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Yahoo Music Chief Comes Out Against DRM
waired writes "It seem that a trend has begun in the music industry after Steve Jobs essay. Now a senior Yahoo chief has spoken out in favor of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' call for major labels to abandon digital rights technology (DRM). It points out that consumers are getting confused and that the Microsoft DRM "doesn't work half the time"."
3) have their talent pool stop making revenue (crappy quality music, and so on-- also highly unlikely).
Don't rule this one out.. Some talent is going inde. Some consumers are moving outside the Clear Chanel CD advertising route. Talent now gets exposure on youtube, Google Videos, etc. They put their products on CD Baby and emusic. You get higher quality (192Kbs VBR compared to 128Kbs fixed) with no DRM and lower prices. This trend is growing. Given time it will gain critical mass. It is legal and the RIAA and their team of lawyers are powerless to sotp it. They will have to adopt or die.
Arvil Lavine and Bare Naked Ladies have already moved. I think some of the newest TSO releases are now on inde labels. The RIAA can only screw the talent and consumers so much before they both seek an alternative.
The truth shall set you free!
"The only thing it flies in the face of is consumer convenience."
I agree with much of your post, but this is incorrect. "Fair use" is a well-established legal principle, not just a Slashdot mantra. While not its primary goal, DRM does its best to contradict our established rights by preventing even fair use of legally purchased material.
#DeleteChrome
You're right, Yahoo have made this point in the past. In fact, there was a Slashdot story on it at the time.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
"The irony, of course, is that 'GPL violation' would be completely meaningless if that were true."
This is not the case. A GPL violation is a copyright violation. The genius of the GPL is that it uses both license and copyright law to force developers to give up their usual rights under copyright law. If license law is suddenly struck down, no one can use GPL code because they no longer have a right to do so, because of copyright law. If copyright law is struck down, one does not need the GPL to legally distribute the source code. The whole point of the GPL is that the GPL wins in either situation.
Jobs has said that doing a mixed store with some DRM and some non-DRM isn't something he's interested in doing.
It would be similar to the Zune where you can squirt some songs, but not others. Confusing.
You don't need to worry about any of this, since you think WMA sounds fine. It's not the same quality, especially if it's coming out at half the file size, but if you can't tell the difference, don't worry about it.
Enjoy your WMA. Just don't share it with anyone, nobody else prefers WMA. Everyone else thinks it sounds like shit, even at high bit rates.