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."

Comments

Missing from list

[overshoot]

They missed at least one unrestricted-music site: MagnaTune -- nice people. Don't miss the founder's comments.

Re:Independent music recommendation services?

[cortana]

cdbaby has a useful genre/category/mood browser.

Re:Independent music recommendation services?

[servoled]

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.

Get rid of Apple DRM on Linux [thnx to DVD Jon]

[drgonzo59]

My brother gave me an iTunes gift certificate. So bought some albums. After my windows hard drive died with a "click-o-death" I just re-installed Linux by itself and am using that now for about a year. But the problem is when I went to play the music that _I bought_ from the iTunes, I couldn't! I payed money for the freakin' songs, I want to play them. Why do I have to install windows or buy an Apple computer to play the music that I bought?

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!

enough iTunes bashing

[TRRosen]

enough already with the iTunes bashing just because its the most popular. iTunes has by far the least restrictive DRM of any of the (drm) services. And lying about those who are fighting to keep as many rights available to the consumer as possible accomplish nothing.

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.