Slashdot Mirror
Former Apple Exec Speaks Against DRM
Wysz writes "Mike Evangelist, former Director of Product Marketing for Apple's "Pro" applications, has blogged his thoughts about DRM. Like many of us, he is offended by the fact that the record labels and movie studios treat their customers like criminals.
While he notes in the comments section that iTunes is the best of the worst, he admits to using third-party tools to remove the DRM from iTunes tracks."
Yet I bet it comes with more protection next release.
It already has. Hymn and JHymn are unable remove the FairPlay "protection" from videos and music purchased from iTunes 6. Videos can only be downloaded in iTunes 6. Want to downgrade to iTunes 5 to buy your music? Too bad, once you buy something from the iTMS with 6, you can no longer use 4.x or 5 to make purchases. Hello DRM!
http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/
I only know of one tool: hymn (Hear Your Music aNywhere) (formerly called PlayFair) http://hymn-project.org/
-J
Actually what I think you are describing is not legal in Canada.
You can only make copies of the original and those copies can only be for your personal use.
If you borrow a CD from a library, you are allowed to make a copy of it to use. You could then lend the original to a friend and they could make a copy and return the original to you. You then return the original to the library. You, your friend and the library now all have legal copies of the music. You could also buy a CD and lend it to a friend for them to copy.
You can not borrow a CD from the library, make a copy, and then give that copy to a friend to copy, because that would not be copying from the original, but from a copy.
It sounds stupid by I'm pretty sure that is how it works. The requirement to copy off the original constrains the possibility of mass distribution.
Now, back to the above post. In the case of BitTorrent, you are effectively copying from a copy, not from the original, and thus it is not legal.
if you want to read the 75 or so responses posted to his blog, you're out of luck here...
________
The latest episode in the war between music companies and their paying customers (the one where Sony decides it's OK to surreptitiously take over your PC so you can't make a copy of the music you thought you bought from them) has finally pushed me over the edge.
I've been a big buyer of prerecorded 'media' for over 35 years. I have two or three hundred vinyl LPs, several dozen 45's, a hundred or so audio cassettes, and roughly 60 prerecorded reel-to-reel tapes. They are jammed in my closet with a couple hundred VHS tapes, 450 CDs, and 500-odd DVDs. (Mercifully, I skipped the 8-track, Betamax and laserdisc formats.)
< image > media closet
Part of my media collection
I have to believe the record companies and movie studios would consider me a good customer. But with every day that passes it becomes more and more obvious that the greedy bastards who run these media companies prefer to treat me (and all their customers) like criminals. They continually expect us to pay more for less, and even then they are not satisfied. They want to pretend to 'sell' us their product, but they don't want us to actually have it. Well I've had enough.
From this day forward I will never spend a another dime on content that I can't use the way I please. If I can't copy it to my hard drive and play it using the devices I want, when and where I want, I won't be buying it. Period.
They can all take their DRM, and their broadcast flags, and their rootkits, and their Compact Discs that aren't really compact discs and shove them up their bottom-lines.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
disturbance in the Matrix?
Glitch.
Glitch in the Matrix; disturbance in the Force.
You can't take the sky from me...
In a retail store that enables tags like the GP mentioned? Yup.
Employee Theft 48.5% $15.1 billion
Shoplifting 31.7% $9.7 billion
Administrative Error 15.3% $4.8 billion
Vendor Fraud 5.4% $1.7 billion
From another source:Or another I have never heard of any data to the contrary, but _everybody_ might not know that as you implied.
Where in the hell can you return an opened CD these days?
I've done it a few times at various stores in Australia. I just take it back and politely explain that it doesn't play in my CD player (I normally don't bother mentioning that my CD player is PC based), and they normally just give me store credit.
Only once have they argued that "you can't return CDs", at which point I explained that nowhere on the product is it referred to as a CD (they can't for licensing reasons, right?), and that I bought it in good faith, thinking it was a CD. They got the manager, who gave me a store credit.
No! NO!
It is NOT legal because you've paid for it through levies. It's legal because IT'S LEGAL.
Those levies are a red herring. It would be legal even without the levies. It has been for years. Don't bring those into this. They're just a money grab.
Don't use the levies as an excuse, either. Not only have they stopped collecting levies on things like iPods, but paying for things beforehand like this aren't an excuse for bad behaviour. If you buy bullets with a levy on them to compensate families of shootings, you aren't allowed to go out and shoot people.
The only thing that you have to say when talking about downloading files in Canada is that it's legal. End of story. Any other justifications just weaken your position.
Have you not bought any games lately? "so now copy protection on games is pretty pedestrian and generally kept minimal" is just not true. For example, buy Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and watch in sadness as it installs a kernel-mode driver and disables all your CD burning software (regardless of what you intended to use it for).
I returned my copy to Walmart and yelled at a manager there until he gave me a refund, but it was a close call between that and taking the thing out in the back yard and setting the fucking box on fire. I'm now boycotting Ubisoft games after that experience.
He wasn't disputing that employees are the leading shoplifters.
He was disputing whether or not everyone knows that fact. But then again most reasonable people know that saying "everybody knows that employees are the biggest shoplifters" is merely hyperbole. Yes, it is a logical fallacy to belittle someone for not knowing a fact that the speaker considers to be common knowledge, but it's a widely used technique anyways.
I honestly haven't been keeping up on top of it, but the media always talks about Phish when talking about the other side of the coin.
http://www.phish.com/
I just listen to internet based radio stations myself.
I wonder if Metallica has ever figured out that Load didn't sell well cause it was a Load of Shit, not that people were actually downloading that crap?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
"You don't buy the music you buy permission to experience it."
No. I bought the music, the media it was recorded on, and the right to copy and remix it any way I like. What I don't have is the right to copy and redistribute without permission from the *copyright* owner, which is NOT the same as the owner of the music. Music is not property, and it cannot be owned any more than an idea can be owned. The idea of illegal redistribution was envisioned to be illegal CD manufactories and suchlike, NOT Joe Suburban copying records onto tape.
I have fair use rights to copy the music for personal use, which by common law for over thirty years meant, among other rights, the right to make copies and share it with friends. Music companies have tried to outlaw this, but legislatures and courts had skillfully ducked around finding such copying "unlawful". Up until recently, the infraction was a civil one, not criminal, which meant the infringer was liable for civil damages limited to actual monetary damages caused to the copyright holder -- less than a few bucks per album copied. Record companies didn't bother suing people for dozens of dollars, so massive copists like Metallica's band members, who copied thousands of other people's albums from vinyl to tape when they were young and poor, got away clean.
Now, with skillful placement of bribes to congressmen and a 30+ campaign to put Federalist Society judges on the bench, it's criminal to copy music, and the "damages" per individual copist is judged in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars -- obvious horseshit.
I don't mean to drown out your other points, as they are worthy. But we can't let them own this "license to experience on the correct media" meme. To win a semantic war, you can't let the enemy redefine the terms of the argument.
The record companies don't subsidize musicians anymore. Generally all of the costs associated with recording, promoting etc are a loan to the musician. If the record company doesn't get that money... the musician is screwed out of anything coming to them, and are in financial debt to the record company, with interest.
Maybe some musicians are able to get a good enough contract where this isn't the case, but they generally can't argue for that kind of contract unless the record company is sure that it'll be a hit. Not to mention, large record companies are signing fewer and fewer new acts sticking with proven cash cows.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Check these out:
http://www.phlow.de/netlabels/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.archive.org/audio/netlabels.php
http://numia.scene.org/n2/yellowpages.php
http://www.rowolo.de/labels
http://www.acowo.org/labels.php
I'm one of those generally honest people you speak of. I buy CDs regularly and I avoid "file sharing." I have hundreds of albums worth of MP3s that came straight from the CDs I bought.
I'd like to buy music online, but I'm faced with some problems. I prefer higher quality music than iTunes offers. They don't have a choice of spending a bit more for better quality; it's just one size fits all. Then there's the fact that I have to use their media players to play my music. My cell phone and PSP will all of a sudden become useless as music players unless I go through the cumbersome burn/re-rip process that will give me even lower quality than I started with.
Even though I'd love the convenience of downloading, I still have good ol' CDs. I can get universally playable MP3s at any quality I want. I'm happy. Except now they're putting DRM on those too. I can no longer assume that the CDs I buy will ever be playable on my PSP without jumping through a whole grab-bag of hoops. I have to explain to my teen-age daughter that the reason daddy's computer is chock full of hacking software is just so I can listen to the music I legally bought in the store.
And the worst part is that if I really was a "file sharer" the music companies have not stopped me from sharing their music with my favorite P2P client. All they've done is made an honest guy's music listening experience an exercise in frustration.
Thanks.
TW