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Apple Sends Cease-and-Desist To the Hymn Project
Troed writes "Tools for removing DRM from iTunes-purchased songs (myFairTunes7, QtFairUse6) have been available from the Hymn Project Web site for some time. These are legal in many countries. But on the 20th Apple sent a Cease and Desist note to Hymn's ISP, forcing the site admins to remove all download links. It is speculated that this is due to a new tool being created (Requiem) that attacks Apple's FairPlay DRM through cryptographic means instead of by copying the unprotected music from memory while it is being played. But since the tools are no longer available (after several days there are still no public mirrors), discussion around this topic has died out. Many users buy music from the iTunes store and rely on DRM removal to be able to play the content on their mobile phones. Apple may be on dangerous ground here, since those users might now start checking out competing services."
Now tell me how is this not evil and not unlike Microsoft?
I assume that anyone who has the original installer could upload it to the pirate bay as a torrent, right?
Fuck Apple, and fuck DRM.
P2P. You could call it stealing, but I call it sharing.
Apple wants you to pay for music!
when Microsoft do DRM its like "OMG they are freaking evil!"
lets see what excuses apple fanboyz come up with now
http://harrier.net/songbook/S/shorth.html
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Another draconian legal tactic by a truly evil company! I would never touch on of their prod... oh wait, Apple?
Ooh, look over there! Shiny!
So that the Hymn Project people can buy their own island nation to continue their work. More realistically, what's to stop them from hosting everything in a different country? Could they get arrested in the United States for "exporting" DRM cracking software?
I'd put money on http://www.doubletwist.com/ being next. Given the cross platform, Zune, iTunes etc applications it covers, Doubletwist would be a pretty high profile target to hit with a C & D.
G4 Hackintosh
am praying that this decision is overturned... I'm praying to the iHouse of iApple which is led by iSteve... Now, just time to utter an iHymn.
Also, soviet russian jokes, car analogies, linux and beowulf clusters are definitely not allowed in the iHouse of iApple.
Why does anyone still shop at the iTunes Store for music if they want DRM-free songs? Just use Amazon.
Look, they are a business, and need to make money, at the very least just to pay the bills and survive. Running iTunes must cost a bundle. If everyone pirated their music, this great service would be gone. Additionally, they have no choice - they have to pay the RIAA etc for the music to begin with. It's like stealing a coke from a small grocery store owner - you're not screwing coca cola over, your screwing the store owner over.
Apple on dangerous ground? They may lose .01% of their market! People who crack the DRM on iTunes (and their purchase hinges on that) are a tiny part of the market. I can understand both sides here (Apple kinda has to do this or the record companies, who don't like Apple enough as it is, will get even more pissed, but the crackers want fair usage of their music), but saying that Apple is on "dangerous ground" is more self-important internet crap.
If someone gets a Cease & Desist letter threatening them with harm if they don't c&d, then fights it in court and shows the C&D was invalid, the court should treat the sender of the C&D letter like any other bully making threats. Fine them, count a strike against the attorney who wrote it (and start disciplining/disbarring them after some number of strikes in some period of time). And find damages to cover the time the recipient had to spend to straighten this out when they weren't wrong.
And when the C&D sender loses such a case, every other recipient of such a letter should be able to file to get the same results applied to their own case, if they can prove it was the same circumstances (which should be cheap, easy and quick if they were indeed the same). That should load up the fines and strikes on the sender and their lawyers.
Which in turn will deter lots of these C&D letters, especially when they're just bluffing (and they know it). Why should a law license and a retainer let these bullies litter the land with their C&D letters that get enforced with just the threat of intimidation, but which don't have a legal leg to stand on (or ever have to demonstrate they do)? They should have to face some consequences for abuse themselves.
--
make install -not war
I will have be forced to stop using the iTunes store if the Hymn project disappears. I don't own an iPod—I don't *want* an iPod—but I do want to play my music on the Linux-powered media box in my living room. Is that really too much to ask?
Like it or not, utilities to break encryption are illegal in the USA and in many other countries that have aggressive intellectual property laws. In addition, using these utilities are against the license agreement between the purchaser and the copyright owner. Although you may have perfectly good intentions, breaking DRM is simply illegal.
Happily, there are legit ways around many of these problems. For one, many music stores (including iTunes) are selling higher quality, DRM-free tracks. Secondly, you can simply buy a CD and rip it. Thirdly, you can simply burn a CD from iTunes, and then rip that.
There are rumors that iTunes will be going DRM-free in the near future. It'd be very cool if that worked out.
A whois lookup for hymn-project.org says the domain's REGISTRANT is in India. A Netcraft lookup shows the netblock owner as "NECTARTECH, LLC SAN JOSE CA US".
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Let's say you go get a hair cut. Then you walk out without paying for it. You haven't deprived anyone of physical property, however it is still "theft of service".
Now, in the case of copyrighted material... The original creator of the content has performed a service for you, that you are accepting by obtaining that content. Their service was actually creating the content for you and a bunch of other people -- you all split the service providers fees evenly (just like a group of people going to see a movie -- the theater owner is charging for several thousand dollars for that movie showing, and everyone in attendance is splitting the cost of it evenly).
Since it would be extremely inconvenient for a content producer to go and collect fees from everyone that wants that content prior to them releasing it, we as a society have created a system of laws (copyright) which allows the service to be performed up front, and the collection for that service to take place on the back end. And anyone who takes advantage of that service (outside the normal bounds of copyright law) have committed a "theft of service", no different than walking out of a barber shop without paying, or sneaking into a movie theater without paying.
The easiest way to remove Apple iTunes DRM is to burn an audio CD with your tracks. Then, rip the CD to MP3. In fact, Apple tells you this explicitly on their website in the tech support section. There are several advantages to this, the number one being, you don't have to run fly-by-night, I-don't-know-this-person, hey-ma-look-at-that-keylogger-go greyware to do it. You just need a fucking CD BURNER. And I thought /. kids were smarter than this.
The only dangerous ground apple is in is with record companies if they don't aggressively pursue DRM faults/breaks/violations. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that apple has clauses in their contracts with these companies that force them to maintain their DRM updated, track offenders and litigate where necessary.
This is not to say that apple is blameless. They aren't. Apple, at this point, has had the chance to shame record labels (at least them. It appears we are doomed to repeat this nonsense with video) into changing their contracts. They took the opportunity to sound like a white knight in copyleft circles for a few weeks and did nothing. Maybe this was because companies were intransigent in negotiation. Maybe it is because apple's commitment to DRM free media was less than sincere. Probably both.
Part of what is allowing this silliness to happen is the dMCA itself. These folks can be send a CnD because they might be cryptographically breaking DRM, but regular old listening and rerecording is ok. The anti-circumvention clause allows companies to litigate in the absence of real infringement. That is the problem.
a thousand internets for the first link to a working mirror two thousand internets for everyone who subsequently mirrors it ten thousand internets for the first person to get it hosted on apple.com
www.tdobson.net #### Dare to Dream #### blog.tdobson.net
Any mirrors yet?
Let's be realistic here -- the number of people who hate DRM is pretty small to begin with, and the number of them who continue to buy from iTunes (especially now that Amazon has just about everything DRM-free) is even smaller still.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
So he bashes DRM http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/ and then turns around and has his company issue a take down for anti-DRM software? That's awfully two-faced.
Apple is not under threat, they still sell bulk music, people still durn their own CDs etc. The difference here is that cracking DRM via an attack on the cryptography is illegal in most countries, while other, simpler methods, are in a grey area.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
A C&D ORDER on the other hand, comes from a court and you'd better do what it says or risk pissing off the judge. Almost always a bad idea.
In any case, a C&D Letter can be responded to by a letter of your own back to the sender requesting "clarification", setting off a torrent ( :-) ) of correspondence that could level a forest while consuming time as you continue to do as you please. Or you could just use it to pre-emptively go to court and threaten the sender with attempting to interfere with your business/life/whatever by harassing you. And you will have the letter/evidence in hand, signed by the sender.
And of course, in the greatest of Slashdot Traditions, IANAL.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
that removing software from its original website means no one can get it off the internet anymore
/. kids are smart enough to know that transcoding decreases the sound quality, and burning to CD is a waste of money.
But judging from the other comments here, while they're self-righteous enough to bitch about DRM, they don't have the fucking backbone to just not buy DRM'ed music.
The original thread is here: http://hymn-project.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2496
I don't have an mp3 player or an Ipod. Don't need one. I don't use P2P or torrent sites either. I use free direct-download sites and burn the songs I download to CD.
>I thought /. kids were smarter than this.
They are. That's why they want a process which preserves every little bit of audio goodness possible under the already less-than-CD-quality, marginal-bitrate-file circumstances. They'd rather NOT use a process which takes the files and transcodes them TWICE, thus compromising the audio quality even further.
They may not be audiophiles, but they DO prefer to save what little quality they started with.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
> But since the tools are no longer available (after several days there are still no public mirrors)
Umm... a simple Google search for "myFairTunes" got me a working download for version 7 as the first result. Am I missing something?
This message will self-destruct in 5, 4, 3...
The new commandment of Slashdot: "Thou shalt not believe in Imaginary Property. Unless said Imaginary Property happens to be free software, in which case it most definitely is not imaginary. Anyone violating the GNU GPL will suffer the death of a thousand slashdottings."
It's not a site for tech professionals any more, it's a circlejerk for pirates seeking moral justification from each other. Hey guys, if it's fine to break an IP license for a movie, song or game, it's fine to break it for the Linux kernel as well, since that "property" is no less "imaginary".
This is yet another reason I refuse to purchase an Apple product.
I'm glad they are making some contributions to open source. That's lovely. I'm also glad they abandoned their mess of an operating system for something unix based -- I find it a lot easier to help out friends with their computers now, if they are Mac users. I even for some time recommended to friends / family that they get Macs.
However I will never allow myself to give this company any money. They do a pretty good job of masking their ridiculous greed and destruction with a slick PR campaign, but some of us are still not fooled. It's interesting that Apple was born out of the hobbyist computing community, yet is continously the one stomping on the little guy hardware/software hacker these days. Apple has absolutely no interest in openness, other than when it helps their bottom line -- if they only had the power and money of Microsoft they'd likely be even worse, considering Jobs' ridiculous Messiah complex and the number of idiots who buy into it.
The tag on this article says it all: Fuck Apple.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
I used to use Hymn to make copies of my legally purchased iTunes songs. It was only because I *could* make m4a files out of iTunes downloads that I purchased music from Apple in the first place.
Now that Amazon is in the mp3 business I've been buying all my music from them. I've bought more music from Amazon in the last two months than I did in the last year from iTMS. iTunes was great when there was no other legal way to get a large selection of artists. That's changed now.
-EvilMagnus
I suppose this is a reasonable point to make one thing clear about myself:
I don't hate Apple.
In fact, I rather like them. They make good stuff - both hardware and software - and I enjoy using it.
For what it's worth, Apple is entirely within their rights to request that I cease distribution and development of this software. The WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act (a component of the DMCA), 103, says that "manufacturing" and distributing software (i.e, ffh) to circumvent a protection system (i.e, Fairplay) is illegal. While I don't agree with this law, I don't really have much of a choice but to follow it.
If you disagree with this as well, good. Tell your senator as much. Apple isn't to blame, though.
It's also probably worth considering that Apple is probably bound to pursue any violations. Although I'm certainly not privy to the details of their agreements with record labels, I strongly suspect that one of the terms of those agreements is that Apple must maintain the integrity of the Fairplay system (or - I imagine - risk dire penalties, either in terms of cash penalties or in companies breaking off music licensing contracts). I certainly can't fault them for doing what they've got to do.
The cryptographic attack on Apples DRM (And Vista's protected video ) could be aided by the so-called "Cold Boot Attack" discussed a couple of days ago. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/21/1543234
In fact, this could be useful for cracking BD+ under Vista as well....
My rights don't need management.
Sorry, I hate DRM as much as anyone with common sense, but this is not going to hurt apple's monopolic music store
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
I hope everyone on this site will be going after Apple with the same fervor they would as if Microsoft had taken similar action.
Wait, what am I thinking? This is SlashDot.
Summon your strength and try to complain. I know it will be hard, seeing how Jesus just slapped you but give it a try.
_____________________
Ever notice that Microsoft fans don't find the need to bash Apple every chance they get? Think about it.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
Ever try getting a single real Beatles song from any other service now that Cr^H^HApple owns them? >:(
I mean, it's quite possible now that both of the people who buy music from iTunes to play it on a portable device other than an iPod may switch vendors!
It doesn't have a car in it.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The only reason why I ever got iTunes is so that I could have legal means to buy my music. Now that Amazon MP3 popped up, there's really no point in having that piece of bloat anymore.
Whenever I purchase music from the Apple Store, I burn a copy for backup purposes. Re-Ripping the CD eliminates the DRM. A little inconvenient, but you can't have it all. I honestly prefer to purchase physical copies of my music whenever possible, but that's a discussion for another topic.
1. Burn purchased music to CD.
2. Rip with a decent ripper, using lame --preset standard
3. Listen and enjoy. There will be the slightest of loss in quality.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I knew we'd get there, eventually.
Seriously, this is a complete non-issue. Don't like DRM? DON'T BUY DRM TRACKS, STUPID. Artist you want is DRM-only? Haul your lazy ass to the store and buy a hard copy. Don't like the prices? Bitch to the artist.
It reminds me when we were buying t-shirt to get printed. Most of us wanted to do it cheap (the money was going to a good cause) and get the shirts for 5 bucks (printed on two sides, one color). Our hippy friends wanted to get American Apparel which would have caused more than twice the price but the mexicans who work there get more than minimum salary, so we had to support the company.
I told them that the sleazeball who runs the company is a major league pervert and even found them the interview for Jane's magazine where he pulled out his weiner and jerked off in front of the reporter, to 'release tension'.
We ended up going with AA because a guy who jerks off in front of his employees is ok AS LONG as he pays them well.
As long as you pimp 'cool' to the masses, you can do no wrong.
Heck, most Apple fans would consider it an honor if Jobs were to bukake them.
Apple should cease and desist pretending to be anything other than a company who cares about their corporate profits, and nothing else!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Hymm should just host their updates on WikiLeaks. Since Wikileaks.org is now shut-down, Apple will never be able to find out about it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You could (re)use a CD-RW.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It's funny how people will rant about how OOXML and Office format lock-in is evil, and then go buy stuff on iTunes. iTunes is worse:
- No even just partially compatible alternative at all. Your Farplay songs MUST be played with Apple stuff. Doc files CAN be opened with other software.
- It's even arguably illegal to open FairPlay files with another sotware/hardware. Imagine if MS did that with their formats !
-> apart from the lock-in, Fairplay is risky long-term: who knows how long apple will release good/cheap or not-so-good/not-so-cheap hardware-software for you guys to acces you FairPlay files ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Apple does not sell most of the music (and I use the word lightly) on iTMS without DRM.
They can find a new competitor to flock to.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
the project was different from myfairtunes. From what I understand the source was being distributed, but I haven't seen it yet.
My next computer will run ubuntu, you hear me apple?
My favorite thing is they named the project so it's impossible to find amongst all the hollywood rubbish
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
USA laws do not apply to 99% of the globe they can send DMCA notices all they like, they have no legal bearing in Europe,Asia,Russia,Africa,Middle East, Australia, S-America, Scandinavia, UK, it would be better to list the countries that do respect the DMCA but so far i can only think of one and Jon doesnt live there or do business there they tried once to take jon down and failed over the DVD CSS code, so they will fail again
Freenet.
its time to take ALL content underground, since what you today may be banned tomorrow.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"...it would be like buying a Coke tagged with RFID and the cashier never disabling the RFID tag after the sale or telling the customers about it..."
That analogy sounds more applicable to Apple's M4P's than to MP3's
I think MP3s are more like the Coke bottle: Buy the product, use the product, hell even make the product yourself as long as you don't commercially pass it off as "the real thing", or distribute it in Coke's bottles, or distribute the recipe on-line using Lime wire otherwise the "Drink Interest Consortium Klan" (aka DICK) will sick their lawyers on you, taking away your "Coke and a Smile".
Only fools actually buy music from iTunes, anyway.
I keep asking people--what did you get for your money? They always answer, "I own the song". Really? Do you? You can do whatever you want with it? And they say, "Oh, well, no, of course not. I guess I have a license for the song, to play it whenever I want." To which I respond, "so you bought a license."
And they all frown and shuffle their feet and say they guess so.
You haven't bought a fucking thing.
expandfairuse.org
I have a DVD burner and use DVDFab HD Decrypter and DVD Shrink. I rent, rip, and return. I have burned off well over 400 rental discs in violation of the DMCA and copyright laws. This coming Tuesday I will rent and burn off "Beowulf" and "30 Days Of Night".
In the words of Steve Taylor, "Try and catch me, coppers. You stinkin' badges better think again before you mess this boy around".
I'm no Apple fanboy at all, but if Steve Jobs was sincere in his open letter, then this certainly wasn't Apple at all. It was the record companies holding a knife to Jobs's throat and commanding him to make the project shut down or watch his contracts with the entire music industry shrivel up and die. The record companies just don't want to get their hands bloody.
"you should *never* open a pop/soda, particularly a huge 2l bottle, unless you have chilled it."
Many moons ago I put a large unopened bottle of warm soda in the freezer before starting a BBQ. When I later opened it at the table we watched the cold liquid completely freeze in a surprisingly rapid and regular manner. At first the slush formed a distinct 'freeze line' at the top of the bottle which then quickly worked it's way down to the bottom. The entire contents were frozen in a mtter of seconds.
My soda-less ex-wife was singularly unimpressed by the accidental party trick and sent one of the kids down the street to get another bottle.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You get bit for bit perfect music from iTunes by using the formula from Apple's ad campaign. Just change the order a bit. Mix, burn, rip.
...rip, MIX, BURN, RIP, mix, burn...
You can't re-encode it in a lossy format without some loss. That's true. So? You lose information (and quality) when you rip your original CDs to a lossy format too, but you still do it.
You don't need Hymn, you don't need Doubletwist, just hum along to the Apple tune, and
They always answer, "I own the song". Really? Do you? You can do whatever you want with it?
I can do the same things with music from iTunes as from anywhere else. Once they're burned to a CD they're no different from music I've bought on CD, vinyl, tape, or anything else.
Where do YOU buy music from that you get full rights for a buck a track?
Or are you just saying only fools buy music?
1) start up your favorite audio recording software (Audacity, say).
2) Select "Wave Out Mix" as the recording input device.
3) Start recording.
4) Play your DRMd music like normal.
5) When the music is done, stop recording.
6) Save the recorded data in whichever format cranks your shaft.
Easy, eh?
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
... for anything other then Itunes exclusives. There really is no good reason to use Itunes exclusively. Amazon frequently has albums for $1-$2 cheaper, and the music is ALL DRM free. Itunes has the occasional itunes plus album, but not often enough to rely on it. If the music has DRM, then it's coded at a lower bitrate than Amazon's mp3s as well.
BTW, you don't need to be a genius to understand that DRM isn't there because of file sharers. It's to keep people using Itunes and apple products. If you can't play itunes music on anything other than apple mp3 players, then you're going to buy apple mp3 players. If the DRM wasn't there, you would have the option to use other mp3 players. You're also required to use itunes to play itunes music on your computer. Meaning if you want to download a new album, welp.. you might as well just get it thru itunes since you're already logged in anyways.
Or tubes!
you do know you can just burn a cd of your itunes songs and re import the cd as MP3 right? sure it wastes a cd, but in the scheme of things it's not that much money.
Fixed that for you.
GPL code is free to hand out and share.
So we don't mind if people hand it out and share.
When people make money off counterfeit music we call that piracy (still not theft) and we don't like it.
When people make money off counterfeit GPL code (not sharing the code) we call that piracy and we don't like it.
Now, can you see there is no double standard?
Sharing music for money without having paid for the right (in money): Bad
Sharing GPL code for money without having paid for the right (in sharing the code): Bad
Both the same.
And we call NEITHER theft.
B) Feel free to copy my car and drive off in the copy.
"Would you mind if I borrowed your ferrari" is more like in music "would you mind if I borrowed your revenue stream from selling music for a while" or "Would you mind if I had the copyrights to your work for a while"?
You see, it would be
copyright car
which is the thing that you have (you don't have license to a car, but you DO own it, just like you can own copyright).
If we want
music car
then you don't borrow the car, you make a copy all by yourself in the same way as you'd make a copy of the music all by yourself.
Alternatively, you could mean borrow the CD is equal to borrow the car. But then there's no law against borrowing or lending a CD of music. So the LAW and the labels agree that you CAN loan or borrow a CD, so asking to borrow a car isn't finding out anything other than the particular person's trust of you to look after his goods.
>Apple may be on dangerous ground here,
>since those users might now start checking out competing services
What, some other service that offers DRM'd music that they *encourage* you to crack? When you buy a DRM'd itunes song, you know that apple is going to stop try to stop you from copying decrypting it. That's the point of DRM.
It should be noted that apple also offers music *without* DRM. You should not buy DRM music if you don't like DRM being enforced.
So they want people to share freely instead of first buying the right to copy their files?
Good! I've had it with this generally stupid idea to sell something that costs nothing to copy, and record companies and iTunes do way more harm than they are doing good, so we're better off without them.
Arrr!
*Boards a Spanish gold-ship, notes how much gold there is and draw a copy off the ship, says good-bye and goes home and makes my own replica of it*
Maybe Apple just got tired of the cat and mouse game.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
I don't see a problem with this. Apple protects their rights (at least, as they interpret them), and as the writeup says, this might make more consumers leave the teat of iTunes and try competing sites like Amazon MP3, which are 100% DRM-free. This, in turn, will show record companies that you can still make money selling unprotected tracks, so they'll make more content available in unprotected format, which will in turn boost the iTunes library of non-DRM material.
This won't put iTunes out of business, but it will give them some stronger competition. And even the most strident fanboys will acknowledge that competition is good... even for Apple.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
You may have to play with the volumes on the source (itunes) and the mixer to get it to sound just right. But it works. This is also good for saving songs off myspace and other streaming sources.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Are Apple's actions because they want to do this or because they are obliged to under their contracts with the record labels?
Certainly EMI couldn't care less about this since they're providing their content DRM-free to iTunes. If the other labels would simply get on board and allow Apple to offer DRM-free files then all this would be a moot point.
Apple has stated, and followed through, on their desire to provide DRM-free musical content where they have been allowed to do so.
To answer the question, yes it is a bit evil. Whether it's like Microsoft can be determined by asking this: does Microsoft have a public position stating that they want to provide DRM-free content? If MS also has that position, then the two companies are equivalent (and are only limited by contracts).
What I fail to understand is, if this is an issue for Apple, why do they allow you to burn 5 CDs of iTunes downloads? Afterall, burning iTunes AACs to CD removes the DRM, then the CD can be cloned over and over.
By burning to CD and importing back off the CD at 256kbs, there is no audible quality loss over the original 128kb AAC file. Therefore Hymn was a redundant project, anyway.
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
As I write this, the parent post is modded as -1. This is absurd, as the post is spot-on. It's also well written, contains no personal attacks, foul language, or anything "bad" that would warrant a -1 moderation. There is absolutely Zero justification to mod down this post. But since it goes against slashdot doctrine, it gets modded down into oblivion. Pathetic.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Profit?
Just quantization noise.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
But judging from the other comments here, while they're self-righteous enough to bitch about DRM, they don't have the fucking backbone to just not buy DRM'ed music.
Sometimes you're self-righteous enough to not ride the bus - sometimes you accomplish more by sitting up front.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Am I missing something here?
its business as usual. its interesting that everyone here is even SURPRISED that something like this happened. if you wanna listen to your iTunes purchased DRM music on your phone, buy an iPhone. If you want to remove DRM from songs you knowingly purchased that have it, buy the cd. oh and doesn't iTunes offer DRM free music? if you can't find the artist you want there, go buy it somewhere else. I'm tired of everyone blowing their whistles over DRM. Seriously people, can't we grow up a little and learn to avoid the things we dislike?
It's not like you did not know that you were buying songs with DRM. Stop complaining. If you don't like it - don't buy it.
I've been away from Slashdot for several months now, and I have to admit that I'm horrified at how I'm seeing the exact same flame wars today as I did so long ago. The talk never changes, only the UIDs, growing ever larger.
Who can say what evil is?
I will say the network they decided to go with, on the surface, would seem contrary to the best $$ collection. For that, I might be willing to consider their movements to combat piracy less selfish then, ya know, whoever comes to mind.
See here.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
N/T
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.