Yahoo Exec Speaks Against DRM

AWhiteFlame writes "Dave Goldberg of Yahoo spoke against DRM on media files last Thursday at the Music 2.0 conference in Los Angeles. From the article: 'According to attendees, Goldberg pointed to the experience of eMusic, which offers its subscribers access to MP3 files without any digital rights management attached. Rights management restrictions have created a barrier for consumers, he said, making it a hurdle to transfer music to portable devices, and creating incompatibility between music services and MP3 players ... A Yahoo spokeswoman said that Goldberg was 'basically trying to move the industry forward,' and wanted to prompt industry-wide discussion about what the consumer experience is."

Comments

Promising, but...

[john-da-luthrun]

...DRM will only hit the buffers when ordinary users realise they're paying for their own shackles. At the moment I suspect it's still only a tiny minority of users who care about this issue, so "the market" still makes it worth record companies' while to impose DRM. Hence, while Emusic is a great service, it only has quite a limited selection - and even more limited if you live in the UK, and run up regularly against "This is not available for download in your country" notices even on Emusic.

Macrovision?

[MS-06FZ]

Please explain to me, then, why every VCR you can buy in stores has a Macrovision circuit, which causes the video signal to become intentionally degraded if you use a Macrovision signal (like a rental VHS tape played on another VCR, or a DVD player) on the line input - and not necessarily only if you happen to be recording that signal on the VCR. This is the same as DRM and it's worked its way into just about all the consumer-level VCRs out there, and it's been around for ages.