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How to Turn A Music Lover to Piracy

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the self-defeating-drm dept.

dugn writes to tell us The Consumerist is running a story about how a run of the mill (read non-tech-savvy) music lover was pushed to become a pirate. "I've devoted a not-inconsequential chunk of my life to collecting music; to tracking down obscure records, cassettes, 8-Tracks and CD's of all genres and styles. And now apparently that is all but over. Music has somehow evolved from tangible things into amorphous collections of 1's and 0's guarded over by interested parties as if they were gold bullion. How so very sad."

2 of 521 comments (clear)

  1. Purchasing a License? by Otis2222222 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Well" she responded, "You didn't actually purchase the files, you really purchased a license to listen to the music, and the license is very specific about how they can be played or listened to." Now I was baffled. "Records never came with any such restrictions," I said. She replied, "Well they were supposed to, but we weren't able to enforce those licenses back then, and now we can"
    Wow. This succinctly sums up everything that's wrong with the online music business, in my opinion. If I am going to pay 99 cents a track, the product I buy needs to be as equivalent as possible to what you get when you buy a physical product from the music store. For that matter one of my main objections to online music stores is the fact that you cannot download lossless-encoded songs (let alone DRM-free).
  2. Re:hmmm... by myc_lykaon · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Cubas' status as a world leader in medicine is actually debatable, not laughable. It is recognised in many places as a world leader in oncology with substantial numbers of people paying for treatment there, and those people are from Europe and South America.

    People joke about the pricipal export of Lichtenstein being false teeth and the main export of Greece being culture, but Cuba does 'lend out' a phenomenal number of doctors to other countries.

    I've visited and been very impressed at the serious level of effort they put into education and medicine.

    Yes, they can't compete on level terms with the West and the phenomenal amout of cash we can put into solving a problem (viz. shotgun gene sequencing) but it very much reminds me of theoretical physics in Russia in the late 70's - frequently we were surprised by solutions to normally intractable problems they produced. We would say it would require many months of CPU time to simulate and their reply was 'we have no computers to do the simulation - we just invented new mathematics'. Cuban medicine and education appears to rely on inventiveness and necessity being the mother thereof.