Slashdot Mirror
Britons Frustrated by DRM
thesp writes "The BBC is reporting that UK music lovers are 'frustrated' with DRM restrictions and pricing of online music purchases. The confusion over file formats and player compatibility are being compounded with the desire to 'own' rather than 'license' an album or track, leading to widespread concern. This debate has recently been the province only of the technologists and the media companies, with the consumer being regarded as unaware and unwitting. Is this a sign that this picture is changing, with consumers begining to realise and leverage their own market power?"
the ipod carrying generation finaly has the wealth to make a difference
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Don't the RIAA have a virtual monopoly on music, and so can't they place restrictions at will?
I think that it's good that people are listening, but without competition, somewhere else to go to to get the music that you want, why would the music industry do anything?
It's called a "tea party". Throw your music into the Thames!
You know about tea, right??
Thank god consumers are "rejecting" DRM. It can only be a bad thing for manufacturers [such as Apple] (no flame intent) to have control over music files. What the people want is to be able to download a file and to use it like a file, not to download a restricted piece of music, which is only playable by specific players (hard- and software), only allowed on "x" computers, and unable to be shared around to friends. That is against the general undertone of "freedom" on the Internet and this non-acceptance by users can only be a good thing.
I rarely download music, most of my friends buy CD's so they can do what they like with the music.
Some of my friends do download, but i can't think of any that download any drm'd music. They stick to sites such as audiolunchbox.com and alloffmp3.com and get drm-free mp3 files.
The only thing that bothers me is that if i want to listen to my flatmates cd, i will want to put it on my ipod for a while. He uses media player to rip his music, so it wont play on my ipod.
If music companies sat down and thought about what they are doing, they would realise that they are competing against the mp3 player market, because if they dont sell something that plays on most mp3 players, then people wont buy it!
While I understand I don't own a copyright. I do think that if I buy a cd/dvd/download that I should have the right to copy/play/replay the media for my own personal use. Unless of course I agreed in advance that my use would be limited (video rental, pay-per-view). If I want to make a copy of my cd/dvd/download and convert it to any format that I deem necessary to enjoy the content then that is my right! I am claiming it as my right. It doesn't really matter at all what any law says. You can take my ipod out of my cold dead hands because I bought the freaking CDs!!!
If true, then what does that do to the common refrain around here of people being "sheeple"?
How about the long-view as it relates to "I'm helpless against my government"?
well actually what'll probably happen is the same thing as with everything else we brits have issues with, there'll be some whining and eventually the nation will roll over and accept it, same way we do with everythign else, seriously we're pretty much the most apathetic people ever!
I think file sharing would die down on its own if the industry stopped pissing about. Give people what they want at the price they want - thats how a market works. I'd say the most likely people to download music of kazaa etc are school kids and university students - neither group has any money and whatever new 'laws' or solutions the industry comes up with people of these ages are going to share music even if they have to go back to swapping and burning CD's with their friends. After a while people grow up and get jobs and disposable money, the music industry has to realise that theres a price range people want to pay and they can either take internet distribution or leave it. The only 'format' thats going to last out is un-DRM'd or a long-time cracked format (DVD for example) lets be honest with ourselves, the format of choice is mp3 and sooner or later mp3s will be sold cheaply online by all labels and they will still rake in the cash.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Technically, the BBC are just lifting from this Months UK PC Pro magazine, something they freely admit in the body of the article.
-Jar.
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
It's the beginnings of a massive world wide revolt where everyone starts downloading their music from bittorrent.......
Oh wait....
Mod me up, mod me down, flame me, praise me -- whatever you do, you help prove I exist...
I see a lot of the comments echo my own worries with these online music stores; they're just too bloody expensive.
Partly it's that we're being forced to pay much higher download costs than the US or Europe pay for tracks, but it's also that with real CDs we can import. If you want a whole album, you can order it from most online stores (or sometimes even buy in your local supermarket) for around £9. When it costs at least £8 to buy the tracks from iTunes, and usually around £14 from the WMA sites, you're paying a hell of a lot for music in lower quality and covered in DRM that stops you using it on some devices.
In theory, at least, BMG and Sony are trying to force you to pay the high costs by ruining the CD versions with stuff that is meant to kill your PC. But I've got a bunch of these discs (it's hard not to when ordering discs online and so not seeing in advance if it will have "protection"), and not one of them has caused iTunes to bat an eyelid.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
What a novel concept. Those out there saying "well they should have read the fine print" don't seem to get it. It's not that they expected one thing and got another, it's that even people who know what the deal is don't have a legal option to OWN unrestricted files. It's not presented, at any price. That's where the real problem is.
I figured once DRM got widespread enough to start causing problems with mainstream devices the average Joe (or whatever the name in the UK is) would start taking notice. I've been hearing "But WHY can't I tape my DVD like I do my other tapes?" for awhile now, so I figured it was only a matter of time. The broadcast flag will likely have the same effect. A couple months of nothing major and then suddenly rising complaints of not being able to do the things that were always just fine.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
"seriously we're pretty much the most apathetic people ever!"
Apparently you had the will to inflict bagpipes onto the rest of the world.
Once the sheeple slowly realise they are getting the shaft and bleat about it.
--
"I see a lot of the comments echo my own worries with these online music stores; they're just too bloody expensive."
Anything past free is too expensive.
Wanna buy an 8-track tape?
I got tons of 'em
[This is]...compounded with the desire to 'own' rather than 'license' an album or track, leading to widespread concern.
Gee..wouldn't it be Great if this same desire spread to the software market? So you could move software around different systems and actually own it, instead of just "licensing" it via an evil click-thru. Too bad it'll never happen.
The recent (temporary?) victory of French consumers vs crippled DVDs was mentioned on http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/05/04/25/122230.shtml Yes, Britons, you're definitely not alone...
That's true.
We're British; we like to moan about things; that's what we do.
Hell, we've been moaning about the weather here for centuries but nobody does anything about it, what makes you think this will be any different?
We find something to moan about, we complain that "somebody" should Do Something about it, and then we get on with our lives.
We never actually intend for Something to be Done - we'd lose something to moan about!
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
"I think file sharing would die down on its own if the industry stopped pissing about. Give people what they want at the price they want - thats how a market works."
I wasn't aware that free was sustainable?
"I'd say the most likely people to download music of kazaa etc are school kids and university students - neither group has any money and whatever new 'laws' or solutions the industry comes up with people of these ages are going to share music even if they have to go back to swapping and burning CD's with their friends."
Like I said, free isn't sustainable.
"After a while people grow up and get jobs and disposable money, the music industry has to realise that theres a price range people want to pay and they can either take internet distribution or leave it."
Getting things for "free" isn't so much an economic condition, but social conditioning.
"The only 'format' thats going to last out is un-DRM'd or a long-time cracked format (DVD for example) lets be honest with ourselves, the format of choice is mp3 and sooner or later mp3s will be sold cheaply online by all labels and they will still rake in the cash."
The honest paying for the sins of the dishonest.
There is a DRM alternative in the way of an inaudible signature key inside a waveform. You can use the files as you see fit, however if they are found on a P2P network you will get busted because they will have your details from when you purchased the track. You can even burn the audio file, rip it, re-encode it and the signature will still be there.
Are you an idiot? No seriously... I mean I appreciate your attempt at randomness, but you could atleast obscure the goat.cx link.
Or... maybe this is some grand stegenographic scheme that we will look back on and say, all this time we thought it was goatse.cx, but really it was Al Qaeda.
Well, for some consumers anyway. I stopped buying audio CD's a number of years ago, trying to show what i thought about the price/quality of CD's.
I haven't tried to purchase any music online yet but i will not buy any less than CD quality DRM files at high prices.
I mean if i can buy a full album cd package for a couple of bucks more than the DRM download version i would not even consider it a worthwile effort. It works for single tracks, but for people who want the whole album it doesn't make sense.
Sample this!
Once again, the mainstream media catches up to my rants. Sigh.
For each of the people pissed off by DRM, they will warn off dozens of others, and the music industry will soon find themselves in a world of hurt. Oh wait, they are already there.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=16999
When you piss off your customers with draconian measures designed to suck money out of their wallets at your whim, they stop buying. Duh. The correct answer to this dillema is not to turn the knob up to 11, but to turn it down, or better yet off. The music industry can't seem to grasp this concept.
Maybe it is me, am I missing something? Has the whole strategy of 'make them hate us more than the Nazis' ever lead to greater profits?
-Charlie
I'm American.
Stop moaning about the weather before I buy an SUV and do something about it.
PC Pro who interestingly claim the best business model for a download site is allofmp3.com, and their choice of player is the Rio Carbon.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
They have no DRM controls and have always had top quality mp3s. They are now starting to implement FLAC as well. If you like the type of music they provide, indie electronica / rock / hip hop etc, then I thoroughly recommend them.
So people are annoyed that they can't transfer the files they've paid for, the sound quality isn't that good and sometimes they've paid for something that didn't download properly so they paid to download it again?
More fool them: the consumers and the companies.
I'll stick to buying CDs (but not the Copy Protected ones) by bands I like and going to live shows.
The fundamental problem here is that the music industry wants to get rich off of simplistic, mass-produced music, i.e. the stuff that appeals to young kids with no money.
If they want a healthy, sustainable and profitable business they need to downsize and focus on producing a quality product.
Stick Men
I posted this in my blog a hour or so ago, it goes off topic toward the end.
/. poster)
I won't be buying a significant amount of new music anytime soon. $15 for a CD is simply too much, and with high-speed Internet access there's no need to do so. Why should I pay for a $15 CD if I only want a song or two off it? There was (is?) a store that offered custom-burned CDs, but that was likely stopped by the music industry.
The music industry simply won't change in response to Internet piracy. They still act as it's 1990 and there is no alternate way to get music.
The simplest way to fight piracy is to lower the prices on downloadable music, to say 25 cents per song. This would replace the music industy's model of high priced / low sales with a low priced / high sales model. This would cause most of the downloaders of free music to switch to online stores, but it won't move everyone over.
The second step, which is required to get the advanced users into it, would be to stop using "Digital Restrictions Management." Fortunately, at such a low price per song, the volume would cover any loses to piracy while allowing any song to work with any device. I can't imagine the same numbers of these advanced users sharing music when it would be easier to download them at the low price of 25 cents.
Download sites should also increase the bitrate (quality) of the legal tracks online. Offering lossy formats doesn't provide a superior product. When I have the choice of two files online, I download the higher-quality one.
The last step is to offer "bootlegs" and "unreleased" tracks, which is an issue seldom addressed. There's a great version of Led Zeppelin's "No Quarter" that runs more than 10 minutes, but due to a very minor analog distortion that I didn't notice until a trained musician pointed it out to me, is not available for purchase anywhere. I'm a Zep fan and I would gladly pay for a CD of live and unreleased Zeppelin songs even if they weren't perfect in the ears of Jimmy Page. I imagine there's countless other examples of songs that aren't available any other way than "illegal" downloading.
The copyright system needs to be reformed, since copyright is:
" To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" - US Constitution (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/a rticle01/)
I can't say music is a "useful art", nor is it a science. Copyright isn't for securing a permanant income stream for the author and his descentdants and corporations. (paraphrased from another
For example, Disney's Steamboat Willy (a percursor to Mickey Mouse) is from the 1920s, and will never be "publick domain" in my lifetime thanks to the amazing power of corporations in our government. If one was a lawmaker and wanted to reform these laws, I'm sure ABC's (owned by Disney) stations and reports would take a bit more of a negative view of that lawmaker.
The movie industry is also worried about piracy, and since many movie studios are in corporations that also own music labels, they're not taking this issue lightly. It shouldn't be as big of an issue, as not nearly as many people expect to download free movies online.
The movie/tv industry needs to move now to take advantage of the Internet rather than viewing it as inherently evil. Don't wait until the masses discover downloading movies!
A full movie usually fits on a single DVD, and is between 2-4GB. If a site offered movies for 10 a piece I'd download some of them, provided there is no DRM involved.
Let's take any TV show, say "South Park" for example which is already out on DVD. There's countless ways to get it illegally online, which I prefer to do rather than watch it on TV and it's constant commercial interuptions.
There's no reason why a movie or show can't be released online after it's original primary airing. This woul
I have not bought a single CD since iTMS was available.
The point you are missing is that you buy SINGLE tracks; just the ones you like, not right rest of the rubbish "filler" stuff on the CD.
You don't pay for the rubbish that you don't want.
I've bought entire CD's from iTMS, but more frequently but individual tracks from an album, not the entire thing.
Some bands are so good that I do in fact buy the entire thing, you know who these bands are.
BTW: I'm a Brit who moved from the UK to the US because he was STD (sick to death, not sexually transmitted disease) of the dumbass ripoff no-can-do culture in the UK.
You guys get raped on the price of everything, and earn half the amount I do.
Good luck to you.
...sold all of my CDs, and listen to XM and local radio now exclusively. Screw the music companies. For 12 bucks per month I get all the music I can listen to, most of which was in my original collection to begin with. I'll probably save several hundred if not almost a grand per year and all they'll get out of the deal are the fees radio stations pay to be able to play the music.
The rest of the world will be able to see this apathy in full swing on May 5th.
Andy.
The current fuel demonstrations kind of put pay to that. Hopefully they'll grind the country to an almost halt again.
... a frustrated consumer doesn't automagically turn into a consumer that is aware of his/her own market power.
If that were the case, consumers would be able to program their VCRs (because only usable VCRs would be sold), Windows would be a lot safer, spyware would be non-existant, etc, etc.
And even if consumers were aware of their market power, they'd need a vendor that would provide what they want.
Anyone remembers Celine Dion's album wrecking havoc amongst iMacs?
Put one of hers into an iMac and you could kiss your machine goodbye.
I find that the most excellent example of how DRM is bad for the industry ánd the consumer.
I, for one, still lament the day this monsterous entity winded up in my disc drive. I should have returned it to Sony strapped to several kilo's of semtex...
The original study also found that people aren't satisfied with 128kbps files. I'm not really an audiophile, but I can tell the difference myself if I convert and burn a 128kbps mp3 onto CD. On the other hand, 256kbps is indistinguishable for most people, and that's what I rip at.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Copyright owners don't want to give user rights to 'own' the song.
Listeners don't want to 'rent' song, they want to 'own' it.
I guess it will be all the time.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Bleep is fantastic. Not only do they have sane formats with no DRM, but they let you listen to entire albums at reasonable quality before buying.
It's the way buying music online should work.
Please don't play to the stereotype that Texans are illiterate. You know the difference between a 'queue' and a 'cue' as well as I do:
queue: a line of waiting people or vehicles.
cue: a sign or signal to cause some action.
Norman
Cory Doctorow (Speaking to MSFT about DRM)
...
I speak from experience. Because I buy a new Powerbook every ten
months, and because I always order the new models the day they're
announced, I get a lot of lemons from Apple. That means that I
hit Apple's three-iTunes-authorized-computers limit pretty early
on and found myself unable to play the hundreds of dollars' worth
of iTunes songs I'd bought because one of my authorized machines
was a lemon that Apple had broken up for parts, one was in the
shop getting fixed by Apple, and one was my mom's computer, 3,000
miles away in Toronto.
If I had been a less good customer for Apple's hardware, I would have been fine. If I had been a less enthusiastic evangelist for Apple's products -- if I hadn't shown my mom how iTunes Music Store worked -- I would have been fine. If I hadn't bought so much iTunes music that burning it to CD and re-ripping it and re-keying all my metadata was too daunting a task to consider, I would have been fine.
As it was Apple rewarded my trust, evangelism and out-of-control spending by treating me like a crook and locking me out of my own music, at a time when my Powerbook was in the shop -- i.e., at a time when I was hardly disposed to feel charitable to Apple.
I'm an edge case here, but I'm a *leading edge* case. If Apple succeeds in its business plans, it will only be a matter of time until even average customers have upgraded enough hardware and bought enough music to end up where I am.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Well I live in England and am technically British (another story) and I for one will have nothing whatsoever to do with digital restrictions management.
:)
If it's DRM crippled I'm simply not buying it. If it's region code crippled I'm not buying it. If I can't use it the way I want to I'm not interested. Ner nerny ner ner.
Sadly however most people couldn't care less, don't actually understand the issues, and will just buy whatever crap's dangled in front of their noses. "ooh look at it, it's so SHINY". Then I get to say "told you so" and laugh at them whilst they curse loudly and smash their shiny new toys to bits after it's lost their entire music/photo collection
Ho hum c'est la vie.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
This is going to lead to a backlash I think. The thing is - most music is produced on an assembly line and is very repetitive; I honsetly have a hard time telling the difference between a lot of the bands out there. And the music industry wants to squeeze ever more profit out of us?
I personally have stopped buying new music altogether; can't see the point. At the same time I can see there's a lot of real talent that simply doesn't get published - at least not through any of the known labels. Seeing how recording equipment comes down in price all time, I think its only a matter of time before a lot of people start producing - and having success with - home made, unlabeled music CDs. I know I would be interested in buying some of that stuff!
If anyone is illiterate, it would seem to be you. And I see nothing of the sort. The fact you've been modded up would seem to suggest an anti-American bent on /.
I remember as "Cum on her face", a famous facial site released drm enabled movies. Because of a huge lost of members they stopped it. The most UNIX folks was uable to play the movies because they had passwords from trading site.
Sammy4u a blonde sex bomb is going another way, she only restrict the most sexiest movies (example creampies,...) - but soon she will also loose members.
I see you mentioned red, white, and blue in a way that implies you think of them as American symbols.
Ironically, those are also the colours of the French flag, which is even named for them. Oh, and they're the colours of the British flag, too.
cheers
I thought it was more along the lines of
the average George Beddingworth XIV duke of Essex jolly good chap.
mod parent down. Site has sod all to do with music or the music industry
Here in the UK, CDs in the big shops cost anything up to £18. That's about US$34 at current exchange rates. I shop at an independent store and I can get most things for about £13-£15 or about $25.
I'm very choosy about what I buy, and only buy 5-10 CDs a year nowadays. I don't download and I don't listen to music radio, since I don't want to hear Britney Spearmint-Gum, Sealion Dijon, Boyz'R'Us and the All-Whingers or whatever there is nowadays.
If CDs cost $15 here (i.e. under £8) I'd be more inclined to buy many more.
Stick Men
The music industry is driven by profit. If profit is down this quarter, that's bad. If its down for a year, that's really bad.
Dropping DRM and changing business models will probably in the short run cost the record companies big money. It doesn't matter in the long run they'll make more, because they're not willing to lose any money in the short run, so they can never get to the long run.
However, like the ride at the ocean, the world won't change for them because its inconvenient. And just like men build levees and dikes to temporarily halt the rising tide, record companies are using DRM and getting laws pased to ward off the inevitable.
This is going to be a long, ugly fight.
Can't we all just get along? /.
There is, and seems like there always will be, This mess over digital rights. I'm surprised that it's not showing up as bad PR with the companies that are involved in trying to remove rights from users. But I don't think the average person at home gets to see what goes on. But you see it much more on
http://www.6765656b.com it's the ~ for us geek's.
I feel that if I have an album on vinyl I have every right to record it onto a cassete, from there I have every to burn it onto a CD, and from there I have every right to put it on my MP3 player, or any combination of the above. I purchased the right to listen to that particular configuration of sound waves going into my ears, what machine or media delivers those sound waves is irrelevant and I certainly shouldn't have to repay everytime they bring out a new format or means of delivering it. I download DRM coded tracks when that is the only way to get a track I want but the first thing I do is convert them to unprotected MP3's.
I will NEVER buy anything I can't play on ANY of my pc's or standalone players, anywhere I want, any time I want.
^^^^^^^^^^^^Read it again
Clear enough?
I think that the root of the problem is that given the opportunity most people (including those who consider themselves law abiding) will copy music or video illegally if they can get away with it. Therefore the music companies try to combat this with whatever means they can devise. I can remember as a kid taping from "Top of the Pops" with a cassette recorder stood in front of the TV - the technology has changed but not the principle. This occurs partly because, especially in the UK, DVDs and CDs are way overpriced. Another reason is that a lot of music is disposable: i.e. you listen to it a couple of times and then are fed up with it.
Only 10 types of people understand binary: those who do and those who don't.
'Tom, Dick or Harry'
HTH
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Have you heard about Allofmp3, I find this place the best in balancing Quality/Price as you can have your CD in any format, I think you can download some Lossless format, even WAV and the price is proportional to the size (MB) of your download.
Having say that, some people find it offensive because of the good price, the legality is being questioned in U.S. but if you are outside I think it is alright.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Licensing is good as long as it is 90% or more cheaper than buying! Would you lifetime-licence your favourite CD for 1,5 instead of buying it for 15? Well, I would. Would you pay 0,5 Cent for listening once to your favourite CD instead of buying it for 15? Well, I would.
Until then... well, not for me, kids. I am not stupid enough to licence a CD for 30 when I can get the original for 15. I won't pay per listen a whooping 15 when I can get the Original for 15.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
I find that most Apple fanatics swear that 128kbs is indistinguishable from the CD.
Are you saying these people suddenly grow deaf in the presence of apple stuff?
wow... We don't talk that way in Houston. You must be from East Texas?
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
On a HiFi (the sort you play CD's on), I can easily tell the difference. 128kbs is absolutely fine for mobile use and "OK" for HiFi - it's slightly worse than stereo radio, but not a lot. I listen to the radio on my HiFi. However, if you want to get a compressed version to *replace* your CD, 256kbs MP3 is pretty damn close. A *real* audiophile could probably tell the shortcomings, but they'd have to listen for it. They will also put up with it because there are shortcomings in any reproduction of a work.
However, if you're sharing the files, 128kbs is good enough and halves your bandwidth usage for a less than half reduction in quality (64kbs is half again, but a LOT less than half the quality - about as good as AM radio in a so-so area).
THAT is why 128kbs is so prevalent, though you see a lot more people picking up the higher bitrate versions where available.
So now that content is licensed the content, who do i contact to have my media replaced when it gets ruined? Certainly I shouldn't have to pay the full retail price for a new CD since I already have the license...
Another poster has already brought up Tom, Dick and Harry, but we also have Joe Bloggs and John Smith (not to be confused with clothes and bitter).
Then, there is always 'Bob'.
The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) said it was taking action against 33 UK net users accused of illegally sharing music.
Somehow I get the image of an RIAA PR flunky cringing every time I see that. I mean, how are they possibly going to get their way if media outlets start using phrases like this? They should be using the safe, loaded names for it like "piracy"! At the very least, it should be "illegal copying" so it is related to something every schoolkid is taught to be wrong. Even preschool kids know sharing is supposed to be a good thing!
that most of the problems lies with using wma files, a lot of iTunes users there are happy. In this case, a closed, simple but fair system seems to be working well.
Jonathanjk.com
I agree with you. There is a music purchase/download service here (we don't have itms yet, or else) where a MS-DRMed album costs about 10% less as the normal CD album in a store, with around 256k mp3 quality (but in wma of course). I'd never ever in my life would buy songs from them for such a price. However, I didn't stop buying CDs, but I'm not buying any copy-protected/DRMed CDs if I can avoid it. But sometimes I can't like the latest Dido, or one Norah Jones album I bought couple of weeks ago, etc. But, if I couldn't rip these anyway :) than I would send them back complaining they don't play in my hifi, that's the way.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
*** Is this a sign that this picture is changing, with consumers begining to realise and leverage their own market power? ***
No, this is a sign that consumers are finding out what the money-whoring corporates have been up to. Namely, enacting unreasonable limitations on the use of music and movie products, that don't preclude the use of programs to enforce those limitations. Programs that in other contexts are considered trojans and viruses.
I'll believe that consumers will start to realize and leverage their own market power when they lean on the politicians to the point when the policos discuss the enactment of laws that make the use of such programs illegal. Given most governments have, or are working towards, enacting laws that promote and protect DRM, this is a long way off.
I just tried to register with allofmp3.com. Because I just wanted to see what they offer, I used a fake name. Then I had to enter my age. I entered 100. I was quite surprised to see that it didn't work: "more correctly input your age", was the message I got.
I tried 90, then 80, and got accepted at 70. At first I thought it was really smart russian hacking (being able to correct me lying about my age), but as they only got to just within the 100% error margin, it couldn't be thát smart.
Although I expect not many people will be excluded by this marketing technique, I'm surprised they even check for this.
I don't see how the Brits are going to make a smidgen of difference. Nonacceptance of the system was broadly challenged in the US and look where it go it's citizens, new laws that protect the companies and place the public in jail or at least saddle them with hefty fines. The Brits are on the backside of the curve here and probably have little choice but to bend over and take it, just like the Americans had to.
Sorry no vaseline for you, we used it all up on ourselves.
i quit buying music as soon as the RIAA started sueing music downloaders, i have not spent so much as a penny on any music since then, vote with your wallet...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
It is not an enumerated right, it is a doctrine which can be used to mitigate charges of copyright infringement.
when you rip Audio CD's. I rip all kinds of my own CD's with Media Player, and the WMA's play on any Windows computer I try to use them on. No DRM at all.
because he turned DRM on.
It's simple to turn DRM on and off for CD's you rip with Media Player. I rip hundreds of CD's with Media Player, and they play on all Windows computers I've ever tried them on (including from backups to fresh installs).
Something is terribly wrong when we've let ourselves be renamed into what amounts to a giant mouth sucking in 'product'. It's dehumanizing. We are no longer people; we're an economic equation.
Why have we let ourselves be redefined in this way?
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
for local people ....
"Cats like plain crisps"
I guess i'll just decode my 128kbit mp3s and reencode them in 256 kbit then... (yes, It is a joke)
Romans were about 1600 year too early (pre British Empire & the East India Company) for that.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
This reminds me of my aunt, who lives in Israel. She states that if you rush into an Israeli woman's home to rescue her from a fire, she will insist that you first sit down for a bite to eat.
Or maybe it isn't related after all. I don't know.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
... fool me twice, shame on me.
.wmv baseball game footage from MLB.com (last year's playoff games). They even advertised that I could "burn it to CD!". This is the first time I've bought anything like that, so I'm figuring "Great! I'll be able to make a VCD of it.". Wrong. The things are so heavily DRM'd that even the fast-forward buttons are disabled.
I bought and downloaded some
Oh, and yes, I can burn the files to CD... as data. But I can't do a damn thing with them. I still need to be at my internet enabled PC so it can check for authorization any time I want to watch them.
I figured I'd give iTunes a try having read that their DRM isn't nearly as draconian. Well, it's basically the same issues though not to the same extent. And the sound quality sucks.
Fooled me twice... shame on me.
I hope the media companies hear this loud and clear... I will GLADLY buy high-quality un-DRM'd content. Let me repeat that... GLADLY. That means lossless compression for audio and DVD quality for video. They need to figure out their distribution model. I find it hard to believe that manufacturing discs and paying for shipping and retail overhead is a better cost model than allowing download. But for now, I will continue to buy CDs and DVDs because I can then rip the content and have the high-quality un-DRM'd files that I'm looking for. OR, they could increase their profit margin by allowing the same thing as a data transfer.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
There's a lot of snobbery here in the UK (not just England). If people drop their change on the ground, they often won't pick it up for fear of appearing cheap.
People here often go out of their way to buy the most expensive stuff they can because they think it must be better or to show everyone else just how rich and discerning they are.
Like you, I've often had many free snacks from vending machines because people have walked off and left their change. I've also almost managed to fund a night out from picking up the odd pund here and there off the floor...
I've had many useful computer parts from the local rubbish dump.
I'm not a miserable, stingy Scottish git for nothing :-)
Stick Men
It really is, starting the other day with news of the French fed up with DVD "encryption" as well as this news. It's just too bad that Americans can never seem to peel back the wool from their eyes and stand up to this, however when they do the government is so closely aligned with the big companies that nothing ever gets done in these cases here. If someone tries to bring it to the forefront it still gets nowhere because the media is generally owned by the same big music/movie parent companies, it really is a frustrating situation.
All this DRM and laws is surrounding forms of entertainment for Jebus sake! This isn't about protecting lives, or destroying the planet, it's about when, how, and what I can do with a freakin' music CD, or over-hyped movie adaptation of the best five-book trilogy I've ever read. C'mon! It really is time to step back and look at the big picture now before it continues to worsen.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
It is legal to copy a CD to another CD for backup-purposes or for your car or as otherwise specified by fair-use. It will be legal to bypass the protection if it is needed to play back the music on your hardware.
It will however not be legal to do format-shifting, like copying copy-protected cds to mp3s. The reason given for this was that "you would not expect a CD to (physically) fit into a small digital & portable music player" (i kid you not).
So it's stupid, it's crap, but it's not nearly as bad as the pure DMCA.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
UK citizens are accustomed to participate more in society (in general) than US citizens are?
Note that you'll be fine if you have a Diesel-engined car with a mechanical fuel pump {e.g. older Fords and Peugeots}. These will run quite happily on cooking oil.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
But on a more serious note I wholeheartedly agree. The only reason I would rebuy stuff on CD when I've already got the vinyl is because most of my vinyl is knackered (or should I say well used :)
You forgot the other reason; because you can buy it on CD at a price that's far less than your time taken to transfer the thing is realistically worth.
I find it very hard to get good transfers from vinyl to CD/MP3. Of course, I am using a cheap (and old) 'Midi' HiFi (an oxymoron, but I digress), and doing it for one-offs, but...
If I can buy the CD for UKP 10.00, it is probably not worth my time transferring, bearing in mind the mediocre-quality end results.
Of course, if you have a good audio system, very good quality vinyl or cassette sources, and have enough material to make it worth your time setting it up very carefully and doing your collection on a 'production line' basis, then that would probably not be the case.
But it'd still be questionable whether it was worth it if you could get the album in question for 5.00 at your local Fopp store(note: Flash required, I don't use that...).
Singles are a different kettle of fish; it's often hard to get songs individually once out of the charts, and buying 20 mediocre CD albums to get 20 single tracks isn't much good. So, I would transfer them in that case.... *after* scouring the P2P networks for decent-quality rips.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
beautiful!
I've been under the impression the whole time that the DRM and every other anti fair use law is aiming at one thing. Locking down the music to a point to where they can charge you for each time you play it.
If it's not stopped hard in it's tracks, one day you'll go out and buy a CD, and after so many times listening to it it'll stop playing. Reading the fine print you really only licensed the music to play it 50 times. If you would like to listen to it some more, pay some more.
*DrugCheese rants*
eewwww
The four major labels (Sony BMG, EMI, Warner, and Universal) are members of every major national record industry trade group. Sure, the BPI and the RIAA are different organizations, but it's the same stool in a different pile.
massive world wide revolt where everyone starts downloading their music from bittorrent
That would be illegal. Even if the music isn't the all-rights-reserved crap of the major record labels, the major music publishers still in effect own all the melodies in the sense that most independent songwriters don't have the funds for a legal defense against an allegation of subconscious copying. The only way downloading music for free can be unquestionably lawful is if all of the following apply:
Let me be the first to appologize from canada: http://www.22minutes.com/realwrapper.php?target=ap ology_256.rm
you might get rid of the watermark but you will make so much nasty "twinkle" in the resulting mp3 that nobody will care you are sharing it.
And who's to say that the watermarking process itself won't create a nasty "twinkle" in golden ears?
and on top of that the code is perhaps made non- compressable
That might work to stop trading in lossy formats such as FLAC or SHN, but every lossy codec has a different algorithm determining the exact shape of the quantization noise that will distort your watermark.
As I wrote in my journal http://yro.slashdot.org/~hyc/journal/85312
the real point here is that music has to belong to individual people, not big corporations. The RIAA isn't doing anybody any favors; most of the new artists that get signed by labels get screwed by contract terms that whittle all their sales earnings down to less than 1/100th of a percent of the gross, while the record companies take the rest. The only way to fix this situation is for artists to remain independent and market/distribute their music on their own. Anybody can set up a web site and put up copies of their music for sale/download. With the Internet today, you don't need the RIAA.
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
www.mindawn.com - no DRM, provides both Ogg and FLAC, the FLAC can be decompressed to WAV which can be converted to any other format. All songs can be previewed, in full, up to 3 times in the Mindawn player (that's the extent of the DRM anyway), the client works on Linux, Mac and Windows. The system is open to any artist that wants to join, just pay the $50 sign up fee and your music is ready for sale as soon as you upload it. The library is still a bit thin, but it's growing quickly.
DRM is a technology that has been doomed from the beginning and anyone in his right mind would have never fallen for it. I am happy to see that there are still smart people out there who think on their own.
I'll start off by saying that I'm not a major fan of apple. I dont really care about them either way.
However, I was very intrested in getting an iPod, and PowerBook, when my laptop bite the big one.
I looked around, and asked alot of questions. The more I learned about PowerBooks, the more intrested I was. So I started asking about iPods.
It was about the time that I learned I would have to buy all the MP3s I had (bought and paid for) over again, that I realized I would never own an iPod.
About 2/3 of my collection I purchased from allofmy3s.com; the rest I ripped a few years back from CDs I had. Guess how many of hose CDs I still have that *aren't* scratched to hell?
I can understand why companies would show intrest in DRM... but I can't understand why they would implement it like this. DRM would be great for documents/files that you want to keep inside the office, and in many other situations. But it sure as hell isn't for this.
So. I suppose for now I'll stick with Linux and USB/MP3 players.
I de-drm my iTunes music with Jhymn. Now if only my Neuros could play m4a files.
When sales go down, it's piracy not "the market." Will they get it? That's the question. I'm afraid it will take some time of people just not buying in for them to understand what the people want. Basically, we want our digital music like our vinyl.
Supposedly the new version of the Xoom Media Player can play some DRMed WMV files. I have nothing to test it with so I can't personally say how this works, but maybe this info is useful to you.
and unable to be shared around to friends.
I am still unsure as to how this perceived right ever made its way into the ongoing vitriol between the *AA and consumers. If I release music (for sale) that you decide you'd like to use for your entertainment, being able to back up, media shift and time shift are reasonable consumer expectations. Being able to pass my music around to others, at *your* whim, is not.
As this battle carries on, consumers ridding themselves of the idea that they have some kind of inherent "right" to distribute copyrighted work would be a step in the right direction (no pun intended).
My problem is that I listen to a lot of music that's not well-known and not readily available through online services; thus, I'm forced to either buy the CD, or download it illegally. Because of the relative obscurity of the artists, I've found that the CD prices are astronomical. I will not pay that much money for music, nor do I think it's fair that I should be expected to. Furthermore, it makes no sense to me that the prices of technology and materials seems to have declined considerably over the years, and yet, if anything, the price of music CDs and movie DVDs has only gone up.
I would prefer to support my artists, but if it's not feasible, I have no particular qualm with stealing. By "not feasible", I mean that overpriced and DRMed music is not feasible, when I can obtain the same music for free, sans DRM, in just a few moments of effort. I've decided that not only will I engage in this behaviour, but I will make it clear to the people involved that I will do so, as evidenced by the following conversation I had with an employee of a music store the other day over the phone:
Store worker: Hello! Can I help you?
Me: I was wondering if you could tell me if you have the new CD by Monade?
Store worker: Let me check for you. *pause* We have one copy available. Would you like me to put it on hold?
Me: Could you tell me how much it is?
Store worker: It's $25.99.
Me: No thank you. For that price, I'll download it.
A song simply isn't worth $2.60 to me. Furthermore, I will not shell out money for a CD when I'm not even sure I will like the songs. I was able to download the album within an hour with virtually no effort on my part. The artists are coming locally to perform in a few weeks, at which point I'll buy the CD directly from them so that they receive a much larger cut of the profits.
You would think if penny pinching is good enough for Bill Gates (look for the comment on the Rotary speech), pence pinching would do for the British.
All I can say is, vote with your wallets. I will never buy any music that is copy protected. If there comes a time when I can't go in a store (local brick and morter preferablly, last resort purchase online) and buy a non-protected cd with the music I want on it (a real, hold-it-in-your-hand cd), then the "powers that be" will never see another red cent from me.
From that time forward, Viva la usenet!!
If I pay you for your music or art or whatever, I own it. Not a license, not a limited rental, not 'own it except I can tell you what you can or can't do with that' own it. period. once it is mine, i can do with it what i please. THAT'S what you seem to be forgetting. Once it is sold to me, it is MINE. Provided, of course i don't sign some contract agreeing to the rental/license/etc.
Download non-DRMed music.
m /m p3tunes.com/: //www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/4686 46/l isten.com/en/w ww.downloadmusicmart.com/c om/
http://www.emusic.com/
http://audiolunchbox.co
http://www.warprecords.com/bleep/
http://www.
http://www.livedownloads.com/
http
http://www.downloadpunk.com/
http://www.web
http://www.magnatune.com/
http://
http://music.download.
Of the pay-per-song sites, emusic.com is the best deal out there by far.
So you've never let someone borrow a CD? 'Sorry, I'm not licensed to redistribute the intellectual property. You'll have to buy your own copy.'
Note that he said 'share around' and not 'copy'.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Who are the Britons?!
Goodness knows why this is modded insightful, because it is quite incorrect. EUCD is not part of British law and does currently not hold any legal weight in Britain.
It may do in future, but it certainly does not now.
I'm always surprised that articles about DRM seldom if ever mention the fact that all DRM'd content is in effect printed on disappearing ink.
If you remember to back up your licenses (provided your DRM lets you do that in the first place), you can take your music and ebooks with you to your new computer. But you can't do that indefinitely. Microsoft, for example, only lets you do it twice. After that, all your paid-for content is simply gone.
I wrote about this in some detail on my blog last week.
No one seems to have mentioned that the wonderful people who are giving us downloadable music are the same people who publish CDs. Offering CDs works for their corporate interests now, but long-term, they will want consumers using DRM-based technologies.
It's the combination of a very high quality encode and open file format that got them into the whole mud puddle in the first place.
So, logically, CDs will soon be gone.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
This is a silly conclusion to reach; you're assuming that once CDs are phased out, reintroducing them is an impossibility. Bzzzzt. Once there's a ridiculous consumer backlash from DRM-based computer file-based songs, the CD will hastily make a comeback when record companies figure that rampant piracy is a decent compromise versus going bust.
First off, music is not a tangible item. You "own" music the same way you'd own a live performance. What you own is the means (and the right) to enjoy the music at your discretion, according to the terms under which it was released.
Second, If you insist on using your analogy, then you have to be consistent. If you really feel that you "own" it, as you would a tangible item, then you must treat it like one. If you happen to "share" the music with a friend, you must have no semblance of it in your posession until your friend returns it- the same way you'd loan a tool, a car, a book, or whatever. I dare say that the vast majority of people who think they have an inherent right to distribute copyrighted work conveniently ignore this particular aspect.
Notice how all the media companies are imposing DRM, they are moving toward fuck the customer.
Secondary markets increase primary market sales. People are more likely to "try" a cd (either buy, copy and sell, or buy an unknown that someone recommended) if they know there is a secondary market to sell it in. Think about it, someone has to be buying the new copies and reselling them and they would have to buy less new copies if no one was buying used, as they would have less money to buy new copies with. Thus, secondary sale helps drive primary sales. If you really want to hurt the RIAA, or the BPI, don't buy major label music, buying used may annoy them, but its not crippling.
Home machines get spyware and virus infested all the time. Can you really hold people responsible if their copies get out on the `net due to security holes on their computers? And if not, then what use is it?
Until they can go out and buy legislation like the big corporations.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You can "own" an unrestricted file easily, it is built into itunes in fact. Burn and rerip. There you go.
Also, when could you tape any commercially released VHS tape? They all have macrovision. Just like DVD. There is nothing new about that. It has been like that for 20 some years.
Q.
From a record company perspective CDs are a product, but from a musician perspective they are advertising. Musicians don't make money from CD sales. Under standard recording contracts, musicians never actually receive royalties until all costs have been covered, which rarely happens. Musicians make money by playing live. What they get out of CDs is exposure, which leads to bigger and better paying gigs. They get the same exposure whether someone buys a CD, hears it on the radio or downloads it, pay or no pay.
The more crap the recording industry throws at its customers, the more they will drift away from pay music and toward free music, put online by bands who have figured out that letting people listen to advertising for free is smart.
for the music industry, I've had to spend some time thinking about this, and: copyright on sound recordings just don't make sense. A copyright for preventing crooks from pressing their own CDs and selling them, sure, but really: who can own a digital recording? Reproducing them is so simple, fast and cost-efficient that being forbidden to do so feels like being forbidden telling stories one has heard.
And why should these big companies be able to fool batallions of young musicians to join their stables, and then to suppress all but the most popular?
No, really, why?
+Why should musicians have a 'work once, earn all-the-time'-clause in law? Get some goddamn gigs and work for a living like the rest of us do.
This has been an incoherent argument.
The competetion is the band you heard in that bar last Saturday night. Their CD costs a fraction of Britney's crap and is usually far better.
Rhe RIAA/IFPA aren't really afraid you're going to upload Britney's tracks. That's just stupid. If I want to hear some top ten pop crap, all I have to do is turn on the radio, and I can sample that pop crap at a far better quality than any downloaded MP3.
The RIAA/IFPI's problem is neither you nor the musicians need them any more. They are on the way out unless they change what they actually do.
They're not going to die from your uploading Britney. They're going to die when you discover that your local bands are better quality at a lower price.
Some time ago, I bought my wife a Sony Network Walkman(TM). It was exactly what she wanted, a portable MP3 player that could hold all her CDs, and it can even be used as a network hard drive to back up all the photos and artwork she creates on the computer.
About a month later she joined one of the music sites available in Canada. Try as she might, she couldn't copy the songs she downloaded onto her mp3 player and get them to play, even after talking to the site's tech support. She closed her account and tried to get her money back.
Then she said "Fuck that then. I'm going to steal the music instead. At least I know it will work."
(Of course, stealing the music in Canada is legal thanks to our current tax on such things as MP3 players and blank CDs and DVDs)
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
When I own something - in this case copyright on certain work of art - my song - I have all rights with me. I can't take away something you don't have.
"All rights"? Try "all privileges". I don't know about the basic justification for copyright in the United Kingdom, but at least the Constitution of the United States treats copyright as a privilege, not a basic human right on par with freedom of speech. The Constitution authorizes Congress to grant copyrights (up to the limit of a constitutional protection of freedom of the press which mandates some level of exemption for fair dealing), and Congress can take them away just as easily.
There IS a reason why independent movies/music are picking up the pieces these days.
On the other hand, independents have to worry more about lawsuits alleging subconscious infringements because they usually don't have the money to pay a forensic musicologist to certify each work as original enough for publication.
That being said, I'm not buying an IPod or any rent-a-tunes and hope the whole scheme fails. It's better to live in freedom than comfortable slavery. The one condition I have for music players is that I can load them using free software. It must let me copy music via usbfs or firewire equivalent. It must also play music that I rip with free software, ogg or non-patent encumbered mp3. These days, I get music from places like Magnatune or local artist CDs. I refuse to give money to people like the RIAA who want to restrict my rights so that they can continue to rape musicians like it was 1929. I wish more people would come to the same conclusions, but I'm afraid they are happy with Apple's comfortable slavery. That they hate WMF is good but not good enough.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Copyright covers copying, not listening or playing.
I don't know about the United Kingdom, but courts in the United States have ruled that an ephemeral copy or phonorecord even in the volatile memory of a player's read buffer is a reproduction, and it's an infringement unless fair use or some other exemption applies. Is it possible to contractually waive the right of fair use?
Boycott Britney and Lars and BUY INDIE! Look for CDs with the statement "please feel free to burn copies for your friends."
They're out there, all you have to do is look.
Also, used CDs provide no revenue to the RIAA companies that originally made the record.
If de-registering a computer for iTunes Music Store requires turning the computer on, booting to the operating system installation containing the iTunes instance, and connecting to the Internet, then how are you going to de-register the computer if you can't do all three steps because the computer is failing? For the benefit of users who are considering iTunes Music Store but do not have access to the manual, or who cannot access the manual because the computer with iTunes installed does not boot correctly, what specifically does the manual say about this situation?
Second of all, if you would have just read the f*cking manual, you would have read "Remember to deauthorize your computer before you sell it, give it away, or get your computer serviced."
De-authorizing a computer allows you to get back the authorizations you had before..
Third of all, if you had read the f*cking manual, you would have realized that Apple customer service will de-authorize the computers remotely if you can't wrap your mind around the idea of de authorizing it before-hand. "To deauthorize a computer to which you no longer have access, contact iTunes Music Store Customer support..." From what I can see, you're not a very good evangelist.. all I can see from your comment is a bunch of bitching. A true evangelist would have at least went to support.apple.com to confirm anything before bitching on slashdot.
How to de-authorize a computer
I don't recall VCR+ being advertized here, most people already had the concept that VCR = difficult to use, and joined the DVD purchase crowd instead.
I will GLADLY buy high-quality un-DRM'd content. Let me repeat that... GLADLY. That means lossless compression for audio
There is no lossless compression of audio. Even CDs are lossy in a way, as they knock out all frequencies above 22 kHz (the Nyquist frequency of the CD sample rate) and add a dither noise floor that, at best, varies from -110 dBFS to -60 dBFS by frequency. Besides, even if you consider CD quality "lossless", it wouldn't make sense to offer digital lossless audio downloads to the exclusion of CD sales because a lot of music buyers don't have a computer let alone Internet access let alone broadband.
It's epidemic - it's like 128k is the defacto standard and it's terrible!
Really, anything with any sort of trebble/sybols/etc sounds like trash. And you can hear it a lot on the radio now since most of them have these digital juke-box things where they just click the song they want to play. All encoded at 128kbit, and you can hear the poor quality sound even over FM Radio.
CD-Quality is very good, and all this compressed garbage being sold online amazes me. I always thought that quality was supposed to get progressively better as music production technologies improved.
I think a lot of people don't even really notice because they've never really listened to the music on anything else - it sounds crappy on the radio and it sounds crappy from iTunes.
I'm not against compression itself, I'm against the degree of which it's used commonly in downloadable music.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
however, they don't start happily on cooking oil - at the least you're going to need some diesel fuel (or something else that will work, like biodiesel) to get the thing started up. biodiesel, of course, is easily made from cooking oil.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
... with consumers begining to realise and leverage their own market power?"
lmaoIf it's a pain in the ass to the users, they will get frustrated and the promise of on-line music distro suffers.
I don't see most average consumers having a good time of this...
imho online music stores are just a rip off, for the price of a CD: - you get no physical copy (much lower cost to the producer) - you get a lossy version of a CD - you can't copy it as much as a CD a fair music store would either provide something closer to a CD (HQ, no DRM) or sell it at a much lower price.
>First off, music is not a tangible item.
No but copies of it fixated in some sort of physical form is. I believe the US copyright law refer to it as "material objects". This can be a copy of the music on a CD or a copy of the music on a hard disc and so on.
>You "own" music the same way you'd own a live
>performance.
You must be aware that we have two different things here. The "work" which is the non tangible music that can't be owned, you can hold copyright to it though. Then we have the individual copies of the work (mentioned above, which are material objects. These copies are owned just like everything else that is tangible and material. That ownership is not in any way connected to holding copyright, that is one does not imply the other. So when you buy such a copy of a work, you do indeed own it in all aspects and means you can possibly think of just like anything else. You still don't hold the copyright to the work though.
>What you own is the means (and the right) to
>enjoy the music at your discretion, according to
>the terms under which it was released.
This is just nonsens with no meaning, see above for "ownership" and what you own when you buy something. Buying things are covered by sale laws (or consumer sale laws) of the country by the way, have nothing to do with copyright.
As long as you don't violate the few exlusive rights (that has exceptions) the copyright law grants the copyright holder, you can share music or pass arround it to others just as you see fit, regardless of what the creator or the one releaseing the music wishes. If you don't like that concept, don't sell the music to start with since that means losing the ownership of those copies (not copyright which is why there are still SOME restrictions).
Next I assume you might want to think that someone buying chairs should not be allowed to pass arround the chair at *their* whim to others and have strangers sit in it... Or?
I've bought a few CDs that I didn't know were copy protected until AFTER I ripped them. I simply chuck them in my computer with the Shift key down (to prevent AutoPlay/AutoRun) and then rip to MP3 with CDex with "Paranoia Full."
(Strangely on my drive, CDex actually extracts faster on "Paranoia Full" than with its own routines. Paranoia also painlesly extracts from most copy protection types.)
I only found out it was copy protected when I tried to play it in my MP3-compatible CD player.
How good is this copy protection if I can rip it without even knowing it's protected, but can't play it in a valid CD player?
Then we have the individual copies of the work (mentioned above, which are material objects.
The copies are merely a means of conveyance. It could just as easily be sheet music, a cassette tape, or an MP3 player. They all refer to the same thing (the music), and they all do the same thing...convey, in one form or another, the musical creation of someone else. If you're suggesting that having a means of conveyance in your posession entitles you to distribute the contents, I'd say you're wrong. Back to my point...if you want to loan your CD to a friend, I'd say there's nothing wrong with it...so long as neither of you retain any copies while it's in the other's possession.
This is just nonsens with no meaning
Here is what it means: I create some music, and I'd like to offer people the chance to enjoy it. My terms are this: the CD costs $12.00, and I reasonably expect that anyone who is interested in the enjoyment that it will bring them, will pay me what I'm asking. I also reasonably expect that if the music is not of sufficient value, you will not steal it (as in, taking/using it without paying, or without asking). It's a contract of sorts. You either agree to the terms and get to enjoy the music, or you don't agree to the terms, and forgo the benefit that it would have provided. As the copyright holder, I can decide on the terms under which the music will be released. You have the right to decide if those terms are agreeable.
Interestingly, this is exactly how the procurement of a tangible item would work, except that taking without paying could very well land you in jail.
While it's true that there are ways around DRM, such as going analog, that's not really its purpose. DRM is more like putting up a shed around some pile of crap you don't want someone to take, say some lumber. It's a different legal ballgame for someone to break-in to steal a 2x4 than if there the lumber was laying in your front yard. The DMCA made this legal distinction for electronic files in 1998.
Now if you want to talk about lobbying on copyright legislation, I'm on your side. Disney is such an ironic company: they push for legislation to increase the copyrights to claim to stories they originally took from works in the public domain.
I think the current copyright setup in the US does not encourage creativity, as it was designed to do. I would like to see it changed back to something more like 14 years from commercial release, whereafter the work is public domain and made freely available from the library of congress. And I don't see why files that are DRM'd shouldn't be legally required to have a way to unlock the files using the license servers record of private keys.
But I'd rather see changes to the patent and copyright systems than force venders to not use DRM. No one is required to sell or buy DRM restricted products, and not every media site uses extremely restrictive license rules, it's entirely up to the merchant on what rights are provided (hence why they like it). Most non-subscription music sites allow their users to burn CD of purchased music. They're not dummies, they know you're going to burn a CD, rip it to mp3s and upload it to your iPod.
It's been really interesting lately watching these old-media companies adapt their ways to the new frontiers. At any rate, I'm sure what comes out won't be worse than the days before computers powerful enough to run an mp3 at higher than 8-bit mono and we had to buy our music in the malls for $17 at price fixing record stores.