stick around forever, and if you see something cool, there's no guarantee it'll be there tomorrow. Therefore, I want to be able to save it.
So, according to your logic, you should be able to go to a Movie theatre and view the film as many times as you like for the price of one ticket?
If you only want to watch it once, go to the theatre or rent it for a week. If you want to watch the movie as many times as you want, buy the DVD when it comes out. Can't wait till the DVD comes out? Too bad, because the world would be a much different place if you didn't have to wait for anything.
So, why not release DVD for movies when they're also in theatres? Because that's where a lot of the money comes from, and believe it or not, but a lot of these studios are businesses, making money is one of their priorities.
Right now enough people go to the theatres to make the decision Profitable, maybe if enough people decide to wait for the DVD, that will change.
Accepting DRM isn't an option.
DRM is an extension of a Copyright system that, fundamentally, cannot succeed in the digital realm. There's the implementation problems revolving around controlling copying rights (seriously, without massively invading the life of every human being, just how do you expect to enforce 'digital copying rights'?). Deeper than that, there is the problem revolving around what digital means.
It's a number folks. Seriously, it's a number. If you superficially grant someone copying rights over a number, then you'd better give them copying rights over them all.
Example: Digital copyrights are given to Bob over the number 1234. Bob retains all copying rights to the number 1234. Sue 'copies' 1234 when she puts 1000 + 234 on her website. Bob sues Sue for copyright infringement.
You can see where this is going? Sure it's a slippery slope, but it's a valid one. Why? Because if Bob can own the copyright to 1234, but can't sue Sue for having 1000 + 234, then copyright becomes trivial to circumvent.
To prevent this circumvention Bob will need to acquire the ability to sue Sue for putting any combination of numbers on her page that could be construed in any way to result in Bob's number 1234. Sure you can talk about intent and how Bob can only sue Sue if it can be shown that she intended to infringe on Bob's copyrights, but that can be difficult at best to show.
Anyways, IANAL, and this is just my musing on the digital copyright farce and its children DRM.
Can you invest in an enterprise and make a profit from doing so with copyrights in place?
Not necessarily. If you are starting an independent music publisher, then how do you plan to make sure that your songwriters aren't inadvertently copying songs that they had heard on commercial radio over a decade ago? George Harrison got in trouble for subconscious copying when he started Harrisongs Music.
Indeed, the more arbitrary monopolies you allow people to make for themselves, the easier it is to create opportunities for that investment.
But once you allow enough monopolies, then just about every possibility will become monopolized, leaving no room for further entry. You might want to read a combinatoric analysis or a fictionalized account of how it could happen.
people that share music illegally are the ones that have stuffed it up for the rest of us. Big companies are not blameless, but to take your copy, and then pass a copy of it to anyone else is just theft, it breaks any reasonable definition of 'fair use'. so the way that we are being policed is DRM. Thanks Napster (and the others) for giving us the tool to shot ourselves in the foot.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I could live with DRMed content if the price vs. limitations tradeoff were acceptable to me. And that would also mean different models for different kinds of content.
For movies I'd accept a rental-style license: I pay for a given movie and have, say, 3 days to watch it, limited to one device (e.g. my laptop to which I downloaded it). That's OK, I only watch most movies once.
With music, I could rent it first to listen and decide if I like it. But for the stuff I really like, I'd have to be able to have access to it for life, from any place, any device I choose. Or at least have a yearly subscription (my taste does change with time).
These are just examples. Yes, I can accept this kind of limitations, because I don't have to own everything and forever. A lot of content I only need temporarily.
As long as the system is flexible depending on your needs for a specific piece of content, it won't be that bad. The real problem is, what if they decide to "de-authorize" a product, e.g. because they have remixed the album? (Example: Tangerine Dream's "Tyger". Good luck buying the original mix, with original artwork.)
Nobody owns the actual song. Someone may own the copyright to the song, but that is just ownership of temporary government sponsored monopolistic rights
Anybody who still believes that copyright is temporary has not taken Eldred v. Ashcroft into consideration.
you give someone cash in exchange for a DVD and there is no signed contract
Until the publishers start instructing retailers not to take cash in exchange for copies of copyrighted works, to permit purchases of DVDs only with check, debit, or credit, just as publishers have instructed retailers to exchange a returned opened copy of a work for an opened copy of the same work. Then you have a signed document stating "I agree to pay the card issuer, and I agree to the EULA posted in the store."
cool, I'm going to do this too.
Thnx
Never. I never have and never will. Period. Next article, please.
P'sha to the arbitrary laws of men
-Socrates, updated for 2005
You see, the point of having a discussion on the ethical/financial standpoint of copyright laws is to porpose how they ould be more moral/just for all. This includes both the content creators, distributors, and customers. Currently, the market is HEAVILY slanted in favour of the true middlemen (the record and production companies who take creative content, mark it up thousands of percent, and sell it to us poor CD/DVD buying saps). This is unsurprising considering the relative financial, and thus political, standing of the parties involved.
Ergo, if we are to view this mark-up as unethical, we ought not be constrained by what IS "legal". Instead, we should be discussing what OUGHT to be legal. If, as is likely, DRM will be used to facilitate such immorality, it should matter what impact it's rejection will have on "legal" downloading sites (iTunes, Napster-to-go, etc.). In DRM's absence, the above mentioned middlemen may be forced to accept certain digital freedoms. When/if that happens, lawmakers will follow suit. After all, the laws of a land are supposed to reflect the ethics of those residing in that land, aren't they?
Without eyes there is no light and no darkness.
Additionally, what constitues unauthorized reproduction (in reference to those ominous FBI warnings everyone is so fond of) is defined in legal code and is not the purview of a company's policy, or more applicably, the psuedo-legalmumbojumbo often seen present on retail media, or in marketing media. All that stuff is just various types of FUD, plain and simple. The biggest farce to hit the IP scene was in the form of licensing a la Microsoft. All it really is is a gentleman's agreement that they won't sue you for not buying multiple copies of their software so long as you pay up for what they deem said software to be worth (think VAR licenses). Don't get me wrong, they're useful as hell. But given the past 20 years of legal precedents, federally speaking, licensing is pure bunk. Now at the State level that's different. Some States have in fact held licenses as legally binding contracts, so YMMV in that sense.
(Devil's Advocate)In most circumstances a minor cannot enter into a legally binding contract with an adult without parental consent, so what happens in the event a minor should buy a copy of a game, software, or other Intellectual Property?(/Devil's Advocate)
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
The Line must be DRAWN HERE if we accept any at all you can kiss that whole thing known as open standards good bye.
,do unto others, and in my book drm fits thats nicely
Even if the alternative is piracy then so-fuckin-be it,
We gotta be pragmatic about this because it's only what happens in the real world that really matters.
There are two ways the content companies are going to go with: either you deal with DRM'd content or they'll go to every step possible to make sure their content can't get on your computer without violating the DMCA.
All the rest of the arguments are academic discourses on civil liberties. Unfortunately, the record labels have the civil liberty to not release their creative works digitally.
The license, even if/when you hit "I accept" may not even be valid under contract law since the software company did not concede anything in exchange for your rights at that time. They didn't conceed a copy of the software - you already had that.
And that's where the DRM comes in. When you put cash on the counter at Best Buy, you became the Owner Of A Copy of an encrypted software installer. The publisher is willing to decrypt and install the software only in exchange for your agreement to a second contract presented by the installer, and because the software is encrypted, installing the software without going through the "I Agree" screen is circumvention of access control in violation of 17 USC 1201(a), which was enacted as part of the DMCA. Sure, you can choose not to accept the second contract, but then you have a $300 coaster, and this fact was duly noted on the box.
Well you see my player has this nifty button called "Next Chapter" and another one called "Menu". I've watched disney dvd's, and lots of other dvd's. Worst case, I can't skip the copy warning, but I've always been able to skip all previews by either hitting menu to go straight to the menu, or hitting next chapter to skip through each preview.
Some players either by default or through modified firmware will ignore all such restrictions, but in my experience it's extremely rare for a dvd to lock you out from skipping the opening previews.
... I did paint the picture, carve the sculpture, and draw the sketch. You can buy it if you want to, and you own it for all time. You can do whatever you like with it except claim that you produced it. You can resell it for a huge gain over the original investment (if you're lucky), destroy it, or give it away for free. I have no more control. How did it come to be that my art form is a product, and other art forms are temporarily licensed?
No incumbents, not no where, not no how.
Vote them out every term.
Well you see my player has this nifty button called "Next Chapter" and another one called "Menu".
Push "Next Chapter" and get a Ø. Push "Menu" and get a Ø. Now what?
but I've always been able to skip all previews by either hitting menu to go straight to the menu, or hitting next chapter to skip through each preview.
Watch there be five previews on the same disc, all of which you have to press "Next Chapter" to skip individually; pressing "Menu" gives you Ø. This is the case with Paramount/Playskool's Weebles: Welcome to Weebleville.
As of Apple and their lame fix, They cosed nothing. They will "close it" when someone will find a cheap and fast way to encode ad-hoc drm'd audio files for realtime delivery serverside, as fast as those clear generic (cheap) ones.
God luck Apple.
I actually started a _small_ record label (6 active bands) for this exact reason - I was tired of seeing bands get screwed over. The general public knows nothing of what really goes on behind the scenes in production of an LP/CD or exactly how bad bands get screwed.
Perfect example: With recording, mastering, CD production, and printing - I can put out 1000 CDs @ $1.74USD each. We are as small as it gets - only 6 bands, two active people working on projects, and only 829 results on google. With only two releases under our belt we are a little nobody punkrock label that very few people outside the Tampa Bay area has ever heard of. If I can do it at $1.74USD per CD I know for a fact any "major" label can do it much cheaper. (Yes, I have factored in costs of distribution. I have world-wide distribution at my disposal, it's cheaper then you might think.)
One of the most active bands on my label decided that they wanted to sell every new CD they make for $5 each, then when they release something new they put the old CD on the net in mp3 format for free. Their fans have the option of downloading every track on the CD for free (DRM is never an option for our digital releases) and burning it OR they can pay $5 for a CD with the printed lyrics, pictures, and other info you would typically see in a CD insert.
The majority of fans choose to do both - have the music on their computer AND purchase a CD. They know the price is fair as it's easy to see we are not out to make money off the band by charging $15 to $20 for $1.74 worth of "work".
Fans generally want to support the band they like but at the same time they don't want to get ripped off. I guarantee that if you ask any member of a band on my label how they feel about working with us they will have nothing negative to say about how we do things. Music is the most important part to us, not making money - when the bands see that and the fans see that everyone is happy.
If the major record labels were to drop the CD/LP prices by 50% piracy would drop significantly. While the public might not know about the record labels and what happens to the bands, they DO know when they are getting ripped off.Any major label could do the same as I do if they were more worried about music then money, we all know that will never happen.
The bigger issue is that DRM just plain does not work. DVD Jon has already cracked it again.l ech_joha nsens_p.html :(
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/22/jon_
Unfortunatly, the link to his blog does not seem to work.
When I own the unlock code, and I can use it forever without further involvement of the licensor, the distributor, etc., then I have no problem with it. I'd prefer it not have to be this way, but books and the like are not significantly different than this, so I can accept it.
When I have to hit their server to unlock it, or when they can withrdraw my license at any time for any reason without compenstion to me, or when I cannot do whatever I please with the unlock code I own, then I have problems with it.
Of course, I always have problems when they try to use it to enforce restrictions on what I can do with the content. I have to accept this with DVD movies, but the disks continue to work for a long time (except my Fantasia 2000 one :-), players are easy enough to come by, any manufacturer's player will do, and I can even copy the files on the disk to my hard drive for later playback with some software players. The fact that I cannot copy the files and give them away is not a big limitation to me -- it is neither legal nor ethical to do that anyway.
... when they glue it into my cold, dead hands.
That is all.
If I can download a DRM laden free tv show I'd probably do it, assuming I wanted to see it of course.
DRM laden episodes of CSI free and ready to download and watch? Sure I'll grab it and forego the torrents/etc. Free downloads of a band I like except what I download is DRM filled? Sure that's cool, I mean I'm not paying MONEY so beggars can't be choosers.
If I pay for a song, a show, a movie, I want to be able to do whatever "I" want to with it, I'm not going to give it away, share it over p2p or none of that crap but I might want to burn a dvd, copy it to another PC, put it on VCR, etc etc, I don't want any hampering on that level if I PAY for it.
DRM filled rentals? maybe, just maybe.
--- www.f-theocean.com
When Would You Accept DRM?
When there will be no other choice (i.e. no content without DRM plus being forced by I do not know who or what to see/hear/... some content). I hope that means "never".
what DRM would you accept as a consumer?
None. But in market reality that means "the less, the better". So if "free market" is working that means I should be able to get reasonable content for reasonable price without any DRM. Why should I pirate content if it is more conveniet to get some legally in better quality for acceptable price? And if that works alsmost for everybody, that means almost nobody would be pirating so why wasting money, time and nerves on DRM?
or do you feel that DRM in any form is ridiculous?
Yes, I do. It's like saying "all your base belong to us.". Or like saying "for us you are just a thief".
And ussualy it's also like saying "we are fat lazy gyus, we want to make a lot of money from you and while we feel like you are not paying us enought we want to at least make your life more miserable so you can think about it twice and give us more money so *maybe* we stop torturing you".
hany
That's 100% the right attitude. The wrong (aka "typical slashdot idiot") attitude is "all DRM is evil." The right attitude is "i weigh the amount of DRM vs the price, and make a buying decision based on that."
Bravo for some (un)common on slashdot common sense.
How much you're willing to pay. Sooner or later companies are going to figure out *again* that selling at the right price basically eliminates piracy. It happened with VHS movies. It happened with software (anyone else remember how Borland started?). If you can get a perfect copy of a song, first try, at a great sample rate, with terrific download speed, and a simple payment method from a easy to use Sony.com, why would you even bother trying to get it P2P? Sony and the like just aren't ready to face yet what this means about the true value of their product and stock.
-The content is priced reasonably
-I can put it on as many computers as I want
-I can burn it to CD/DVD, and do what I want with that copy
-I don't have to jump through hoops to do any of this
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
The thing that amuses me are the number of people who are saying "Never Accept DRM!!!!" yet have been playing games like NWN or WOW for years. I know this isn't everyone who dissents to DRM (and notice I said _like_) and I actually admire those folks who state a strong opinion and stick to it in every way.
The biggest battle is always "want" over unhappiness about the methods of the company
True Story: My NWN:HOTU disc got really banged up due to a faulty CD/RW drive, so I called Atari to get the media replaced. Atari's response: We don't replace media, and if you want to keep using your game, buy another copy. You don't actually own the game, just the copy you licensed from us, and your EULA says so! I was then told I should try to get it from eBay as it would probably be cheaper that way.
My options: grab a crack, or buy a new disc. While I did the first for a while, I had serious issues playing the way I wanted to play, so had to be the b*tch and get another copy. The only reason I did is that I didn't want to stop playing that particular game. It did, however, make me vow never to get hooked on another Atari game, and to never actually buy another Atari game. Who knows, I might even admire myself one day and stick to that.
The GPL places legal restrictions on your rights to redistribute, while DRM places restrictions using hardware and/or cryptographic measures. The latter necessarily restricts certain end use as a side effect; it was turned to reluctantly after it was found that laws and social norms against piracy were found to be grossly insufficient. So it's not really possible to make a comparison between the two.
The real point, of course, is that the consensus on slashdot seems to favor defining digital rights in a way that abrogates the ability of music and movie copyright holders to restrict free copying, while at the same time pushing for vigorous enforcement of copyright law against GPL violators. It takes intellectual contortions to take these positions simultaneously but when those in favor outnumber those opposed by about 10-1, then this act of intellectual dishonesty goes unnoticed.
1) Major players in these industries take a huge and immediate hit to their stock value.
Currently working for a fortune 500 company, I've seen first hand what happens when a company doesn't hit its stock targets... the board gets a little edgy, which leads to
2) Huge reorganizations and upheavals in said companies to "improve their cost structures", "shift paradigms", huge losses, high expenses, reorganizations, and layoffs.
Now, I'm not saying that (2) above is necessarily bad, because it opens up the workplace again and increases competition. My point is that these companies which are behind DRM have invested mega big bucks in it, and removing it 'just like that' is completely unfair to them, their employees, and investors (and if you have any kind of retirement plan or mutual fund, you, dear reader, are likely an investor).
I'm in favor of something other than DRM, but I don't see a clean way to get away from it now without hurting real people. DRM might suck, but as a wise mentor once taught me, if you want to get things fixed, rather than just complain, come back with a proposal to fix the problem. I don't see a solution here, but I'm not industry expert.
There must be a win/win out there somewhere. Who's going to be the genius that discovers it?
In Soviet Russia, us are belong to all your base.
I doubt people rejected Divx (or whatever the Circuit City proprietary DVD was called) because they insisted on preserving their right of first sale. Most people have no idea what right of first sale is, even if they leverage it when they buy used media at stores and garage sales. Without evidence supporting the assertion, arguing that consumers are working to preserve isn't convincing.
I would be much more likely to buy an explanation that jibes with what I hear from consumers (and jibes with what I'm seeing multinational corporations teach consumers). For example, incompatibilities with their everyday lives, sort of like the lame reasons why people reject e-books: computers aren't portable and cheap like paper, they can't be read as easily in all the conditions in which one reads a paperback book, and so on. I call these reasons "lame" because they are so easily addressed (and thus resistence is so easily undermined) by sufficiently advanced technology. The more interesting and important issues have to do with the law (right of first sale, as you brought up, for instance) and ethics (how should we treat one another?).
I should add that I'm not saying any of this to stifle any attempt to educate the public about more important reasons to critically examine DRM or related efforts in "trusted computing" attestation ability. We need more people talking about what to look for when old ideas are transferred to new technology (reading books on computers instead of bound paper volumes, listening to music on portable digital audio players instead of carting around playable media, etc.).
Digital Citizen
Honestly I have nothing against DRM iff it's done properly. Basically as long as DRM protections are patent-free, it can be good. It means every artist can sell his songs without the burdain of being sold by a major.
:) :) :)
Sure some DRM protected song could be only rents. And some wouldn't be. Most of the songs I download and listen are just listened out of curiosity. If a song is sold over the internet in an open drm format for a fixed number of listening its price will automatically adjust to what it's worth. How many CD's covered by dust do you have exactly ?
If you don't LIKE being restricted don't yell at the DRM, it's just a fair mean of protection, juste buy the more-expansive unlimited number of listening version.
Reading the thread I find that many peoples just keep repeating: I want to OWN the song do whatever I want, it's MINE etc...
It's very funny because 30 years ago you guys would basically be against the very notion of ownership
Disclaimer: Nooow my vision of DRM might be a little idealistic and I do think that the people setting it up right now are actually evil, but DRM per se is not bad.
One note on an otherwise appropriately-moderated fine post -- please don't honor the concept of "voting with one's wallet". It is meant to sound like democracy in action, but it is actually just the opposite of democratic control.
In a democracy, everyone gets one vote. Voting with one's wallet means rich people get more "votes" than poor people (who may get no vote at all). Hence, voting with one's wallet is a means of reinforcing the power of the rich to regulate how culture will be used by everyone else.
Digital Citizen
Copyright lapsing?? That's silly! Everyone knows copyright lasts forever!
Seriously, though...I think it's obvious from the Copyright Act of 1976 plus the Bono act, that Congress will let the likes of Disney buy a new copyright term extension act every twenty years. Most of the public are such sheep they won't even notice what's going on...watching the news would interfere with watching "American Idol" or "MTV's Cribs."
I will never accept DRM in any form. I would rather do without the DRM's materials than subsidize monopoly capitalists with even one cent. This should be the standard response of all who are offered these shakedowns. No matter how 'cheap' these 'downloads' are, the products are not really offered but rented on onerous terms. The correct response should be to only buy complete products that have a physical form, not a 'download', nor a disk based product that is imcomplete and needs a kind of 'key' or 'authorization' or 'activation' or some such BS. Windows XP and recent EA games, and Vivendi the movie makers' sock puppet Sierra and its recent game 'Half Life 2 needing the 'steam' system are all examples of retail cheating and disclaiming.
All products should be subject to the Irish sale of Goods Act which is specifically disclaimed by name in many of these 'product's' "warrantees".
I will *NEVER* use DRM in any form for music under any circumstance. I'd rather have no music than be forced to use DRM.
...quicker, easier, more seductive the darkside is...but more powerful, it is not.
I'd just like to point out that there are many ways around DRMs that they will never be able to stop, such as using Goldwave to record a MP3 off your stereo out (if your soundcard can support it, you won't even have to buy a male to male cable and go through anaglo) while playing it in iTunes, or, in the case of a DRM video, use your video out and record to the video in of the same or a different computer. I know the video work around is not really practical, but it would work, and there will never be a way to stop people from doing it. If they do develop software that can detect it is being sent to another output, get a VGA -> TV scan converter and tape it, or record it from the scan converter to a dvd recorder via s-video. If all that fails, you could record your monitor on a video camera. They will never ever be able to get around that. DRMs suck, and if you support them by buying DRM media you are just asking them to DRM everything. I still use soulseek and download torrents of albums, and I do NOT consider this stealing, the RIAA has had their day, now it is our turn.
I buy a movie with an expiration date every time I go into the cinema. (D)"RM" consists of the guy who will at first politely and then forcefully tell you to put your damn video camera away.
Except at a movie theater you're not "buying" a movie, you are renting a seat in a building, and in return they entertain you.
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
I would accept DRM'ed media if the industry would embrace an open DRM standard. I reject any DRM that seems designed to lock me into one vendor's monopoly (ie. iTunes).
Pretty simple issue, really. Protecting intellectual property is fine. Creating artificial barriers to stifle competition is not.
What happens when some of these companies go out of business and people are left with hundreds of useless music files.
When they pry my MP3's from my cold dead fingers.
Seriously, the only DRMed products I am willing to accept are those that I possess the ability to crack And - unlike the unprotected media - I don't feel any qualms about sharing the cracked version onward.
Yes, as many others said, I think it's "ridiculous". Will it stop me from ever buying, say, a song on the iTunes music store? No... probably not. Frankly, when I do something like that, I consider the overall situation.
I think "Ok, I'm using iTunes already, and my immediate goal is to be able to listen to this song. If I buy this DRM'd track online, I can do that here and now, in this software app I'm already using." Furthermore, I know it'll go into my iPod and play there just fine, which is another expectation I'd have for it.
Ultimately though, I'm ok with the purchase because I know there are plenty of ways to get the DRM stripped back off of it after the fact, if and when it becomes necessary. (Simply use a utility that intercepts the audio stream while you're playing it back, and saves the results to a new file - if all else fails!)
So while "philosophically", I'm anti-DRM - "realistically", I find it more of an "inconvenience" than a "deal-breaker" for me. If and when they get DRM to the point where I really can't disable it (or make it so tough to disable that it's quite time-consuming), then I'll refuse to buy the crippled products anymore. It's that simple.
you would think, given iPod/iTunes is the current DRM poster child, that if anyone accepted DRM it would be iPodders. not so. check out the results of an informal survey:
r eadid=85534
http://forums.ipodlounge.com/showthread.php?s=&th
only 5% (1 out of 20), at the time of this posting, of iPodders have more DRM'd audio on their iPod than non-DRM'd audio.
like an earlier poster stated, DRM is unlikely to be accepted while alternatives exist. if it's going to take hold will have to be forced upon people.
"Both the BSD license and the GPL share with people who don't want to share, but only the GPL "protects a sharing society" by not allowing people to take something from within the sharing society, and use it to directly attack the sharing society."*
Well seeing as how "ideas" can't be held hostage, and that you can't "steal" IP. I'd say your argument has no legs to stand on. The ONLY part that's not free is the proprietary bits that companies add, and the funny thing is. Nvidia shows that the GPL isn't any better a defense against that as say the BSD. You even promote it with the LGPL. At best the GPL forces them to share what you ALREADY have. At least the BSD is more honest with reality.
*I've noticed the BSDs are doing quite well despite all these "attacks against it", up to and including the AT&T one.
On the other hand, I'm not willing to deny businesses their rights to their [copyright monopoly].
Under your morals, why should talking motion pictures from before 1930 still be copyrighted?
If I found the terms agreeable.
I buy a song off iTunes, for example, and I know that I can only play it on X computers, sync it to the iPod, and burninate X copies. I'm fine with that, so I send my 99 cents on its merry way.
I know this thread is already getting old and this probably won't be read by anyone, but I'm going to say it anyways.
The name "Digital Rights Management" is deceptive. The software does not manage, or ensure, everyone's rights. It just ensures the copyright holder's rights while trampling on the consumer's 'fair use' rights. A realistic title would be "Copyright Holder Rights Only Management".
If DRM could ensure BOTH sets of rights then I might accept it.
In it's current form it's the inverse of piracy. But I don't consider it morally superior because someone's rights are still being violated.
DRM is a 'knee-jerk' response by an industry who's business model is in danger of dissolving. I can only hope that pushing DRM hurts their sales enough for them to drop it.
Like most slashdotters, I'd probably do it whenever Microsoft wasn't supporting it.
--- nick
This topic seems to have produced the highest level of stupid replies I have ever seen on Slashdot (and that's saying something).
Stupid ideas like the corporations are getting all the money, not the artists, therefore it is ok to steal stuff, since the corporations don't deserve copyright protections anyways.
Stupid ideas like I won't buy anything that has DRM, when the reality is that virtually everybody has at least one of the major gaming consoles.
Stupid ideas like once I buy it I can do anything I want with it, including giving it out to everybody I want.
The stupid-meter is off the chart on this topic. The fact is that a lot more people than the artist have a vested and legitimate interest in making money in this business. Whether you like it or not, the technology is going to catch up and we are going to have a strong (and fair) DRM scheme eventually.
It may take decades, but eventually stealing copyrighted materials will be as difficult as stealing a book is today. And that's the way it should be. If you don't like it, you don't have to buy the product.
If the copyright owner could come up with some scheme that only allowed you to access their content from inside your car during daylight hours, then more power to them. You may not like it, but that's a decision you are free to make before you buy the product.
Personally, I pay $4 to be able to watch a movie for 5 days only (blockbuster rental), or I pay $15 to be able to watch it as long as I want. If they can come up with a scheme whereby I can pay $8 and watch it all I want, but only from my home TV, that's fine with me too.
Do whatever the hell they want. I am the consumer and can decide for myself whether I am willing to put up with their restrictions for the price I am paying.
What the RIAA has to do, to solve this, is 'induce' a new industry wide protected format, like say the UMD.
Given that UMD is a Sony format, you can expect Columbia, Jive, and Arista to sell UMD albums. But will Universal, Warner, and EMI? And has there been any press release anywhere since 1990 that a major label is releasing an album but not on CD?
I've generally said I'd consider using DRM when the DRM system worked as hard to ensure that the rights of consumers and the public were maintained (including the various rights associated with fair use, to make backup copies, for a fixed copy of the work to be sold, for libraries to lend the work, and to use the work after the term of the copyright expired) as it did to ensure that the rights of the content creators and owners were maintained. And the DRM system has to accomplish this without an invasion of the users' privacy...for instance, it's absolutely unacceptable to give either the content owner or the government the ability to track who reads a particular ebook.
I've yet to see a DRM system that comes close to meeting those goals.
I also think it's extremely valuable to society that it is possible to get away with small amounts of copyright violation without punishment - think of how things would be if every photocopier would only copy non-copyrighted material or if you had to get permission from the owner of a work before making even a few photocopies. To be reasonable, DRM needs to permit some amount of casual copying without making it traceable, even if it violates current copyright law.
Can't get the content if you can't pay the creator.
Did you mean "Can't get happiness if you can't pay God"? When discussing legal issues such as copyright, it's best to use the same words used in the statute, such as "works of authorship" and "author" rather than "content" and "creator".
More likely, did you mean "Can't get the works if you can't pay the author?" In that case, what's your position on the issue of orphan works?
They shouldn't and I did not say otherwise. You are putting words in my mouth here in the way you quoted my statement. I said "intellectual property rights" and preservation of intellectual property rights does not imply a copyright monopoly.
As I said in my original post, I am concerned about the government not looking out for the interests of its citizens. The copyright situation is exactly the kind of thing I was referring to. I am not disputing that the citizens are being denied something that is owed to them with respect to copyrights. I agree with you on this point. Furthermore, I also don't like the current software patent situation either.
The biggest problem in this whole discussion is that both sides seem to have pretty unreasonable positions and neither one has shown much willingness to understand what is required to find a solution.
Nobody is ever going to make much money on pirates. Trying to address them, is a waste of effort and expense, and that's what DRM is. DRM has the side effect of annoying customers and encouraging them to become pirates, in addition to its unsuccessfully-achieved goal of addressing pirates. Get it?
DRM is not useful to a profit-seeking company. If you own stock in a company that uses DRM, your asset is being negligently mismanaged.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Problem is as is absolutely, catagorically, empirically proven, people don't stop at "fair use" do they? No, they give and eagerly take verbatim copies to/from anyone and everyone, especially if:
a) it's easy to do
b) everyone else is doing it
c) it's fun
d) there are no repercusions from it
DRM is the current state-of-the-art way to try to stop that with digital content. If you don't like the proposition, don't give them money. Oh and if you want to stay honest, buy the CD while you can because there's no rule that says they have to keep selling those either. In the end one of three things will happen:
1. Because you're honest, you'll have no current content because you refused to buy it and CD's aren't around any more.
2. You'll buy the DRM'd stuff, use it yourself and work within the rights that you've been given.
3. You'll have cracked versions and basically be a criminal.
Life sucks doesn't it.
Those honest working people have a right that you are ignoring.
Despite the name, copyright is not a right but instead a privilege to prohibit reproduction of your published work by third parties. The U.S. Constitution allows Congress to grant this privilege "to promote the Progress of Science", not to uphold some right granted under natural law. (In 1780s English, "science" meant knowledge.) In fact, many major philosophic traditions are facially incompatible with copyright.
> As I said, I believe this attitude of mine is due
> in part to my Gen X demographic. Baby boomers and
> older -- those presumably running XXAA -- grew up
> not expecting reviewing capability.
Not true - us Baby Boomers grew up with VHS and cassette tapes, so we're extremely familiar with the concept of being able to record and playback at our leisure.
Unfortunately, it was both expensive and time-consuming to use these media, relative to what's around now. Copying a cassette or VHS tape had to happen in real-time (i.e. 90 minutes to copy a 90 minute cassette), unless you had expensive non-consumer gear to do it. And, of course, we didn't have the Internet as a cheap distribution mechanism.
On that basis, I think a lot more Baby Boomers than you know are against DRM. As a group, we're not prepared to download loads of stuff for free, but we don't expect to pay over and over again to listen to the same music or watch the same movies because we didn't have to do so as kids.
I bought DVD Region X with my PS2. If it hadn't been for that product I wouldn't haven bought a PS2 or any of the thousands of dollars worth of DVDs in my collection, many of which aren't available locally.
Speaking of DRM, I was checking out IM clients for the Palm recently, and I happened to notice that one in particular was being licensed instead of sold. I find this concept to be ridiculous for most things, not to mention that it's a huge turn off.
while i find DRM an abomination in principle, if it was limited solely to ensuring (somehow) that my copy was legitimately purchased, i would accept it. but the crap itunes pulls with limiting how many personal use copies i can make, etc. is completely unacceptable. i'll buy audio cds and rip the tracks manually before i put up with that stuff.
You are putting words in my mouth here in the way you quoted my statement. I said "intellectual property rights" and preservation of intellectual property rights does not imply a copyright monopoly.
The United States Code refers to no such thing as "intellectual property rights". There are privileges under copyright law (17 USC), privileges under patent law (35 USC), and privileges under trademark law (parts of 15 USC). Using the term "intellectual property" confuses copyrights, patents, and trademarks, which is why I changed "intellectual property" to "copyright".
As for replacing "rights" with "monopoly": Under the construction of Congress's constitutional power to enact copyright law, copyright is not a right but a privilege. In theory it's a useful privilege "to promote the progress of Science" (that is, knowledge), but it remains a privilege nonetheless. This privilege takes the form of a monopoly on reproducing a given work or even on unintentionally creating similar works after having been exposed to a given work. Perhaps "copyright privileges" might have been a less loaded term than "copyright monopoly".
The biggest problem in this whole discussion is that both sides seem to have pretty unreasonable positions
Another Slashdot user has remarked that the pro-copyright and anti-copyright factions had roughly the same positions in the 1780s when the U.S. Constitution was written, and the "to promote the Progress" construction we know today along with the 28-year maximum copyright of the 1790 Act were the compromise between the two sides. Why not revive this compromise?
No kidding! You aren't supposed to feel that if a song, movie, book, etc. is truly yours, because it's not truly yours unless you hold the copyright. Copyright law is very lenient on what you may do with copyrighted material in your possession. About the only thing you aren't permitted to do is steal it!
Let's think about this for a minute...
- The average price for a CD in my country (Argentina) is U$S 8
- The average CD contains about 13 songs. That would make the song price 0.62
Now, there are several problems with current DRM'd digital downloads:
- Worse quality (lossy compression)
- I can play the songs in about 1% of the places where I can play a CD
- I can't sell the songs when I get tired of them
- I don't get a CD box (they DO add value for me)
This, combined with the fact that distribution costs are A LOT lower, should make the downloaded songs AT LEAST 4 times cheaper. That is, 0.15 a song.
Conclusion: I'll buy DRM'd songs when they price them correctly.
15 cents a song, 2 bucks for an album, and perhaps some discount for buying several albums from the same artist.
- They're pissed off because they can't make a backup copy and there's no warranty on the original
- They're pissed because they can't resell their used copy if they don't want it any more
- They're pissed off because they used to be able to do these things and now it's being taken away from them
Don't get me wrong, I'm pro-copyright (although 90 years + the life of the artist is a little much). I agree that trading copyrighted anything online is illegal (movies, music, books, software, whatever). But that's not what DRM is about. DRM is about taking away the rights of the end-user -- by destroying the principle of first sale. DRM tells the end user, we think you're a thief, so we're going to protect you from yourself.I'm all for the RIAA lawsuits -- because that's how you protect copyright. I'm all for FSF lawsuits against GPL violators because that's how you protect copyright. If Red Hat DRM'd my Enterprise Linux CDs, I'd still look for a way to break the DRM and make a backup copy because I bought a usable copy of software.
Of course this is all academic, anyway. I've always said, "as long as something can be seen, heard or otherwise processed by humans, it can always be duplicated." New DRM schemes will be broken. The "Trusted Computing" machines will be cracked -- because necessity is the mother of invention.
I'm not talking about law. I'm talking about copyright holders - you know, RIAA, MPAA and the likes? They want to stop you from making backups in any form.
The law doesn't matter. What use is an allowance when technical restrictions hinder you from using it?
If DRM was ever to become the dominant means of distributing content, recorded history would disappear. We would enter a new dark age.
Imagine historians trying to learn something of our society, our culture, a thousand years from now if all they had to go on were encrypted data files.
The copyright holders would be long gone, but the useless, unreadable files would remain.
I keep hearing all of this whinning about DRM and I bought it so it's mine to do whatever I wish...yadda yadda. I can rip it strip it... blah blah blah. All your arguements, all your complaints and you are losing site of the big picture... TIMES HAVE CHANGED! You could always buy songs or movies and there were ways to "share" them with friends and family. You could buy one of those dual cassette players and make a tape for a friend or you could buy a double deck VCR and make a copy for a friend. Now I'm sure the labels and studios were not a big fan of this and other than a legal statement making you aware of the Federal offense, they didn't really try to hard to control this level of "sharing" they knew there would be a loss of revenue but it wouldn't be on a large scale. Enter the Internet One guy buys a CD for $14.99, he rips it and puts it on a P2P network. Millions of users hear about this cool thing called Napster where they can grab that song for free. Now millions of people have that song for the one time payment by guy #1 of $14.99 FOR FREE! Can I say two words here..... MASS DISTRIBUTION!! That is the difference here. Now I don't care about all of these moronic arguements trying to validate reasons that sharing is ok and It actually increases the revenue to the food chain because I went out and bought the CD.... MORE BS!! Bottom line is because of the ease of mass distribution of content through illegitemate channels of distribution, THAT is why people want control of their content. DRM is not in place for the honest people out there who understand the importance of commerce for consumer goods and how it is all part of the chain, it is in place for the millions of people who are acquiring a "good" and not willing to pay for that "good". At some point, there may be no profit in creating content, thus no content will be created. So this generation of "I'm entitled" will cut off their nose to spite thier face because they don't understand the value of "goods" and "commerce". I'll never forget a scene I saw as a child from one of the Sinbad movies (7th voyage of Sinbad??) They came upon a shore where all they saw were bones and Sinbad asked "What happened to all of the people" and someone responded "They became too civilized". So stop all of these silly and moronic arguements and start understanding that "sharing" massive amounts of content instead of paying for it will bring about a collapse of a free market system. Silly, silly humans.
I think the important thing is that the DRM on DVDs isn't even noticeable, and doesn't restrict anyone's rights to use the DVD. It works on all players, it works on XBMC, and on pretty much any Linux player.
And sure, some of these work because prior work was done cracking CSS, but that's pretty much irrelevant as far as user choice is concerned.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
There is already plenty of law that can be used to bring pirates to justice and regain lost compensation. I'd like to see you go after every individual who pirates content. Lets clog the legal system a bit more shall we? Oh... and when you see the bill from legal counsel for going after every single "individual", you sh*t yourself and close the doors to your business. Fight for the rights of the crimminal.. way to go... dum dum
If you oened the physical media, you had essentially a perpetual and reassignable license to it... if I bought a Metallica CD, I could resell it to you or a used record store and neither the band nor its label had any recourse.
The DMCA and similar legislation made it possible to use technological means to add licensing restrictions beyond what previous copyright laws assigned.
Tech Public Policy stuff
If you can prove payment for, or have an explicit user license to, or have posession of the original media and thereby an implied user license -- let the duty be on the plaintif to have to argue against fair use when you enjoy the work in the form (albeit not necessarily in the same format) you bought it.
Funny how your little piece ends at the "and they sued him" There's two equally valid assumptions one could make to account for "and he no longer does live music".*
1-The ASCAP proved their case in a court of law.
2-He gave up before it ever got to court.
*Of course there's the even bigger assumption that there was even a bar that had this happened to, but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.
That's a really bad anaolgy to my mind. You shouldn't reproduce the dollar bill, sure (and that's what Copyright tries to achieve), but you can trade it for coin, exchange it for another currency, deposit in in your account to write cheques against, pay it into your credit card to charge against -- you certainly can use your dollar in many different ways/formats -- but you only get $1. So now tell me how to get my iTunes song to play on my TiVo or on my Treo?
The DRM should not restrict what I can do with the file in any way shape or form. However I would accept having my ID stamped into the file. Maybe use steganography to bury my id throughout the file. That way if I use the file legally, it's no problem. But if I upload the file I can be identified. This would even make me reluctant to give the file to a single friend, since I am responsible if I loose control of the the file.
I didn't think it was about ownership of an individual piece of 'art' or whatever (in this case your awesome sculpture); i thought it was about your ability to MAKE COPIES and distribute THE COPIES to anyone. In the case of your sculpture, would you be okay with selling it to a dude who, unbeknownst to you, as a technique enabling him to distribute pretty good copies (á la mp3s; good, but they're certainly not WAVs or SHNs) of your thing? It is HIS after all, right? to do with what he wills, right? You have no more control, right?
Well that's good that you've given yourself the right to say that someone could not sell icons of their images on their web site. And whose to say what "an actual art form is". Isn't that confinining. What if someone's medium, and hence livelihood, is icons.
Honestly I can't see what the problem with DRM is, if it is merely a pipeline to ensure that one's IP is protected. If consumers want art, they should pay up.
This is my sig.
I'll accept Digital Rights Restrictions when they protect my rights as a content creator to generate revenue from my creations while at the same time offering the consumer a reasonable amount of freedom to enjoy that same content.
There needs to be a distinction drawn between "sharing with friends" and "distributing/publishing to the world". This is not a technological problem, it's a societal problem. As the saying goes, there are management solutions to technological problems, but there are no techinical solutions to management problems.
Education is the silver bullet. This is a morality issue. My views on this issue are diametrically opposed to those who believe that they have the right to dispose of my creations as they see fit. It's *my* right, not theirs.
Currently DRM has turned fair use on it's head by making the default of any file to deny ALL uses but the "average case".
I will not accept DRM'ed files unless they come up with a DRM which allows you to do ANYTHING with your files with the ONLY exception being redistribution. This includes transformation, editing, altering, remixing,censoring, or otherwise for personal use. Additionally, the news LOVES those short films.. which technically are derivitive works.. so the DRM should be scientifically developed to release the content after it has been sufficiently altered to differ from it's original form.
One thing which i've noticed....
Nobody, and i mean NOBODY whose white papers i read or whose speeches i've seen mentions anything about a very important aspect of computer interoperability called format shifting.
format shifting is essential to the open platform, and is what has contributed to the widespread adoption and evolution of general purpose computing as it is today.
On a computer one MUST be able to format shift in order to use different editing suites.
-you cannot convert itunes or napster files to wav or aiff in order to make fair personal use transformation in audio editing tools, or to sample portions for personal, academic, or critical use.
-you cannot currently format shift a DRM'ed wmv to a raw DV format for editing (or any wmv outside windows because 3rd party codecs are "circumvention devices")
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are still too many people who consider $0 the only price they will accept. DRM stinks. The labels are bad. No argument there. If people would pay fairly for the music they liked, artists could publish on the web in mp3 and get paid. Unfortunately, only a core group of true, loyal fans will pay up without some kind of enforcement mechanism behind it. Everybody else will just fileshare.
I find rent, food and tuition rediculous, but I still pay for them. Since when was anything of worth free?
I'm planning on making some radio promos using clips from popular animated television shows.
The total length of the promos would be less than 30 seconds, of which maybe 15 seconds of which would be clips from the audio tracks of said television shows.
I'm curious as to what's considered "fair use" in these situations. The amount I'm planning to sample amounts to about 1% of the total duration of a 30-minute episode after commercials are removed. I don't want to get in any legal trouble for doing so, however.
The radio station is non-commercial and possibly non-profit 501(c)3 although I'm not sure about the non-profit part.
(Posted without my +1 bonus because this is offtopic and I know it.)
None.
And why should I? Do books or CDs or DVD even that I buy contain some form of "rights management" BS?
never.
i only take something with drm if i have some way of cicumventing them. the first thing that i do when i buy a drm book is to decrypt it (i dont live in a place that have silly DMCA) and back it up as plain text or html . that way if the company that sold the book goes away or something i can still read my book. if i cant remove the drm then i dont buy it at all.
only thing that this rule doesnt apply is if i get it for free (without ANY cost for me).
Perhaps later.
I believe DRM in any form is ridiculous, but I would tolerate it better if I could, for example, play music I bought from iTunes on my Nomad or play music I bought from Napster on my iPod.
"If it's real, then it gets more interesting the closer you examine it. If it's not real, just the opposite is true." -
After all we live in an imperfect world where there are a lot of people that want to profit from other people's efforts. Read the interesting thoughts of Howard Rheingold on this. A community, be it Internet or physical will always contain elements that do not want to play by the rules set for that community! Does that mean we should not agree to live by those rules? In my opinion Apple is going in the right direction by trying to balance the present commercial forces (do not underestimate them!) with a sales model that that ultimately will give buyers as well as creators of content more freedom. Ofcourse this is a threat to the current content selling industry! Face the facts and accept DRM, but also face the fact that there will be elements that will challenge the mechanisms we device, that will keep everybody on their toes and in the end who knows, we all get to learn more! Bart Scholten
I see what you mean about book versus paper on lending, I hadn't considered that perspective. Too used to dealing with paper. I go through a lot of books. At least one novel length book each week. I have become accustomed to the share of the physical books, waiting and such. It would be nice to do otherwise. DRM however does not overcome that problem. To my knowledge, you cannot share a DRM'ed Ebook with anyone else. It is keyed specifically to your activation account on both MS reader and Adobe reader. You will be unable to open that ebook on any other reader than one that was activated under your account. I tried it and failed and then read the facts from both manufacturers. They both specifically state that. So DRM removes even more accessability to material than you had before.
I have hundreds of books in my home. All books that I have read and enjoyed and wished to keep a copy of to share with others over time. I cannot do that with a DRM'ed book. The other problem is that both of those readers also support expiration on the books. If you read the fine print on the ebooks you purchase, you will see that they will expire after a period of time and you will no longer be able to access the file. To me that is tantamount to the person who sold it to me, coming into my house two years later and taking back what they sold me.
I am not against DRM and I want to see eBooks take off more. But the current implemetation reeks of greed as the publishing house try to garner even more control over their products than they ever had in the past.
...you are forgetting one thing. Did you sell the painting or the sculpture for $.99? or did you sell it for $99? $990? $9,900?
Now, would you buy a song if it cost $99? $990? $9,900?
As an artist, would you want to sell your art if you were only paid $.99 for each original work you created?
But like I said - if it weren't for the internet, this music would be dead. Unfortunately, the labels don't have the brains or vision to embrace it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I haven't looked at the law in that regard. I wonder if you can make copies of art that you have bought and sell the copies without paying the original artist or the artist's estate. Think of all those people selling prints of famous works...who are they paying for the rights to make images?
No incumbents, not no where, not no how.
Vote them out every term.
IANAL.
Copyright laws says what rights are reserved for the owner, everything else is fair game.
DRM systems state what you are allowed to do, everything else is prohibited.
The individuals that partake in the bottling of water and bringing it to the public are all trying to MAKE A LIVING. They have to compete with God who supplies all areas for free. Incredibly, the water bottlers make $millions. How can this be? Why doesn't Napster God shut them all down in a day? Why are they still expanding?
Could it be that people will pay a reasonable amount for the convenience of not collecting the water themselves? The water bottling industry sets its prices at a level set by the market competition with other sources. How much DRM water would they sell at $20 a pint if free water was still availible?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Restated, your anaolgy says: My right to change my $1 into quarters to feed that arcade game is but a temporary convenience that can be revoked by the government at any time, without notice? I think not!
Let me extract some choice sections of Apple's iTunes EULA that illustrate that your rights to burn/export music to different formats do not exist, they are merely accomodations at this time which Apple may at its sole discretion change at any time, without notice, and you agree retrospectively to any and all such changes, here and now, before you know what they might be.
To many of us there really is a fundamental difference between a right and an accommodation.
The italic emphasis is the following extracts are mine: "9. Purchase of Apple Content ...
b. Use of Products. You acknowledge that Products contain security technology that limits your usage of Products to the following Usage Rules, and you agree to use Products in compliance with such Usage Rules.
Usage Rules.
... Any burning or exporting capabilities are solely an accommodation to you and shall not constitute a grant or waiver (or other limitation or implication) of any rights of the copyright owners in any content, sound recording, underlying musical composition, or artwork embodied in any Product ...
d. You acknowledge that some aspects of the Service, Products, and administering of the Usage Rules entails the ongoing involvement of Apple. Accordingly, in the event that Apple changes any part of the Service or discontinues the Service, which Apple may do at its election, you acknowledge that you may no longer be able to use Products to the same extent as prior to such change or discontinuation, and that Apple shall have no liability to you in such case
13. Intellectual Property ...
b. Removal of Apple Content or Other Materials. Notwithstanding any other provision of this Agreement, Apple and its licensors reserve the right to change, suspend, remove, or disable access to any Products, content, or other materials comprising a part of the Service at any time without notice. In no event will Apple be liable for the removal of or disabling of access to any such Products, content or materials under this Agreement. Apple may also impose limits on the use of or access to certain features or portions of the Service, in any case and without notice or liability ...
14. Termination ...
a. Termination by Apple. If you fail, or Apple suspects that you have failed, to comply with any of the provisions of this Agreement, including but not limited to failure to make payment of fees due, failure to provide Apple with a valid credit card or with accurate and complete Registration Data, failure to safeguard your Account information, or violation of the Usage Rules or any license to the software, Apple, at its sole discretion, without notice to you may: (i) terminate this Agreement and/or your Account, and you will remain liable for all amounts due under your Account up to and including the date of termination; and/or (ii) terminate the license to the software; and/or (iii) preclude access to the Service (or any part thereof) ...
20. Changes. Apple reserves the right, at any time and from time to time, to update, revise, supplement, and otherwise modify this Agreement and to impose new or additional rules, policies, terms, or conditions on your use of the Service. Such updates, revisions, supplements, modifications, and additional rules, policies, terms, and conditions (collectively referred to in this Agreement as "Additional Terms") will be effective immediately and incorporated into this Agreement. Your continued use of the iTunes Music Store following will be deemed to constitute your acceptance
Okay, then. What exactly do you own outright, free and clear, with no restrictions placed upon what you can do with it?
Perhaps... your own body, I suppose. You can, uh, create and distribute "derivative works" of that all you want (okay, you have to find a "co-author" for those, unless you're good at cloning.) But what else?
You can't go around distributing copies of some book you bought. Nor music, nor movies, nor clothing patterns, nor ROMS (hi, 68k Mac fans!). If you go to KFC and buy some chicken and a Coke, reverse-engineer the "secret formula" of each and start selling equivalents, yes, the lawyers will come a-knockin'. You can't even replicate and distribute Barbie dolls.
Got a house or land? If you live in the so-called "first world," somebody probably wants you to pay taxes on it, even if you've paid off the mortgage. Ditto your car (in the form of registration and license fees. And what's more, you have to keep paying these fees and taxes regularly, or omigosh, things get taken away. Aigh, it's an evil subscription model!
Oh, and of course, there's software. Licenses everywhere. Even our beloved GPL is a license; violate it and you lose the right to do certain things with the software.
I don't want to label anyone extreme, since I too would much prefer an Anarchist in the White House, but Ted Nugent and Lyndon LaRouche look like namby-pamby pussyfooting milquetoasts next to some of these views.
I've been known to accept DRM and other restrictions on my "rights," even if there are alternatives, at times. I bought a house and land instead of squatting. I spend bucks on car registration, insurance, and safety check. I rent or buy those accursed copy-protected DVDs. I've even bought and registered a few pieces of software!
Yesterday, I had these options:
- Spend 15 or so LocalMonetaryUnits on a CD by 3 Doors Down, when I only wanted the song "Let Me Go."
- Spend a Mountain Dew bottlecap on a DRMed version of that song, with album art and good tags.
- Spend hours downloading everything that claimed to be that song from a P2P network, in hopes of finding one file I that wasn't actually just silence, uploaded by the label or their minions specifically to make this task harder. Then Google for album art and any tag info that needed fixing.
- Wait a few years until the album hits 99 LocalMonetaryUnits in the bargain bin of the local used CD store.
Obviously, I chose door number two, in this case. In a lot of cases, it's not the best option (I've got 55 DRMed "purchased songs" out of over 2000 in my music library), but in this case, it was*.(*Excluding options that involve things like giving my credit card info to organizations of questionable ethics in Russia, shoplifting, finding anyone else in my town with decent taste in music and borrowing the CD from them to rip, etc. "Easiest" is a big part of "best" here.)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
well see, many works of art like that are in the public domian, like so many of DaVinci's sketches or works of artists long dead, especially if they died a pauper. Who owns rembrandts work? I think it might come down to those that "own" the physical painting, but as far a copyrights go, i don't know.
Yes, in option 4 I did mean .99 LocalMonetaryUnits, not 99
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I was thinking of more recent works--Warhol, Picasso, those who works still have the copyright protection and are not public domain. Do you think that there is an RIAA/MPAA equivalant out looking for violaters? If I sell the physical art object have I sold the copyright protection? I don't know...after all--IANAL, I only watch Law and Order on TV.
No incumbents, not no where, not no how.
Vote them out every term.
It's nuanced, I know, but a "right" trumps an "accommodation" any day. I'm cautiously optimistic your comprehension will improve each time you re-read this thread.
Please enjoy -- how ever long or short the accomodation -- RIPping and re-import your music. I, like many others, strive for a one-shot digitally improved life style. Those old ideas and redundant work-arounds, well, like this thread, they're just tired ...
"Despite its name, the ability to control the distribution of information is a PRIVILEGE - not a right. Society ALLOWS you to control distribution of your created works in the short term, with the expectation that this will encourage an overall increase of works usable by the public. If the system isn't providing the desired result, then there is no public-benefit reason why Society should keep allowing such a restriction of personal rights."
Sounds like buck-passing. Society failed to do it's civic duty, and let things get out of wack. Then they complain that the system is broken, and the only solution is to throw out the baby with the bath water.
We tried that kind of thinking with Iraq, and look were we are now.
"Try this on for size: if you can't get someone to pay you for your "product" without using force (including threats of legal action), then it's probably not "free market" and you'd better reevaluate your business model."
There's no "force" when it comes to what content providers produce. There is only the weak-willed, who can't say no, and head straight for their P2P clents. Or the strong-willed who don't seem to be having all these problems the slashdot crowd apparently is.
"There is already plenty of law that can be used to bring pirates to justice and regain lost compensation."
Unless those pirates are "Grandmothers", or "teenagers", or...you get the idea.
The only thing destroying fair use, are those who are trying to destroy economic commerce through their unwillingness to follow the implicit agreement they entered into when they purchased the content.
People do bad things and bad consequences follow, for everyone, innocent, and not so innocent alike.
It was just before the internet, it was distributed by BBS and PC SIG. It's not my point. My point is what you said ",most people wont do it" (pay for it). It still comes down to the same social contract that says "I am selling you this performance, not the right to copy and sell or give away"
You own the CD - do with it as you please, attached to that CD is the performance, you own ONE of those - I think you should be able to move it between any of your own devices, to listen to it as you like. You should even be able to back up your CD. But what you do not buy when you bought that cd is the RIGHT to copy it and sell it or give it away to others.
Works the same way as Shareware, you get the right to try it out, If you use it you shoule pay the fee. Many do not.
> our parents, and even our grandparents,
;-) )
> got a better deal by purchasing the physical medium
They didn't really. After some years have passed the technology have changed, and most of the vynil people own is just vynil for them. They don't have the equipment they need to extract the content.
I have hundreds of LPs (vynil) and two turntables that don't work. So I cannot listen to any of them (unless I go get a new turntable and convince my wife to put the ugly thing in the living room). So infact, I've been "DRMed" (actually "ARMed" - A for analog
Changing the type of media used eventually "robbed" me from the right to listen to the music. I can go get the equipment to play it, but it's not the same as it has been 30 years ago: the department store down the street doesn't sell turntables. I can make an effort and get one. I can also make an effort and circumvent the fake copyright protection on "protected" digital music (I say "fake" because if it's so easily circuvented it's not really protection).
When I was younger I bought quite a lot of music on vynil. I collected, and making the collection "complete" in some ways (as in having all the Beatles albums, or at least all released songs) ws important to me. After the switch to CDs I realized there is no point in collecting music. I did buy a bit more than 100 CDs during the time that passed since they replaced LPs, but almost only when there were very good deals, i.e., only when the price was very low, or sometimes as gifts. Now that there are so many new formats and the mainstream distributors of music are doing their best to make me know that they will do whatever they can to limit my use of my music collection much more than was in the past, I don't buy any musuc at all. I just listen to FM radio.
So, perhaps are grandparents were in a better position than us, but that's only because the pace of technology was slower back then, and the format of vynil didn't change every five years...
I hope that makes you feel better :).
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That is a crock of sh*t. There are plenty of businesses that deal with these kind of issues on a regular basis. What do they do? They target the big operators and get the biggest bang for the buck - they don't go after everyone. The only reason the RIAA has gone after some 'small fish' is publicity - to scare all the little fish. They don't have the resources to go after everyone - nor will they. Additionally, it plays into their hands to make it look like 'everyone' is doing it - so they can get stiffer DRM and copyright laws passed.
We are not talking about businesses that are in any way shape or form being threatened with having to close their doors due to piracy - the RIAA's clients control multi-billion dollar businesses, which are only showing a 7% drop in sales over the previous years - less than 1% of which can be attributed to piracy. The remaining 6% is due to a focus on the 'business' of trying to sell cr*p, rather than quality music the public desires. Once the recording 'industry' lost sight of the art of music they sealed their own fate. This is a market adjustment that is a long time overdue.
Finally, what makes me really sick is the focus on the poor starving artists by the RIAA. But the real piracy is the way record companies discard artists as soon as they can to keep costs down, while signing new (read: low cost) artists as fast as they can (without much regard for the quality of thier work - obviously from listening to the latest 'popular' music). They don't compensate artists as they should, and they line their own pockets by selling us dogfood quality music at steak quality prices. I don't know about you, but for $18 I would like a filet mignon, rather than 'puppy chow'. I can and do download/buy free and indy music that is better quality than the major labels at a fraction of the cost - and I can pick and choose what tracks I want for the most part. The market will adjust to the new reality; will the record companies? Will we see them lobbying Congress for protectionist measures instead? (I do not want to see my tax dollars going to the entertainment industry - because its survival is not an absolute necessity).
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Problem is that you can't see the forest for the trees. Piracy isn't JUST a music industry problem, nor a movie industry problem, nor a Game industry problem, or...get the point?
Piracy is every copyright holders problem. From the little guys to the big guys. The main difference is the big guys draw all the lightening, because they're the only ones that can actually fight back.
Some artist running a web site, can only do two things. Take it on the chin and hope the pro-piracy group will show mercy, or two take down their site and find some other line of work.*
*And lest we forget our economics. The smaller you are the harder piracy will hurt you.
That depends on several factors, actually.
As a US citizen, I *do* have the right to make unlimited personal copies (either analog or digital) of music I've purchased on analog media (e.g., LP's and cassette tapes) for my own noncommercial use.
As I also happen to own an SCMS-compliant digital CD recorder, the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 explicitly gives me the right to make first-generation copies of digital music (that is, CD's), again for my own personal use.
Since I already have an explicit right to create a precise digital copy in one format for personal use, how is the creation of a digital copy in another digital format any different?
I *could* use my SCSM-compliant record in analog mode to generate an analog copy of the CD first, then rip the CD to MP3 format if I wanted to be absolutely squeaky clean, since the right to perform those actions (a digital-to-analog copy and then an analog-to-anything copy) are both explicitly granted to me under current US copyright law, but why do the extra step?
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Yes, I do agree with your opinion about the record industry. Point taken. But my concerns are for ANY and EVERY type of content that can be massivly distributed online, bypassing a monetary exchange for the rightful creator.
Drats, I forgot to preview and I botched the BOLD tag. It was only supposed to be the word "deactivates" in bold.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
That being said, I would accept DRM in almost any rental arrangement, provided there was a guarentee of playability. (no sense in getting home and discovering that your machine won't play the video because their DRM specs are two months out of date) I would be loathe to accept any DRM for anything I bought.