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

Interesting..

[taskforce]

...considering Yahoo's music service uses a propretary media player (Yahoo's) with a propretary DRM implementation (Microsoft's) on the subscription model where your music is all deleted when you cancel your subscription... by DRM.

If you live in the UK... (Gowers)

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Sadly, the Slashdot eds decided not to run my story about the Gowers Review calling for evidence as of yesterday, so since it's directly relevant I'll mention it here.

For those who don't know, this is a government-ordered review into the current state of intellectual property, and whether it needs amending in light of new technologies, easy distribution over the Internet, etc.

The review is concerned with several quite general questions, quite a few specific issues, and any other comments interested parties care to make. Among the specific issues explicitly mentioned in the call for evidence (available on the web site linked above) are:

• the period for which copyright lasts;
• what sorts of fair use rights might be appropriate in the UK (bearing in mind that we don't have anything directly equivalent to US fair use provisions at present, and a lot of the things mentioned in this discussion -- such as format-shifting for personal use -- are clearly illegal here at present);
• the use of DRM (including several very relevant questions about balancing the right of a copyright holder to protect their work and the right of a consumer to use it reasonably);
• access to orphaned works, for which the legitimate copyright holder can no longer be reached.

So, if you're from the UK and you've ever bitched on Slashdot about the unfairness of DRM, the media cartels gaining ever longer "temporary" protections, the daftness that format-shifting is illegal even when the industry is happy to sell you equipment that all but requires it to be useful, the use of patents to create a barrier to entry for OSS, or any number of other IP-related issues, stop complaining on here and write to the Gowers Review to make your case. You can bet the big businesses all will be.