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EFF Releases Music DRM Guide
Chris Chiasson writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently created a plain English guide to several fair use restrictions that major online music services, such as Apple's iTunes, force on their customers via Digital Rights Management (DRM) laden music files and End User License Agreements (EULAs). An excerpt from the guide follows:
'Forget about breaking the DRM to make traditional uses like CD burning and so forth. Breaking the DRM or distributing the tools to break DRM may expose you to liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) even if you're not making any illegal uses.'
The EFF also lists four alternative music services which sell unrestricted files."
They missed at least one unrestricted-music site: MagnaTune -- nice people. Don't miss the founder's comments.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
cdbaby has a useful genre/category/mood browser.
I'm not sure if it's your taste in music (hardcore punk/metal/post-hardcore), but if you take a look at http://www.hxcmp3.com/ they have a "sounds like" field in their search. Chances are it'll be nothing overly clever, simply the bands who upload their music suggest if you like XXX band, you'll probably like them. But all the same, more music download sites should do this.
Not quite right - you have the right to free speech, and therefore can technically speak on any subject you wish - however if you've signed an NDA - you're restricted, by choice. You violate that, you're screwed, just as reverse engineering a protected technology would be.
"My name is Derek Slater. I'm 21, and I'm a senior at Harvard College. I'm also a fellow at the Berkman Center, working on the Digital Media Project. The last three summers, I've worked at the EFF, Creative Commons, and the Samuelson Clinic."
If that's not hard-working, I'd like to know what is.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Allmusic is a good starting point for reccomendations. You can search an artist and it will give you similar artists along with artists who influenced that artists and artists who were influenced by that artist. It also is a good source for biographical and discography information.
The Yahoo subscription service also has a neat feature where you can queue up songs which are similar to a song/album/artist and listen to those songs, plus at $60 a year it is a pretty cheap way to find new music. I wouldn't reccomend it for building a music library due to the subscriptionyness of it though.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
I found Jon L. Johansen's site and his two programs :
1. FairKeys - to get the keys from Apple's site
2. DeDRMS - uses the keys to DeDRM the files.
The site is here (no html hyperlink, copy and paste if you want):
nanocrew.net/?page_id=59
You also need to install mono for linux as the programs are in C#. After that just run with "mono programname options". No I can play my albums again. Thanks Jon!
Its Digital Restrictions Management, get it right Slashdot ;)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
A lot of indie music sites have some sort of "Sounds Like" or "Influenced By" search. Check out this list for about 50 indie music sites.
If anyone's reading this and has a site that's not on the list send me an email (robert AT rmpmusic DOT com) and I'll add it to the list. Include your slashdot account URL and I'll link to it, too.
Who doesn't like free music?
I signed up when it was unlimited downloads...now you get a certain number a month depending on your subscription...I have the cheapest one and it's $10 a month for 40 downloads.
Best part? 192kbps+ MP3s! No protection! And even if you cancel your subscription...if your harddrive dies you can just sign up again (for as little as a month) and they'll let you re-download your whole library for free.
Granted, you lose some fidelity as it is MP3 and not CD-quality...and there are very few 'brand new' or 'popular' artists...
but I don't care. The price is right and I've downloaded a whole bunch of cool stuff that I like.
Blar.
"So, does that mean fair use is not protected by law in the USA?" - yes, fair use is defined (very, very vaguely) in Title 17, section 107. In practice, fair use is defined by in court decisions as whatever-the-hell-we-think-it-should-be. Caselaw is inconsistent, and there are precious few rules.
Also, fair use is not a license, it's a defense in court. But by the time you actually win, you've already paid $100,000+ in legal fees, so you lose anyway.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Some words may appear to intentionally attack, but let's consider the ramifications of the words you chose.
(Sidenote: Merriam-Webster is my source)
Sorry, Jack, but claiming bias here is a bit of a waste.
- Non-compete employment clauses aren't valid in California.
- You can't sign yourself into slavery.
- Homeowner's association contract clauses that prohibit small satellite dish antennas are all invalid.
- Attempts to put an EULA on a paper book are null and void.
- There are very specific rules on how the interest and payments section on a loan are to be worded and formatted.
The list goes on and on. The real world just isn't as simple as you'd like it to be.
That's actually not true (though they do make it inconvenient). Go to the front page with the signup form, then click "Contact Us" at the bottom, then on the contact page click "Browse" at the top. You'll end up on this page.
I also reccomend finding radio stations which have shows that play music you like, and see what else they play.
For example, WFMU has a nice playlist search where you can look for shows which have played certain artists. They also have all of their shows archived back to ~2000, so you can find a show that plays stuff that you like and listen to a few of the archives to see if they play anything else you like.
They also have a genre finder that allows you to search for shows by genre.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
Also, the Emusic search page is here: search
how many of these articles come out and say iTunes is bad because it has DRM and DRM prevents you from burning CDs (but failing to mention that iTunes does not do this).
and adding misinformation such as this-
"Restricts back-up copies: Song can only be copied to 5 computers"
You can copy iTunes song to a billion computers if you want but you can only play them on 5 computers at a time. It should be noted that with a CD you can only legally use one copy at a time (first sale doctrine says you have a license for ONE COPY). In this instance iTunes actually expands the rights of its users.
PS changing the number of times IN A ROW one can burn a PLAYLIST is a nonissue - if your making more than 7 copys of a song your not backing up your pirating. and if you really need to have 60 copies just recreate the playlist and start over.
So, does that mean fair use is not protected by law in the USA?
It's protected to the degree the law protects it. And in the USA (and many other nations now), "fair use" has been greatly limited.
You can reverse-engineer the technology (a right protected by law), and an EULA that restricts your rights too far is not valid, even if you signed it.
The DCMA is a law, not a EULA. It modifies previous copyright law, so things that you used to be able to do under "fair use" provisions, you can't do anymore. Elected representatives have that power--that's how laws come about in a democracy.
The most probable consequence of having DRM on CDs and download MP3s is that there will be a fork in the popularity of music. Music with DRM will have one clique or group of followers and non-DRM (or pre-DRM) will have a different group. These groups will generally be unaware of each other's music (because less and less music is being exposed to a general audience through broadcast radio).
The non-DRM and pre-DRM (albums released before the widespread implementation of unbreakable DRM on CDs) will not appeal to the DRM crowd because it will have a 'old' or 'amateur' character to it.
DRM music will not appeal to the sharers because it will be too expensive to buy and it will seem 'plastic' or 'corporate'.
This split may develop not unlike the traditional splits in American pop music along racial and class lines. In the 20th century musical trends would all eventually cross lines and there would be the occasional crossover recording between black pop music (originally called "Rhythm'n'Blues" in order to allow the records to be sold in white stores in the days of racial segregation) and middle-class white "Top40" music. This probably won't happen as much in the coming music legality segregation era (where people who trade the non-DRM music can and will be put in prison for their activities).
The file sharers won't associate with the corporate poppers because they won't be able to trust that the more monied people who can afford to buy the DRM recordings won't turn them into the Copyright police for a reward. (Or to keep themselves out of prison if they get offered a '3 years or 3 names' deal should they get caught doing their own file sharing.) The file sharers will make much effort to keep their own culture (their own 'illegal' recordings) secret. That would be completely opposite of the situation today, where everyone tries to make others aware of especially interesting recordings.
The file share community in the future will have many of their favorite recordings come from albums that were released on CD in years before unbreakable DRM when it was easy to convert CDs to MP3s and distribute them. They (the file sharers) will not be engrossed in the current corporate pop culture trends. This will become one of the ways that the copyright police (or bounty hunters) will identify file sharers. They won't know who the latest corporate pop stars are. They have a parallel culture that will have been defined as illegal, and therefore kept secret.
Needless to say, the entertainment corporations will covertly allow the illegal 'parallel' file sharing culture to remain in place because whenever a recording appears that is good enough to crossover to the corporate culture, it can be released without paying any royalities to the musicians. This would be similar in manner to the way that record companies in the 1950's and 1960's would pay black entertainers next to nothing for the rights to their recordings and then collect millions of dollars for decades from record sales and broadcast fees.
I'm rather intrigued that no one is exploring the consequences that the coming unbreakable DRM will have on popular culture.
DRM does indeed suck, and open standards are good, but in all fairness, the EFF article there is misleading or wrong on at least a couple points with regard to iTunes purchases:
For one thing, check out this paragraph from TFA:
Yes, it's true you can only burn a single unmodified playlist seven times. However, to burn it more than seven times, all one has to do is change the playlist - you can simply change the order of a couple tracks, add a track, delete a track, change the name of the playlist, whatever - and then burn it again; you can even change the playlist and then immediately change it back to the way it was before burning, so that you can still easily make as many burns of the playlist as you like. The workaround is incredibly trivial. The burn limit, then, doesn't remotely stop anyone from making >7 CDs of a playlist for friends or whatever; all it does (and all it's intended to do) is require a little human intervention in the duplication process after every seventh burned disc, to keep you from simply hooking up your computer to a multi-hundred-disc burner and cranking out copies by the truckload to sell on the streets while you go out for a sandwich. Unlike songs from some of the other DRM'ed music outfits, there is no limit on the number of times you can burn any individual track, so if you really "need" to burn a thousand CD copies of whatever it is you're getting, you can do so (and you can even burn the same playlist a thousand times; you just can't do it automatically, without intervening after every seventh burn).The box at the end of the iTunes section also adds:
Do note, too, that when Apple changed the number of times you could burn a playlist without changing it from ten down to seven (which was done at the request of the record companies, who despite their frequent filesharing lawsuits and whatnot are evidently still more concerned about unauthorized actual physical copies), they also increased the number of computers you could simultaneously authorize to play the music, up to five; it used to be just three. I personally think this is a considerable improvement over the DRM situation when the iTMS first launched (since the playlist burning limit is so trivial to workaround, whereas if you wanted to listen to music on more than three computers you'd have to deauthorize one and authorize another each time, aside from the greater need to be able to play a track on multiple comps than to be able to burn more than seven "backups" in the first place).
All that said... yeah, I do think it still sucks that DRM "has" to be there, and I do use other services that provide unfettered, DRM-free MP3s (eMusic, for one).
A quick skim of the Yahoo music site show at least the following are compatible with its service:
Creative Labs Zen Micro
Dell DJ 20GB (Gen 2)
Dell DJ 30GB
Dell Pocket DJ
RCA Lyra RD2762
RCA Lyra RD2765
Audiovox SMT 5600 Smartphone
Creative Labs Zen Portable Media Center
iRiver H10
iRiver H320
iRiver H340
iRiver Portable Media Center-120
Samsung YH-999 Portable Media Center
Creative Labs NOMAD MuVo series
Creative Labs NOMAD MuVo series
Creative Zen Touch
irock 800 series
RCA Lyra 1021/1071
RCA Lyra 2010/2011/2012
Rio Cali series
Rio Carbon series
Rio Forge series
Samsung YP-MT6 series
Samsung YH-820
Samsung YH-925
SanDisk 256MB/512MB/1GB
You can head over to the WMA compatibility list at MS and find a list of at least over 250 portable devices plus another 100 or so other devices that can play WMA.
I would estimate from the MS site referenced alone, there is about 100x more devices on the market that can play various WMA files then can play something from iTMS. Many of the above players will play music bought from just about any music service as well (Yahoo, Rhapsody, Wal-Mart etc) with the exception of iTMS.
There are a large percentage of people who do have iPods and I guess technically you may be correct in your statement about a majority being excluded. They are NOT excluded by the lack of other units and services though, only the fact that they decided to stick with the single choice of iTMS and an iPod. Each person is capable of making a decision on which route to take. I still use cd audio disks and plain old data cds of mp3s in an old $40 portable cd player. At my computer I use Rhapsody (no individual track buying though, just unlimited streaming). If I was making the jump to a music service and wanted portable support, I believe the choice of players and services of the other offerings would far outweight the "stlye" and "hipness" of an iPod and iTMS any day. YMMV
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
The thing to note about Hymn (a tool you can use to convert AAC files with DRM into plain AAC files) is that is DOES NOT break the DRM Apple uses. It uses YOUR OWN KEY to extract the data.
That is why Hymn still stands out in the open (relativley), while WMV crackers are more low-profile.
That is the difference, the Apple tools leans toward the side of Fair Use (legally at least) while the WIndows Media breakers looks much more like pure copyright bypass mechanisms as defined by the DMCA.
Consider that the first versions of Hymn even still included your userID in the de-DRM'ed file, as a goodwill gesture to show it really was for fair use. Sadly Apple axed that feature when they changed iTunes a bit to try and not play files converted through Hymn (Apple seems to have given up trying though since now there's no way to tell the difference between an AAC file from Hymn and one from other programs).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley