Yahoo! Music Going Dark, Taking Keys With It

iminplaya writes with a link to an excellent article at Ars Technica, extracting from it a few choice nuggets: "The bad dream of DRM continues. Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, telling them it will be closing for good — and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September 30, 2008. Sure, it's bad news and yet another example of the sheer lobotomized brain-deadness that has characterized music DRM, but the reaction of most music fans will be: 'Yahoo had an online music store?'... DRM makes things harder for legal users; it creates hassles that illegal users won't deal with; it (often) prevents cross-platform compatibility and movement between devices. In what possible world was that a good strategy for building up the nascent digital download market? The only possible rationales could be 1) to control piracy (which, obviously, it has had no effect on, thanks to the CD and the fact that most DRM is broken) or 2) to nickel-and-dime consumers into accepting a new pay-for-use regime that sees moving tracks from CD to computer to MP3 player as a 'privilege' to be monetized."

Comments

People are still buying DRMd music.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

but the reaction of most music fans will be: 'Yahoo had an online music store?'

Unbelievably, the follow up to that from many slashdotters will be: "My music store will never go offline." Unbelievably, people are still buying (and defending) DRMd music.

If this story (and the MS one before) doesn't alert you to the sad fact that you don't own any DRMd music you've bought, nothing will.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[somersault]

Are you kidding? I wouldn't have thought that slashdotters would go for DRMed music. I did buy a couple of albums from iTunes as a test, one ended up being DRMed and the other wasn't - I just burned it to CD and ripped it again. I know I'll have lost some quality, but if I ever use iTunes again I'm going to make sure the songs are 'iTunes plus'.

most DRM is broken

s/most/all/

If you can listen to it, you can record it. That will always be true. DRM for music and video is a completely broken concept.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is illegal! You are breaking the law, and hurting yourself and your family with your ILLEGAL SOFTWARE. Your ip has been noted and is being forwarded to the SPA with a reccomendation that they investigate your CRIMINAL ACTIVITY. Please destroy all your unpatriotic linux software before the government finally cracks down on you people and you all end up as lampshades or soap.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[TheRaven64]

There's nothing wrong with buying DRM'd goods. It's no worse than buying that great deal at the market with 'sold as seen' written on it. Sure, it may not work when you get it home, and it may not continue to work beyond the first time, but if you're happy to accept that risk then you might get a really good deal.

Of course, if you buy DRM'd music for more than a fraction of the price of DRM-free music then you are as stupid as someone who pays 90% of RRP for something on eBay that probably doesn't work.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Chrismith]

If you RTFA, you'll see that no one is losing access to their music, they just won't be able to transfer them to another computer without a workaround such as burning them to a CD. Annoying, yes, but not the end of the world.

Not that I'm all for DRM, this just isn't as big of a deal as the article makes it sound. This won't be the wake-up call that makes the average user see the evils of DRM, because most of them won't even notice.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Tim C]

Well, iTMS can go offline and it won't affect my ability to play the 6 or so songs I've bought from there.

I dislike DRM as much as the next slashbot, but some implementations are less bad than others. (You'll note however that I have only bought half a dozen or so songs, so I'm clearly still not that comfortable with it...)

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[rufus t firefly]

Unbelievably, the follow up to that from many slashdotters will be: "My music store will never go offline." Unbelievably, people are still buying (and defending) DRMd music.

If this story (and the MS one before) doesn't alert you to the sad fact that you don't own any DRMd music you've bought, nothing will.

I agree wholeheartedly. I don't buy any DRM'd music, preferring to deal as directly with the artist as possible, through places like CD Baby, which eschew DRM in favor of straight MP3 downloads once you have purchased an album.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[jambox]

I've got perfectly legit CDs that I've had to re-rip recently because the DRM on them - I forgot to uncheck the box in media player :( - don't know why that happened but the wma's (I know, I know, I just assumed it would do them in mp3) simply won't play any more.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[dwandy]

they just won't be able to transfer them to another computer without a workaround such as burning them to a CD. Annoying, yes, but not the end of the world.

There is a loss of quality and meta-data when you do this. Of course it's not actually the end of the "world" but it is the end of the music (at specified quality & features) that you paid for. So pretty much it is the end of the world (for your purchase).

This won't be the wake-up call that makes the average user see the evils of DRM, because most of them won't even notice.

This is only true because on the Dark Day it's unlikely that even an insignificant number of the customer will want to move their music to a new computer. There won't be a wake-up call, because it will only be as people replace their old computers or want to move it to another device that they will realise they've been screwed. That doesn't make Digital Restrictions Management any less evil.

On the other hand, there was enough backlash to make MS decide to leave their servers on ... so who knows? I think that what is true, is that the more this happens, the more people will realise they don't want DRM on their media. Like Linux adoption, there may never be a "Year Of The Anti-DRM": it may just be a slow awakening.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Panaqqa]

/. - Don't be in such a hurry to mod this "Funny". If the so called "Trusted Computing Initiative" goes through as planned, then indeed your Linux distro may well turn out to be illegal, especially if you have added or removed stuff and recompiled. In these cases, it will not be "approved" software as the hash will have changed.

All DRM is almost as completely screwed up as the laws that purport to deal with it. My personal favorite silly DRM law is the one which sets out massive penalties for circumventing a DRM mechanism - making anyone who holds the shift key while loading a CD into Windoze box a felon.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Tastecicles]

Slight problem with "Sold As Seen" notices... they're illegal ("Sold As Seen" could mean "Utterly Broken" or "Dangerously unfit for any purpose" or it could mean "Slight cosmetic damage"). At least in the UK. A better notice would be "Please ensure before buying that this item is fit for purpose." Means what it says - thoroughly examine the object/device before purchase to make sure of its functionality and/or ergonomics.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[v1]

The exact mistake you just made will start biting people in the not-so-distant future.

OK I can convert my collection of music to MP3, good and fine, no rush right? I'll do that next week.

Meanwhile, the servers go offline. Then Murphy stops by. HD crash. Glad I have a backup. Restore backup. "Change in hardware configuration detected, contacting authentication servers to renew license.... Error, unable to contact servers. Please call Yahoo Music Store support for assistance."

You lose.

The only way to avoid this is to get a law passed that requires DRM manufacturers to put DRM unlockers in escrow somewhere and in the event that they close shop, go out of business, their servers burn down, etc, the public is given the keys so they can unlock and strip the DRM from their purchases.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

s/most/all/

If you can listen to it, you can record it. That will always be true. DRM for music and video is a completely broken concept.

DRM for Video makes sense, especially in a "rental" situation.

If you "rent" a film, tv show or the like, DRM makes perfect sense. Let the renter watch it, set the DRM to expire after 3 days, then bam, it's gone. Useless. Saves having to go to the store, grab a DVD then return it after.

But yes, DRM on things you buy rather than rent is retarded.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[S-100]

Um, not being able to transfer your music to another computer IS losing access to your music. It should just be a matter of hours before the first class-action suit is filed.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[aliquis]

In my opinion not there either because really, why does it matter if you keep the copy and can watch it forever or can only see it one time? Where is the lost? Heck, I even own regular DVDs I bought like 5 years ago which I still haven't watched .. What says people would see their rented movies multiple times anyway?

Just sell the shit cheap and shoot for volume instead, no protection needed, especially if the consumers actually think the product is worth the price and prefer to buy it.

I don't get renting either, how much goes back to the company which produced the movie? Do they really earn much on a rented copy? Or are you mostly paying to the person renting you the movie? In that case why is that so important? Why does renting even exist? If the companies only get a very small amount of money for rented copies but people still rent because it's cheaper and one only watch most stuff one time anyway they should hate it.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[msauve]

There is a loss of quality and meta-data when you do this. Of course it's not actually the end of the "world" but it is the end of the music (at specified quality & features) that you paid for. So pretty much it is the end of the world (for your purchase).

If you bought, then the limitations of DRM were also a part of the purchase, and should have been factored into the purchase decision. No one has suggested that by discontinuing the service, Yahoo has in any way broken their side of the contract by discontinuing the service. So, yes, you do still have exactly what you paid for.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[aliquis]

Yeah I think it's meaningless in Sweden as well because you can't say "haha but I told you I sold it as seen" if it's broken ..

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[jimicus]

/. - Don't be in such a hurry to mod this "Funny". If the so called "Trusted Computing Initiative" goes through as planned, then indeed your Linux distro may well turn out to be illegal, especially if you have added or removed stuff and recompiled. In these cases, it will not be "approved" software as the hash will have changed.

Just to pre-empt the inevitable shower of folk who have neither glanced at nor fully understood the implications of Trusted Computing saying "It's my computer, how will they stop me?"

In answer to those people, "Very simple. Your computer will no longer be a general purpose computer, it'll be a device like your Tivo or your DVD player. And, like your Tivo, it'll be more or less impossible to change the software on. Or, if you do, you'll create as many problems as you solve because online banking, shopping and even Internet access can and quite possibly will demand that your 'computer' prove it's fully "Trusted" before they have anything to do with it."

The technology has all been thought through very carefully and virtually every counter-argument (particularly the "it'll never work" arguments) has been dealt with in hardware. AFAICT, the only way you'll break it wholesale is by infiltrating a chip fab and maintaining the breakage for so long that it's not practical for the manufacturer to revoke all the compromised keys.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[aliquis]

If I'd bought a lot of music I doubt I would just let it get removed forever when I switched computer.

But I'd probably exist the seller to also let me redownload the same music to my new machine. Just log in and download the music I have registered as bought.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[SCHecklerX]

So open hardware will become more prevalent. There's obviously demand for unrestricted hardware, so somebody will make it.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't you be able to just disable the TPM module in BIOS and then install your flavor of Linux as usual? Sure, you won't be able to install Windows or any other TPM=respecting OS as long as the chip is disabled, but you weren't planning on doing that anyways...

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the solution is that all DRM should be managed through an escrow service. If you want to DRM your content, you have to register it with a centralised content service who will manage the keys for you. Then, when you go out of business, your customers can still access the content as before.

If every media company wasn't so keen on using DRM to lock users into their platform and their services, perhaps they would be able to work together towards this goal, which would certainly address many of the objections to DRM.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[JesseMcDonald]

My personal favorite silly DRM law is the one which sets out massive penalties for circumventing a DRM mechanism - making anyone who holds the shift key while loading a CD into Windoze box a felon.

Technically it also makes the act of telling people that holding down the Shift key will bypass DRM a felony. Of course, the Powers that Be may find it a bit difficult to locate a court willing to convict given the obvious 1st Amendment implications; but then again, maybe not. The courts are a branch of the government, after all, and thus ultimately on the same side most of the time.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[8tim8]

>If you RTFA, you'll see that no one is losing access to their music, they just won't be able to transfer them to another computer without a workaround such as burning them to a CD. Annoying, yes, but not the end of the world.

What if their hard drive crashed and they're trying to load their backed-up songs onto a new computer? In that case they are screwed. Part of the issue here is that there's a problem but the users don't *realize* there's a problem until it's too late to do something. Yes, you realize DRM is a problem and take steps to work around it (burning a CD), but most users probably won't take steps to work around it until they can't figure out why their perfectly good song files won't work on their new computer.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[dossen]

Or how about this - if you release your copyrighted work in DRMed format, without a realistic and working solution for the continued access by your customers in the event of the company ending or the work going out of copyright (for any reason), all copyright protection of that work is revoked (including DMCA etc.) A law like that would effectively make it a choice between DRM and copyright - thereby returning the balance between the protection offered by society via copyright and the gain for society of works being published and eventually entering the public domain. But that might be considered fair and reasonable - not going to happen.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[somersault]

I didn't mean that the concept itself is a bad idea, it 'makes sense' from a rental perspective sure - but if someone can see it, they can record it. Maybe HDMI makes it more difficult to record digitally, but there is always the analog hole. You could for exampe setup a HD camera perfectly aligned in front of a HDTV and record a movie that way. Not the best way to copy a movie at all, but it definitely is an option.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[LordVader717]

They're basically denying a warranty for something that happens after purchase. If they sell you something that is clearly broken, no sold as seen sign can protect them. It would have to be marked "broken - for spares and repairs"

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[CastrTroy]

Yes, but we can all still have multiple computers. Keep one "trusted" computer for all the stuff that requires you have one, and have another computer, or 2 or 3, they are getting cheap, for doing all the useful/unauthorized stuff.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

In my opinion not there either because really, why does it matter if you keep the copy and can watch it forever or can only see it one time? Where is the lost?

One obvious loss is that you are over-ruling market forces, in the sense that a company might want to offer consumers a choice between paying full-price for a permanent copy of a work and paying a reduced fee for a one-off use (the rental model). This worked well for a long time with physical media, and may be in a consumer's interest. However, if you prohibit the use of DRM under any circumstances, the supplier's only option is to price on the assumption that every copy is a permanent one.

I don't get renting either, how much goes back to the company which produced the movie? Do they really earn much on a rented copy?

Yes, a DVD sold to a rental company (with suitable accompanying rights) normally costs a lot more than the ones you buy in the shops that are labelled "not for rental". I don't have any recent figures, but a few years ago the difference was roughly an order of magnitude, depending on the product.

Given the two points above, it is pretty clear that a rental model may be in the interests of both the consumer (who pays less if they only want to view something once anyway) and the producer (who gains access to a consumer market that might not be willing to pay full price for a permanent copy but would still like to watch the film).

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[chrish]

I only buy DRM-free music. Luckily, there are various sources, including:

• Jamendo
• eMusic
• Amazon MP3 (WHY can't I use this from Canada?! C'mon Amazon, get your act together.)
• Magnatune
• iTunes Plus

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Tano]

Oh, it would definitely work, in some way or another - but considering who is implementing it (an organization of multiple hardware/software manufacturers that each follow their own goals), it might very possibly be busted like most DRM solutions out there.

It's even possible that you could have a software solution one day that would tell anything checking your PC that it's "Trusted", while you can do anything with it. Jail-breaking does happen, after all.

The other possibility though, and probably what most companies are shooting for, is that the TCI would work just well enough to require hardware modding to circumvent - that would effectively kill off 90% or more copyright infringement and piracy, owing to the fact that most people wouldn't be able to mod their hardware, or know someone able to mod the hardware.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[PIBM]

which number basis are you using for your order of magnitude ?

Base 4 ?

Last I heard rental movie prices were going down, but at the highest point they were selling at 4 time the price of the normal one. At least up here .. =)

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Chris Tucker]

"Equating Libertarianism to greed is a bit like equating free speech to hate speech."

As opposed to a Libertarian equating a waiting list for a movie from the public library to a Stalin-era Soviet Union breadline ?

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[sm62704]

If you "rent" a film, tv show or the like, DRM makes perfect sense. Let the renter watch it, set the DRM to expire after 3 days, then bam, it's gone.

I hope you're referring to downloads rather than the DVDs that stop working after one play (there was a /. story about their return not long ago). It takes oil to make DVDs and having them wind up in a landfill is sociopathic.

You say "But yes, DRM on things you buy rather than rent is retarded", well what's retarded is thinking you bought a DRMed item in the first place. If it has DRM, you rented it no matter what you think.

DRM itself is retarded. It is completely ineffective against piracy; you can get torrents of the new Batman move and you can get illegal downloads of every song in the top 40 Billboard list. All it does is inconvience honest, paying customers, and that is past retarded and nearing brain dead.

Anyone who sells DRM is a thief who is playing on the media companies' fears.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or perhaps simply not using the hardware portion that is TPM - much like many of us do now? The TPM stuff doesn't require itself to be used and I've seen nothing to indicate that in the future it will be "required" either. By all means though, cite sources.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[elrous0]

Anything with DRM on it is just a rental. You don't own it, you're just renting it until the company you downloaded it from goes out of business or stops supporting it.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

"AFAICT, the only way you'll break it wholesale is by infiltrating a chip fab and maintaining the breakage for so long that it's not practical for the manufacturer to revoke all the compromised keys."

Then this is exactly what will happen.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[elrous0]

Don't be silly, we're not going to arrest you. We're throwing a party for you! There will be cake and you will be the guest of honor. Now, just stay there and a party associate will arrive shortly to collect you for your party.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[turbidostato]

"They're basically denying a warranty for something that happens after purchase."

Which, in so many countries is just forbid by law.

It doesn't stop the seller from trying since, at least on my country, "average Joe" is absolutly ignorant about the laws that defend him as a consumer. After all, if only one out of one hundred goes to court and wins they are still making profit out of the other ninety nine.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can now buy DRM Free music at Amazon, Napster and Rhapsody so I would say *this* is the year of Anti-DRM.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Sandbags]

And those with current access to Yahoo CAN transfer their music, and in fact music transfer was part of the product they purchased (usable on multiple devices). By yahoo terminating this service, i see it as they are in effect 1) forcing people to reduce the quality of their music in order to retain rights to it, 2) exert unplanned for labor and additional expense (CDs) in the process, and 3) are violating the trust of their clients and potentially violating contracts and laws.

Yahoo should release a tool that unlocks the DRM without quality degradation of the music for all of their customers, free of charge, in order to prevent this music from being lost. Even simply reformatting your computer and restoring a backup would render this music useless unless first converted. The customers purchased high quality tracks, not CD ripped quality tracks. They should either be assisted to retain what they paid for, or refunded in full.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[FredFredrickson]

The article doesn't mention this- but Yahoo is migrating their users to Rhapsody. This includes their library. You will still have access to your songs, just through a different service. Not sure what will happen to purchased tracks- but I suspect they'll allow you to re-download through rhapsody.

Certainly not fixing the DRM issue, but, still an important detail.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[TagrenHawk]

I used to work at a video rental store and saw the catalogs for the movies that were coming available. The cost for a movie that was not a headliner was $90. Headliner movies sometimes worked themselves up into the $125 and higher range. The point of renting a movie was that the video store had to recoup their costs by renting the movie multiple times. The appeal for the customer was that they could spend $3 for a rental and not have to pay upwards of $20 to see a movie they may only watch one more time.

Granted, this was back in the early 90s when the rental business model may have been different. It used to be that the studios would release the movies in this order: theater, rental, pay-per-view, pay channels, consumer purchase. Now movies are released for rental the same day they are available at Walmart for $14.

I will still keep my Netflix account active, and use it frequently because I may only want to watch a movie one time. With kids I don't get out to the theater that often any more unless it is a family friendly movie. With Netflix I can watch movies at home without having to pay the babysitter $60 on top of the $20+ it costs me and my wife to purchase theater tickets. As long as there are situations like mine out there, video rental businesses will make money on us.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[dwandy]

If you bought, then the limitations of DRM were also a part of the purchase, and should have been factored into the purchase decision.

I guess consumer protection acts have to exist precisely because of people who think like this. You make some pretty big (and imho incorrect) assumptions about the general buying public.

No one has suggested that by discontinuing the service, Yahoo has in any way broken their side of the contract by discontinuing the service.

I'm sure they covered their legal ass on this, and so although I haven't read their terms of use I suspect you are correct: they haven't done anything legally actionable. But this assumes an educated consumer which is what shysters, con-artists and out-right-thieves have counted on for generations.

In this case, it is a question of expectation. When you buy a CD, you expect to put it in your CD player and play it. And you play it in your car, at the cottage, on your portable CD-player and when any one of those dies (or gets killed by your four-year-old) you go and buy a new CD player to replace it, and the CD just keeps on working.

So when you, as a consumer, buy music on-line, you have no reason to even ask the question of "will this play when my computer dies?". It's music. You "know" how music works. ...or you think you do.

If you buy something, you can't be expected to account for every possible way they might screw you. You have an expectation of how this thing should work based on experience, and you'll probably ask some questions to ensure that it does the things you want. If you buy a cell-phone you don't ask if it can send and receive calls: you make the assumption that it does ...'cause it's a cell phone and they do that. If you buy a pair of pants on-line you assume the bottom of the legs have holes for your feet to go through. If you buy music you assume you'll be able to play it on your computer and there's no reason to ask about whether or not the some other computer will control how your music can be used, because this is well out-side of how a consumer uses music.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[jimicus]

So open hardware will become more prevalent. There's obviously demand for unrestricted hardware, so somebody will make it.

Ahem:

Or, if you do, you'll create as many problems as you solve because online banking, shopping and even Internet access can and quite possibly will demand that your 'computer' prove it's fully "Trusted" before they have anything to do with it."

Nothing closed about TPM apart from the encryption keys themselves. You just can't claim to be "Trusted" without it.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[sm62704]

If you bought, then the limitations of DRM were also a part of the purchase,

If it has DRM you didn't buy it, You only rented it. To call taking money for an item with DRM a "sale" is a baldfaced lie and a dishonest scam.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Well I only use the subscription service and treat it like my own personal "satellite radio" when I'm on the road. Basically, filling up my 8GB MP3 player before hitting the road.

I *much* prefer buying my music on good old fashion CDs... No DRM, and better sound.

To counter the hyperbole being spewed by the trollish story linked above, Yahoo! Music was purchased by Rhapsody. The email yesterday contained a link, which I used to transfer my account to them. Rhapsody will continue to honor my subscription rate and I can now listen to music on more devices... So what's the problem?

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[jZnat]

Well, that's what Macrovision is for, but their analogue copy protection is all easily defeatable, so it's a moot issue.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, what a surprise. Another Twitter Sockpuppet. :rolls eyes:

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Palshife]

Why not? If you have to reinstall or get a new computer, and if iTMS was gone, you'd be up the same creek.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, if you do, you'll create as many problems as you solve because online banking, shopping and even Internet access can and quite possibly will demand that your 'computer' prove it's fully "Trusted" before they have anything to do with it."

I buy tons of stuff online for work. I give false email addresses, wrong phone numbers, etc. What matters is that they payment is real. They want cash, not trust. Although some businesses will turn away 10% of their business to secure a larger market (Ebay, e.g.). Most will not. Even those that do, you pick up the phone and they will take your order or help you out off-line. Gotta split!

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[omnichad]

I'm pretty sure the RIAA would find a way to sue a company for going out of business.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Dan541]

That's why I pirate all my music, it avoids problems like this.

Content produces claim they are "Losing sales" but its customers who are "Losing products" now a can justify my piracy by saying "its them or us"

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[msauve]

I guess consumer protection acts have to exist precisely because of people who think like this. You make some pretty big (and imho incorrect) assumptions about the general buying public.

My incorrect assumption may be that the general buying public reads the contracts they enter into. Your incorrect assumption is that the general buying public cares at all about the difference in quality between PCM and MP3, or about how many beats per minute each song has.

You're also entirely incorrect in your original statement, that there "is a loss of quality and meta-data when" burning to CD. There is of course NO lost quality when burning an MP3 to CD, since the bitstream is identical to that used for playback. Quality loss only comes in if you then choose to recompress back to MP3, but that's a choice, and you would have a similar loss in quality if you compressed from a non-DRM original CD, too, so that's not a legitimate complaint.

Metadata is not lost, although it may not be automatically carried over by whatever tools you choose to use. The only original metadata which is useful is that which is visible to the user at some point, so they can always copy/paste, or write it down, whatever. That it's an inconvenience is due to format shifting, not that the original was DRMed. Non-DRMed tracks burned to CD also "lose" metadata, simply because CDs don't support the range of metadata which WM or MP3 does.

Finally, if someone was dumb enough to buy music in the proprietary Windows Media Player format, instead of a standard one, like PCM, MP3, or AAC, then they've already committed themselves to limitations in transfer/playback that standard formats don't suffer from.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[kalirion]

Unbelievably, the follow up to that from many slashdotters will be: "My music store will never go offline." Unbelievably, people are still buying (and defending) DRMd music.

Same for software. What will happen when Steam closes down?

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[iminplaya]

It just means you will need two computers. The trusted one for the bank, and the hacked one for everything else.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[penguinbrat]

I don't get renting either, how much goes back to the company which produced the movie? Do they really earn much on a rented copy? Or are you mostly paying to the person renting you the movie?

From what I understand there is actually a pretty good business plan setup, with the likes of NetFlix at least - NetFlix never actually buys any of the movies them selves, they are provided directly from the studio and some given percentage of each rental is given back to them.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

$60? Are you hiring?

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[penguinbrat]

The only way to avoid this is to get a law passed that requires DRM manufacturers to put DRM unlockers in escrow somewhere and in the event that they close shop, go out of business, their servers burn down, etc, the public is given the keys so they can unlock and strip the DRM from their purchases.

I thought the whole point of DRM'd crap was that the powers that be don't feel you **own** squate, other than the **right** to listen to it?

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[aliquis]

Did it worked well? I'm not saying it didn't, but I don't know how it was created so I will keep on asking.

Who invented it? Did the media industry create the rental model? Or was people just letting other people borrow their copies for a smaller fee and that was considered ok? Because in the later case the media industry probably see no benefit in that model. Over here a new movie cost 219 sek or similar, a rental cost 25 or 40.

I guess just a very small part of those 25 or 40 goes to the media industry because if it didn't who would even care to rent out videos?

It's my idea that the media industry didn't wanted the rental model, but that it was forced upon them because it was considered ok to let other borrow your copy for a fee, but I may be wrong.

If the rental copy sells for a much higher amount than a normal one I get the point.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Artuir]

Hey, that's a brilliant plan. If anyone knows escrow services it'd be the fine citizens of Nigeria. We could create a job market for them to do legitimate work!

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I pirate all my music, it avoids problems like this.

Content produces claim they are "Losing sales" but its customers who are "Losing products" now a can justify my piracy by saying "its them or us"

No, you can't. You can justify "I don't want to buy for them because of that" but not "So I steal it because I deserve it regardless." as the latter doesn't hold true. You don't hold a right to listen to music just because it exists.

Now, it can be argued that they don't lose anything when you download if you wouldn't pay for that anyways and that I agree with. I also agree that record companies aren't losing significant money due to piratism. Hell, I'm a supporter of local Pirate Party myself and will very possibly vote them in the next elections...

However, saying that you can morally justify your piracy by "Well, I don't want to buy music in the terms they are selling it so that's why it is okay for me to download it" doesn't hold true. At all.

They have the right to sell music they have made and produced in the form they wish to and just because you don't want to buy that in that form, doesn't justify "Well, I'll get it without paying them."

I bet you 20 dollars you didn't send them the money for the songs after downloading the music in the form you like.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[couchslug]

"The only way to avoid this is to get a law passed that requires DRM manufacturers to put DRM unlockers in escrow somewhere and in the event that they close shop, go out of business, their servers burn down, etc, the public is given the keys so they can unlock and strip the DRM from their purchases."

Sounds like a good reason not to suggest such a law. IMO DRM should make the user experience suck so much that they will reject it.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Torinaga-Sama]

I like to buy my music pre-burned.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[somersault]

That's the whole point - it's all easily defeatable. That Macrovision stuff just sounds like an early version of HDMI. So in that case you just need to use recording and playback hardware that doesn't use Macrovision, or you record the entire signal that's coming across to include their little "off-screen signal" or whatever they're using.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[ivan256]

So you're going to preempt the people who were going to correct the parent by spreading mis-information in advance?

The TPM doesn't stop you from using your computer as a general purpose system. It simply allows third party software to choose not to work if certain conditions aren't met. You can still do "whatever you want" with your computer, as long as "whatever you want" doesn't include running such software.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[ConceptJunkie]

My music stores may go offline. It'd be a shame, but it's no hair off of my teeth as far as the music I already have. eMusic.com and Mindawn.com. They believe in providing value and not screwing customers for stupid business reasons... which is itself a _good_ business decision. The labels that provide material for these companies get it, and I like patronizing them. I've bought tons of stuff from both stores (some 300 albums from eMusic and about 20 from Mindawn) and am a very satisfied customer, and I pay less. Oh, and Mindawn provides FLAC, and I _still_ pay less.

I have bought a few odd tracks from Napster after determining I could remove the DRM with reasonable convenience, but with the stores I use, all I have to worry about is backing up my stuff.

Oh, and CDs, I still buy plenty CDs because it's often the only way to get a lot of what I want, and I still pick up new releases from my favorite groups on CD, both to support them (at least in theory), and because I want the best quality I can get my hands on.

iTunes? Pffft. Their selection is still pathetic, IMO. If I'm going to go the route of a company that carries the big labels, I expect to find _anything_ I am interested in, or at least something. They are hardly better than Best Buy for selection and their software is lame.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[mrchaotica]

So? What good will your un-Trusted hardware do, when all ISPs (by law) refuse to allow it to connect to the Internet? I have no doubt whatsoever that that law will come, unless we fight vigorously against it. Not all problems have a technological solution!

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[xouumalperxe]

If you think those odds are realistic, you just make sure to make the fine you pay in court at least 101 times the value of an individual sale. Problem solved.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[iminplaya]

Annoying, yes, but not the end of the world.

Ripped right from the page itself:
No, it's not the end of the world; yes, we have bigger problems. But the Yahoo news is just another depressing reminder of all the wasted time and energy put into these schemes designed to create roadblocks for legal users. At least the music business has gotten the message, and all four major labels and most indies now sell DRM-free online.

I was fully aware of that. And as it turns out, the squeaky wheel actually does get the grease. Note to all who submit to authority so easily: You guys frequently don't get any lube at all.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[TheRaven64]

iTunes store DRM is tied to a specific computer. You can't authorise a new computer without the store working so you have, at most, until your current computer dies if the store suddenly failed. The only thing to do is authorise iTunes running on Windows in a VM, and keep this VM for playing music on future machines (since you can't legally run OS X in a VM). And this, of course, assumes that iTunes doesn't have a serious security hole that causes you to want to update to a new version which doesn't support the old music...

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Dirtside]

1. The idea that the platform will be unbreakable depends on the assumption that nobody implementing it ever makes a mistake. Think about how likely that is, when there are literally tens of thousands of people involved.

2. New computer hardware comes out all the time; TCI components will have to be constantly rewritten/re-engineered along with the new motherboards and CPUs and suchlike, thus increasing the chance that there's an exploitable mistake somewhere along the way.

3. There are criminal organizations out there dedicated to breaking DRM and distributing copyrighted material for money; they have a gigantic profit motive. You think they'll just go away because the hardware gets more difficult to crack?

4. We've been hearing for years that TCI is going to destroy us all; I remember reading articles in 2002 or 2003 that Palladium was going to bring chaos and destruction. Are we any closer to this stuff actually happening? I'm not saying we shouldn't fight it anywhere it appears, but assuming it's a done deal because they've proposed an "unbreakable" architecture is silly.

You're like the teenager who's interested in cryptography and learns about one-time pads, and goes around telling everyone how awesome they are and how unbreakable they are, without considering that you have to distribute the pad in the first place, and all it takes is a thug with a gun to break your "unbreakable" encryption. No offense. :)

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[mrchaotica]

and you would have a similar loss in quality if you compressed from a non-DRM original CD

No, you wouldn't! An original CD, made from the studio master, would still have the other 90% of the information that Yahoo threw away when it compressed the music the first time. A CD burned from the Yahoo DRM tracks would not. This 90% makes a huge fucking difference when compressing the CD again to a different format!

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

It used to be called musicmatch back when I used it. I bought a few albums. So this is the reward for doing everything legit. People of good intent are being taken advantage of. DRM can no longer be spoken of as a necessary evil. It is now apparent that it is in the same category as Ring tones, a way for the music industry to make more money by getting you to buy the same music over and over again. To be avoided at all costs. To recoup my music that I paid for, I will investigate the start of a class action lawsuit against Microsoft, Yahoo and of course the RIAA. They have acted in bad faith to deceive and defraud customers.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Cajun Hell]

DRM for Video makes sense, especially in a "rental" situation.

I think different people have different definitions of "makes sense." The point of "If you can listen to it, you can record it," is that DRM does not work. Having a rental expire makes sense, but only if expiration really works. Does it makes sense to do things that have no chance of working? Does it make sense to use DRM for rentals when the renter is always going to have the option of keeping the content indefinitely anyway?

It may be that the very idea of a "rental situation," when it comes to renting information, doesn't "make sense."

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[duggy_92127]

Just sell the shit cheap and shoot for volume instead, no protection needed, especially if the consumers actually think the product is worth the price and prefer to buy it.

That is a perfectly valid theory, that I pretty much think would turn out to work great. However, the simple truth is that you don't know how that would actually work in the real world. I don't, either; nobody does.

They've been running their business a certain way for a long time, and making a killing. Now we're in the digital age, and the context is different and changing rapidly. Expecting them to one day up and use a totally different pricing model than they've been making a killing with up to this point is silly. Of course they're going to try and do things the exact same way as they always have.

And they've got people assuring them it's possible. These companies that are making the DRM 'software' are also making a killing, and it's mostly because the media people believe what they're selling, which is the ability to keep doing things the way they always have, in this new and scary age. I have no idea if the DRM companies know what they're doing in futile or not; that depends on how cynical you are.

That's all I got.

Doug

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

DRM just contributed to the world pollution by making you waste a CD. =P

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[dupont54]

Yup exactly.
Reminds me great gaming discussions about Half-Life 2, Bioshock, Mass Effect and PC crapware like that. "But they will release a patch sometimes... maybe... hopefully... They are good guys... Anyway, the game is so COOL and SHINY!!! lol"

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[flyingfsck]

Considering how many millions of Linux machines there are in the MoD, DnD, DoD and Gov, your scenario is rather unlikely.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo also had a service called Yahoo Music Unlimited, which is ending as well. Customers are being transferred to Rhapsody at the same price. Rhapsody costs $12.99 / mo, while Yahoo charged $5.99 / mo (1 yr price). Yahoo Unlimited gave users free access to over 2 million songs. (subscribers could purchase songs for only $0.79 / song) Even though DRM-ridden, I don't think the subscription services are that bad. Try a free trial. If you listen to music on your computer all day like myself, you might just like it.

Yahoo Unlimited was a great service. RIP.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[T3Tech]

I've got a couple itunes for free because I got concert tickets through Ticketmaster online. But I can't even get them because I use Linux on all my machines - no client. I can boot to XP on the laptop, install the stupid software and get them, sure, but unless I can play them in Linux (certainly possible, yes) is it really worth the hassle?

More importantly, is there any music I would find worth listening to in the iTunes library?

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[billcopc]

I saw these disposable DVDs at the 7eleven the other day. Apparently they start to decompose once you open the shrinkwrap... unbelievably retarded, imho.

Why buy a rotting DVD, from a selection of 15-20, when the rental chain down the street has zillions of movies for less ?

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[jimicus]

So you're going to preempt the people who were going to correct the parent by spreading mis-information in advance?

The TPM doesn't stop you from using your computer as a general purpose system. It simply allows third party software to choose not to work if certain conditions aren't met. You can still do "whatever you want" with your computer, as long as "whatever you want" doesn't include running such software.

There are extensions already implemented by Cisco to deny routing to anything that can't certify itself as trusted. So it can also stop you from communicating with third parties.

The entire system can verify itself as being trusted, and operating "untrusted" software can alter how the system verifies itself (and hence identifies itself) as being trusted. Third party software can quite happily refuse to communicate with you if your computer can't verify itself as being fully trusted.

It's a fantastic solution for businesses - I can see lots of businesses liking the idea of being able to guarantee that their staff are only able to run approved software and verify this remotely - but I don't fancy the idea of my bank dictating that I use something that they deem "trusted".

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Elbowgeek]

I can say that *my* music stores will never go offline. As long as there are yard sales and thrift shops I'll have a ready supply of records and open reel tapes, and there's *nothing* the record companies can do to stop me listening to formats which have vastly superior sound to most digital formats anyway, and are vastly more fun cue up and play than those boring little iPods and what have you.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[jimicus]

No offence taken ;)

The groundwork's already in place for TPM to become pervasive - Vista supports it, virtually every new PC leaves the factory with such a chip. The interesting thing will be to see if anyone ever starts demanding it.

The nightmare scenario (which is almost always unrealistic) is that you won't even be able to connect to the Internet. I don't think this is likely, but I could certainly see a few banks demanding your PC is trusted - if not now then after the first person in government gets their account raided because their PC was inundated with spyware and proposes legislation to force financial institutions to verify that the customer's PC is secure.

Had you asked me 18 months ago, I could also see the RIAA demanding that any online music store require it as a condition of use as soon as the technology's sufficiently mature - but with Amazon's MP3 download store I'm now not so sure.

Let me put it like this - I think things could go either way. But I'm not above pointing out that if things go down the "TPM everywhere" route then the approach "meh. it'll be easy to crack" is a tad optimistic.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

which number basis are you using for your order of magnitude ?

Nothing clever, just anecdotal discussions with the staff at a rental place a few years ago. At that time, buying a new VHS tape for a major movie would have cost around 8–10 GBP, and the guys at the shop reckoned it cost them about 60–70 GBP for a rental version. DVDs were still relatively new back then, and cost significantly more for both rental and sale at the time.

Of course, prices for DVDs have come down a lot since then, as the technology has been adopted widely and we've had the likes of Amazon selling things at well under their official price (which is pretty much meaningless nowadays as a result). I would imagine the margin between rental and sale has come down as well, so if you have recent data suggested a factor of four, I have no reason to doubt you. It's also possible that as with absolute prices, the rental/sale price ratio has been very different in different parts of the world.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[somersault]

I use Windows at work so that would be fine, but I'm using OSX when I get home (on the same laptop), and also have a Squeezebox and PS3 that I could use to stream media too (though I haven't used the Squeezebox for quite a while seeing as I'm mostly playing the PS3 or watching blu-rays/DVDs/TV :p ). DRM restrictions are just too limiting with what I can do in the future :/ Which is why I prefer to have the CDs, then I can take my music in the car or rerip it as lossless if I buy a soundsystem worthy of that (which would first require me having no neighbours otherwise I wouldn't be able to turn it up) and have enough storage. I re-ripped most of my music as 192kbps MP3s last year to make better use of a nice set of headphones I bought, but my current laptop wouldn't manage to store everything in FLAC format. I have a 500GB NAS box but that's not much use for taking to work with me, and I cba reripping everything again at the moment, it takes aaaages.. :P

One example of how much DRM sucks is that I've not listened to the first Kings of Leon album in years just because it had CD ripping protection on it. I could copy it then rip it, but it's obviously not exactly something I think of very often, and it requires digging through a box of CDs so I've just never got round to doing it.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[VoltCurve]

Bittorent will never go offline!

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[rpj1288]

As a failsafe though, it is wise to remember that any encryption can be broken, and any ID can be spoofed.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

The fundamental flaw here in is that the concept of "BUYING" "Ownership" of music is flawed. The artist OWNS the content; everyone else (including those prostituting DRM and the artists) are licensing it. When I buy a CD, I buy media, and a permanent use license for the content. DRM is flawed in its very concept in that the DRM providers are inserting themselves into a relationship they don't belong in the first place.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[ivan256]

There are extensions implemented by Cisco to deny routing based on any number of things. Validation by the TPM can just be added to the long list. It still doesn't stop you from using your computer as a general purpose (runs whatever instructions you want) system.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Repossessed]

You are aware that there are no TC platforms sold where it can't be turned off in BIOS right? Nobody (so far) has made any attempt to push it as anything other than an optional feature (and it *is* useful for security, if used right).

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Paradigm_Complex]

Assume the Party Escort Submission Position, or you will miss the party.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[jc42]

That's why I pirate all my music, it avoids problems like this.

... You don't hold a right to listen to music just because it exists.

Well, maybe. But consider that there's some obvious fraud going on nearly everywhere. For example, I just went to amazon.com and looked up some of their MP3 music. I note that there are buttons that say "Buy MP3". The buttons don't say "Rent MP3". They're telling me that if I push the button, I'll be "buying" the music file.

Now others have pointed out that DRM'd files should be considered "rented" or "leased", not "bought". If you buy something, that normally means that you have the right to use it for the rest of your life (and maybe even bequeath it to someone else after you die). You can legally give it away to a friend, perhaps as a birthday or wedding present.

But you can't legally do any of these things with DRM'd files, despite the fact that the sellers always say that you're "buying" the files. The DRM means that they can take away your right to use the files at any time. It also means that you can't legally give them to someone else. Hell, you can't even move them to a new computer that you own, without getting their permission, and they don't have to give you permission. If they go out of business or stop selling that kind of file, they can pull all your permissions.

This isn't "buying". It's at most a sort of "lease" that gives you none of the usual ownership rights that the word "buy" usually implies. Once you've bought something, a "seller" usually can't legally take it back from you. That usually only comes with a rent/lease agreement.

I'll be a bit more sympathetic to the pro-DRM arguments when I see vendors stop using the word "buy", and replace it with something like "rent" or "lease". But I don't expect to see such honesty from the sellers (who aren't actually "selling" the goods) any time soon.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[markjhood2003]

My personal favorite silly DRM law is the one which sets out massive penalties for circumventing a DRM mechanism - making anyone who holds the shift key while loading a CD into Windoze box a felon.

Anybody who loads a DRM-installing CD while logged in as a non-Administrator would be guilty too -- that stuff can't be installed without admin privileges, so the effect is the same as holding down shift while loading the CD.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Omestes]

And, like your Tivo, it'll be more or less impossible to change the software on. Or, if you do, you'll create as many problems as you solve because online banking, shopping and even Internet access can and quite possibly will demand that your 'computer' prove it's fully "Trusted" before they have anything to do with it."

I doubt that it will work quite that way... Two reasons; A) There is no money in it, and B) Its only local so there is no money in widespread enforcement.

The first point hinges on the fact that only one segment of the economy can leverage our corrupt (or ignorant but well intentioned) congresscritters towards this, the *AAs, where it would cost many other segments of our economy LOTS of money, and TONS of lost profits. If such a law was passed tomorrow, our ISPs would suddenly lose ALL of their business, since there are no Trusted computers. Even if there was, how many of their customers are still connecting on old boxes or alternative OSs? If it was mandated for online shopping, how much business would these shops lose, we face the same problem. Hardware upgrade cycles (and acceptance shading into ubiquity) are way to slow for this to be good for anyone. I mean anyone in the corporate sense, and not the personal sense, of course. If this was every seriously put before our law makers, you'd have a clash of the Lobby titans.

The second reason is that this would only apply to the US, which is significant, but decreasingly less so in internet presence. Why would Ebay or Amazon want to lose their international markets just to make the MPAA/RIAA happy?

Banks I can see falling for this, since they mostly have a local, or at most national, base, but many online companies are international now, and thus this would hurt them.

It might still happen (never underestimate how hard our government fights against us), but your reasons are somewhat flawed.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[LehiNephi]

The MP3's on Amazon aren't DRM'ed. They're unprotected MP3s. Whether or not there is some form of watermarking included is another issue. So yeah, you pay your $0.99, download the file, and it's yours to enjoy as many times/wherever you like.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, I just went to amazon.com and looked up some of their MP3 music. I note that there are buttons that say "Buy MP3". The buttons don't say "Rent MP3". They're telling me that if I push the button, I'll be "buying" the music file.

You do realize that Amazon sells plain old mp3s and not DRM'ed audio files, don't you? So you are buying the music, assuming you don't lose the file (not sure what their policy is here).

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[LehiNephi]

For the purposes of preventing music/movie piracy, however, it only takes a single compromised computer. Assuming the music or movie is protected all the way to the TPM, once the TPM is compromised and the movie is decrypted, the game is up. As the MPAA have already seen (though not yet learned), once a single unprotected copy of a movie is out there, there's no closing the barn door.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[dgatwood]

Don't even need to do that. Just use a VCR designed for (semi)professional video production. Since they typically don't use any AGC on the incoming video signal, they also aren't affected by Macrovision. You'll pay a lot more for the VCR, of course, but....

Or you could probably design a circuit that notches out that part of the signal fairly easily. No, I will not design the circuit for you, but I think I could build one for under five bucks with a handful of parts that I have lying around my house already if I wanted to....

As you said, Macrovision is designed to keep casually dishonest people honest and nothing more. It certainly shouldn't be considered real content protection.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Tano]

Sorry, should've been a bit clearer - yes, the people with compromised computers will have the possibility to keep pouring out unprotected copies.

The point though is that most of these networks work on the principle of loads of people participating in file-sharing, either as seeders or as leechers.

Take away the masses unable to circumvent the TPM, and all file-sharing will basically stay in the hands of the original pirates and their circle - because, consider this, with the TPM on the computer you might not be able to use certain file-sharing programs, easy to blacklist so that you cannot install them, and you maybe couldn't play any media, audio or video, that doesn't have a certain "authenticity" verification, maybe even done on the spot, online, when you're trying to play it.

Yes, the people who modded the hardware will be able to install the file-sharing software, and play whatever media they like - but they do not represent the majority of users out there.

So piracy might go back to the pre-Internet era, swapping DVD's or BluRay discs full of software or media between friends, or at best sharing online among the few (relative to the original numbers) people who modded the hardware.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[mrchaotica]

That doesn't mean it can't be really, really difficult. Remember, current DRM schemes only work because ultimately, you have control over your computer (i.e., the attacker and the intended recipient of the encrypted message are the same). If you just throw out that idea, as Treacherous Computing does, then it really can be difficult to break, especially when the only places the keys are stored are in Microsoft's servers, or inside the TPM silicon itself.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Orig_Club_Soda]

If all you brainacs would take a breath and stop whining for a minute - take a look at what failed here. It wasnt the DRM - it was Yahoo's business plan.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[jc42]

Well, yeah, but I also went to the iTunes store. Their buttons are labelled "BUY SONG" and "BUY ALBUM". And most of them do have DRM. If you visit any online music vendor, you'll have a lot of trouble finding even one that uses any word other than "BUY". They never mention DRM or any other restrictions, at least not on their sales page. That's kept well-hidden off in the pages of legalese that most people don't read (and probably couldn't stay awake through if they tried ;-).

The point is that the DRM vendors are explicitly telling customers that we "BUY" the music. This is, as others have pointed out, a pure lie when there's DRM involved. The common legal term for this is "consumer fraud". They get away with it because the legal system doesn't care, or is actively supportive of the fraud by enforcing things like DRM, EULAs, etc. against customers who thought they were buying the music.

But publicity of actions like this story might help people understand what's being done to them.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[toriver]

From Apple's standpoint, the files apparently are non-DRM - in the store. The DRM stuff is added by the iTunes software client-side. I seem to recall that was what Jon Lech Johansen ("DVD-Jon") discovered a while ago.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[tkw954]

That is exactly how it should work. Copyright is (or was) a monopoly granted for X years as incentive to have more works available to the public. This is exactly why trade secrets aren't granted patent protection. And nor should works that will never enter the public domain be granted copyright protection.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

Look up "Jury Nullification" sometime.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

It is different today, so called "rental-pricing" never made the leap from vhs to dvd.

At first the rental places were paying wholesale, just like wal-mart. Now there are revenue-sharing agreements such that they pay next to nothing for the physical discs in return for sending some percentage of rental revenue back to the studio... In some cases this also kills the used market - part of the agreements are to send back 'a lot' of the physical discs (for destruction) once rental rates on a title drop below a certain amount. It still leaves some discs in stock that eventually do get sold as used, but not the flood of them that they used to.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Oh please, what difference does that make? Apples controls both the itunes store and the itunes client. It doesn't matter where the drm is applied its still itunes doing it.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Dan541]

I bet you 20 dollars you didn't send them the money for the songs after downloading the music in the form you like.

Why the hell would I send them $20?

Downloading music is not stealing as nothing is lost, however what Yahoo is doing could be considered theft/fraud since users are actually losing something.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[AK Marc]

It's no worse than buying that great deal at the market with 'sold as seen' written on it.

Yes it is worse. It's just like buying a car sight-unseen that is illegal to fix if it is broken. It's not just the risk that it may cease to work, but that it's illegal to fix it, even if you paid for it and own it.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[BitterOak]

Yes, a DVD sold to a rental company (with suitable accompanying rights) normally costs a lot more than the ones you buy in the shops that are labelled "not for rental". I don't have any recent figures, but a few years ago the difference was roughly an order of magnitude, depending on the product.

What country do you live in? IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that here in the USA no special license is required to rent out movies. If I'm wrong, please let me know. Does anyone know in which countries a special license is required?

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[ocularDeathRay]

So? What good will your un-Trusted hardware do, when all ISPs (by law) refuse to allow it to connect to the Internet?

well... before the internet we had access to many BBSs in most areas. Between phone and wireless communication we would see these systems return.

remember... humans did survive before the internet... it wasn't that long ago either. communication would not be impossible, in fact with modern communications tech we would have even more options than before. the sky isn't falling... completely... yet

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[cpghost]

Of course you can buy a DRMed file: you just spent money on a bunch of bits, nothing more, nothing less. That the technology to make sense of those bits may not work in the future is not the seller's problem. Suppose you bought a film on VHS 10 years ago. Even if you can't play it back a few years from now when they stop making VHS players all along, you still bought the VHS cassette, and can't go back to the store and say: hey, the cassette I bought 10 years ago is useless: I want a refund. You bought the container, and relied on the fact, that technology would be around long enough for you to enjoy what's in the container.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I can't speak for the USA, but here in the UK, as far as I'm aware the restricted act of of issuing copies to the public still specifically includes rental of sound recordings, films and computer programs. [Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 18(2).]

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe so, but it is far less likely that this will be implemented in such a doomsday scenario as you describe, because there are far too many "unauthorized" users on non-Microsoft and non-Apple systems to allow for such a thing to go completely unnoticed. The popularity of FOSS has risen dramatically, and while the non-FOSS group still eclipses it in popularity, the entire user base (end users, businesses, and enterprises) is so large that there is no way that this conspiracy could happen without a severe backlash. Maybe it could happen back in 2003 when the first warnings about this surfaced, but most certainly not in today's day and age.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[thexile]

The cake is a lie.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[turgid]

So do I.

I buy it on CD so that I have a physical copy without lossy compression separate from my computers. Then, I rip using cdparanoia and encode with flac for listening to from my PC and LAME for listening to on my PDA.

Now, don't get me started on the dynamic range compression that's ruined some recent albums...

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[chrish]

That's one of the many awesome things about Magnatune (not associated, etc, just a happy customer); you can download WAV or FLAC in addition to the lossy formats they've got. Very flexible, and there are some excellent artists on there.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about the ramifications of locking the box down completely so that no user can add 3rd party software. Think about how that affects the companies that sell software. Think about how that affects companies that write software.

If you open the box up to installation of third party software, you have to deal with how installation of programs changes the registry and, in turn, the hash. Unless you get rid of OSs that require "registries", meaning that you cut MS out of the picture -- and how likely is that to happen?

No, this won't work at all.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[dangitman]

My personal favorite silly DRM law is the one which sets out massive penalties for circumventing a DRM mechanism - making anyone who holds the shift key while loading a CD into Windoze box a felon.

Uhhh, wouldn't that make Microsoft the felon for allowing you to do that, not the user?

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[dangitman]

Incorrect. The iTunes DRM is tied to up to five computers, and an unlimited number of iPods/iPhones. So, if one of your computers dies, you just access the tracks on one of your other computers. And you can use that computer to authorize/deauthorize other machines.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[turbidostato]

"If you think those odds are realistic, you just make sure to make the fine you pay in court at least 101 times the value of an individual sale. Problem solved."

So it would ...if things worked that way. Sorrily they don't. The abuser will only pay for direct damages. Most of the time it means returning whatever the customer payed for the product/service and maybe a short ammount to cover damages. With a big enough customer base, that's peanuts against the benefits. It's not per chance that (at least in my country) Telecomms are the biggest abusers: with maybe one out of a million sueing benefits are orders of magnitude over damages.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[RockDoctor]

Saves having to go to the store, grab a DVD then return it after.

Now, why on earth would someone do that? My letter box is far closer than the nearest video rental place, and the mail box for the returns is still closer than the video store and on the way to the bus stop. No DRM required on that rental scheme.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[toddestan]

That's wrong. When you authorize a new computer (or reinstall your OS), that computer calls the mothership for the authorization, that way Apple can ensure that you only have up to 5 computers authorized at one time. If iTMS is gone, that means no more authorizations. That means if iTMS went away, you can only listen to your purchased music so long as at least one of your authorized computers is still working, or an iPod/iPhone that had been synced up to one of your computers is still working.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[dangitman]

Non Sequitur much? How is any of what I wrote incorrect?

I never said that you'd be able to do authorizations if the iTMS went down. All I did was correct the post I was replying to, which said that your music is tied to one specific computer. I never even addressed the issue of what happens if the iTMS went out of business.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[toddestan]

I never even addressed the issue of what happens if the iTMS went out of business.

Maybe you should read the post you replied to, because that's the situation the poster was discussing.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[hobbit]

Are you suggesting that Apple are willing to sell (i.e., not apply DRM to) those files? Or are you just making a non-point?

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[toriver]

I don't care I just buy non-DRM iTunes Plus music. Costs the same.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[dangitman]

Maybe you should get some lessons in fucking reading comprehension? I was correcting one specific fact in the post, not rebutting its general thesis.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[hobbit]

The discussion at hand is about whether Apple's use of the term "buy" (for DRMed music, not "Plus") is fraudulent. You claim not, on the basis that it wasn't encrypted until it reaches your machine. But I don't really understand what difference that makes, when the button labelled "Buy" applies DRM without giving you any other option.

Haha?

[fluch]

Come on, guys, what does it take so long to tag this story with the 'haha' tag??? Are you all asleep?

Re:Haha?

[sm62704]

Come on, guys, what does it take so long to tag this story with the 'haha' tag??? Are you all asleep?

Posted by timothy on Friday July 25, @06:31AM

Yes.

Insanity...

[bobbocanfly]

This is exactly the reason music piracy is so rampant at the moment. Companies need to learn: DRM doesnt stop Pirates, it encourages them.

When was the last time you downloaded something from bit-torrent and six months later you couldnt play it because of the company going down?

Re:Insanity...

[aliquis]

Well, it's not 100% trouble free, at least not for software.

With a pirated copy you may have troubles with:
* Play over Internet / use any net connectivity.
* Use it after an update.
* Be able to update.

the real criminals

[pimpimpim]

Will they be fined for fraud? they charged their costumers not so much less as the price of a track on a CD for mp3s with an amazingly limited lifespan. For ripping of their costumers they risk what? Nothing. Whereas people getting their music from other online sources are being threatened with jailtime and god-knows-what. Russia was more or less not allowed to join Nato because the perfectly legal and costumer-friendly allofmp3.com.

Re:the real criminals

[Anonymous Coward]

Russia was more or less not allowed to join Nato because the perfectly legal and costumer-friendly allofmp3.com.

Uhh, not exactly. You likely mean WTO but that is quite far from NATO... ;)

Re:the real criminals

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw the customer! thats our motto. --RIAA

Re:the real criminals

[thermian]

Its not fraud to close a branch of a company.
Sure its annoying, but its perfectly legal.

Re:the real criminals

[Anonymous Coward]

Russia was more or less not allowed to join Nato because the perfectly legal and costumer-friendly allofmp3.com.

No, I think Cuba was not allowed to join Nato for that reason. Russia maybe for something else, maybe there was not enough room

Re:the real criminals

[LordLucless]

Yeah! When will there be an online music service that offers real costumer service? I want to know what music goes well with this pantomime lion suit.

Re:the real criminals

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay I'll accept a lot of conspiracy BS but an MP3 format keeping Russia out of NATO is a stretch well beyond, Roswell and the JFK shooting. Russia was shut out of NATO because NATO was largely created to defend against them. It's kind of like having the Mob team up with the FBI to fight racketeering. Not real likely and kind of like having the mouse lend a hand guarding the cheese.

Re:the real criminals

[Erikderzweite]

USA actually tried to make Cuba join NATO in 1961 at Bay of Pigs :)

Re:the real criminals

[jimicus]

Its not fraud to close a branch of a company.
Sure its annoying, but its perfectly legal.

This is something which the law as it stands is not able to deal with.

There's plenty of laws in most countries regarding selling tangible products which protect the buyer at least until such time as they receive the product, and generally for a few months (even a few years) afterwards. Granted, some of these laws are unenforceable if the company goes bust but the only people who'll be affected are those who have paid but not yet received their items. I can't imagine they'd be unenforceable if a parent company said "Right, we're closing this subsidiary down, anyone who's placed and paid for an order but not received it is SOL". Generally they'd honour outstanding orders and stop accepting new ones.

There are also laws regarding selling services which protect the customer. Again, they're not much use if the supplier goes bust but if a parent company said "Right, we're closing this subsidiary and anyone who's got a service contract is SOL" would surely be sued to kingdom come.

But goods (tangible or otherwise) which can lose some or all of their functionality on the whim of the supplier long after they were purchased? Hmmm.... IANAL but I can't think of anything legally wrong. Ethically, yes it stinks.

This reminds me of a news article a year or two back where some fancy computer controlled car park was remotely disabled locking all the cars in because the supplier hadn't been paid. What next? The computer controlling the car park phones home every week and if that process fails for three weeks running it locks everything in?

Re:the real criminals

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't know allofmp3.com were especially friendly to costumers. Did they get a discount?

Does it extend to anyone wearing a costume, or just someone who makes them? ;o)

Re:the real criminals

[aliquis]

Are they in Nato now? I never knew they tried to join it, I'd guess US of A may had blamed allofmp3 as a reason for not letting them in? Though russia in NATO would probably become LESS of a risk of war and therefor a good thing. Not that I see USA vs Russia as a risk as is either.

Re:the real criminals

[pimpimpim]

oh shit. my bad :) Thanks for correcting me here ;)

Re:the real criminals

[Anonymous Coward]

costumer-friendly allofmp3.com

Costumes? I love costumes! I'll start buying music there right away!

[batman-theme.mp3]

Re:the real criminals

[omnichad]

Yeah...maybe they would qualify for NATO if they were...I dunno...on the Atlantic?

Re:the real criminals

[Dan541]

Will they be fined for fraud?

Sadly, No I think their little scam will continue. why sell it only once when you can sell it over and over to the same customer.

Who buys music these days anyway?

Re:the real criminals

[booshnoogs]

They more or less covered that. This is an excerpt from the email they sent out to their customers.

After September 30, 2008, you will not be able to transfer songs to unauthorized computers or re-license these songs after changing operating systems. Please note that your purchased tracks will generally continue to play on your existing authorized computers unless there is a change to the computer's operating system.

For any user who purchased tracks through Yahoo! Music Unlimited, we highly recommend that you back up the purchased tracks to an audio CD before the closing of the Store on September 30, 2008. Backing up your music to an audio CD will allow you to copy the music back to your computer again if the license keys for your original music files cannot be retrieved.

Re:the real criminals

[Anonymous Coward]

YEAH! Just like Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Turkey, Romania, Greece...

Re:the real criminals

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate when corporate America rips off my costumes. It's so violating.

More Ammo

[yotto]

This is just more ammunition for when someone asks me why I care about DRM.

Thanks, Yahoo!, though to be honest I didn't know they had a music store either.

Re:More Ammo

[JCSoRocks]

This is just more ammunition for when someone asks me why I care about DRM.

Definitely - I have a hard time getting through to my friends sometimes on this issue and stories like this will help. This is also why I continue to shop around for and purchase $10 CDs. I get higher quality music, a hardcopy for backup and album art for the same price as a DRM laden digital version that's been compressed to crap. Wal-Mart and amazon.com both have $10 CDs pretty regularly.

Excellent news!

[TheRaven64]

While I feel sorry for the people who have lost their music as a result of this, it has two excellent outcomes

The first is that it gives a great example of why the analogy that I've been using for DRM'd goods for a while is accurate. When I'm explaining DRM'd products to non-technical people, I tell them that they are equivalent to things labelled 'sold as seen' at a jumble sale. You get them home and they may work, and they may continue to work. If they do, you might have got a good deal, but there is absolutely no guarantee that they will work, nor that they will continue to work in the future. In contrast, DRM-free goods are guaranteed to work for as long as you want them to.

The second is that it gives a perfect case study for persuading legislators that DRM should not be legal (or, as I usually argue, that technical and legal protections on creative works should be mutually exclusive - you can have whichever you prefer, but you can only pick one). There is no possible way in which allowing an organisation a government-granted monopoly to sell products and then remotely disable them fording you to buy them again from one of their other resellers can be good for the economy.

Re:Excellent news!

[purpledinoz]

I bet their customers aren't chanting "Yahoo!" over this.

Re:Excellent news!

[fluch]

Or maybe their customers are actually chanting "Yahoo!" over it. Maybe just with a different meaning to it... like in "D'oh!".

Re:Excellent news!

[AlphaBlade]

I was actually thinking of them chanting "Yahoo!" in a manner not entirely dissimilar to Kirk chanting "Khaan!"

Re:Excellent news!

[ScrewMaster]

"Ah, Yahoo, my old friend. Do you know, Yahoo, the Klingon proverb which tells us that revenge is a dish best served cold?"

Re:Excellent news!

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no possible way in which allowing an organisation a government-granted monopoly to sell products and then remotely disable them fording you to buy them again from one of their other resellers can be good for the economy.

Actually, I'm pretty sure it's great for the economy. People could spend a lot of money buying and rebuying a product that's essentially free to produce. And I'm sure the record companies will let the benefits from this trickle down, helping everyone in the country. God bless America!

Re:Excellent news!

[CastrTroy]

Or maybe they are chanting Yahoo! at the people running Yahoo, signifying that they are a bunch of Yahoos. In the sense of Gulliver's Travels that is.

Re:Excellent news!

[omnichad]

Not all that unlikely. If your MP3 is 10 years old, it probably came from a CD. That means the MP3 fairy lives in your CD case!

Re:Excellent news!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think DRM is fine for the rental model like Napster and Rhapsody. It is a way for me to experience a large quantity of music without paying $10 per album (since I choose not to steal music). DRM, however, has no place in music that is purchased.

Well duh?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what happens when you're essentially *renting* your music or movies. It's just a matter of when they're going to stop letting you use it. This will surely happen to those who bought songs from the itunes store (DRM'ed ones), it's really just a matter of when.

The same applies to some software even. Imagine what will happen to Windows XP-style activated apps if the company goes out of business, or just plain decides to stop activating it (could perhaps be legal, using clauses in the purchase agreement or whatever, or not so legal...)

Re:Well duh?

[DarkOx]

Thats a good point IT WILL HAPPEN. Itunes might be arround for 20 years but some day it will be closed. I think the longevity might be the sadest part of all. Unless Apple in the end pushes some automajic code in a later release that strips the DRM from any protected files it finds most people won't ever be bothered to do it, and won't be thinking about it when ITMS shuts down.

Children won't be rediscovering momy and daddys 20 year old records in the future. DRM could cause an entire generations music to be lost.

Re:Well duh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Children won't be rediscovering momy and daddys 20 year old records in the future. DRM could cause an entire generations music to be lost.

Let's rephrase that. Children of today will have to repurchase mom and dad's music collection at some point in the future.

There will be no albums to browse in garage sales, there'll be no CDs to lend out or sell. All the noise the record companies make and their apparent dislike for digital music is a ruse. They love it! There are no resales of digital purchases. As more and more people move to the digital model for their purchases, the market for pre-owned media will all but disappear. It'll be the same for books if they make them cheap enough for book readers to catch on.

Consumers will be left with two choices, to buy again at full retail, or pirate. Flaky hard drives, windows machines ruined with crudware, and umpteen other reason will mean the music on peoples' machines will get "lost" over time. You can't redownload your purchases when the stores have gone down. Let's see, google video, microsoft and now yahoo have all closed stores previously selling digital media. These are multibillion dollar companies, not snotty upstarts.

Re:Well duh?

[TomRK1089]

"Children won't be rediscovering momy and daddys 20 year old records in the future. DRM could cause an entire generations music to be lost."

Oh no! How will our descendants survive without being able to appreciate the lyrical genius of K-Fed, NSYNC, and My Chemical Romance? It really is the end of the world!

Re:Well duh?

[erlando]

DRM could cause an entire generations music to be lost.

With the quality (or lack thereof) of most of the music produced today maybe this is a good thing?

Re:Well duh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering most of the music out there today -- is that really a bad thing?

Re:Well duh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Children won't be rediscovering momy and daddys 20 year old records in the future. DRM could cause an entire generations music to be lost.

-and nothing of value was lost

Re:Well duh?

[Anonymous Coward]

DRM could cause an entire generations music to be lost.

Given what passes for popular music these days, this might be the only positive benefit of DRM.

Re:Well duh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Children won't be rediscovering momy and daddys 20 year old records in the future. DRM could cause an entire generations music to be lost.

To let kids listen to media they haven't purchased a license for? Unthinkable! Music should be DNA-locked.

Re:Well duh?

[WDot]

I know you're being funny, but seriously nobody listens to K-Fed. He sold a few thousand albums before the sales stopped and he fell into obscurity. Most people stopped listening to NSync by the time they got to middle school.

I can't vouch for most music store's top 10 lists, but suffice to say there are still plenty of good musical acts around. Hang out at sites like Pitchfork Media (http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/) and Tiny Mix Tapes (http://www.tinymixtapes.com/). Once you're past all the pretentious hipster attitude, there's some pretty good sound to be found.

Beyond that, you can discover good music in television commercials (the only thing that make them worth watching), from late night talk shows, and from that one song you heard on Youtube, Pandora, or Last.fm.

Nobody's a slave to top 40 radio. Music is playing in so many other places you're bound to hear something you like.

Re:Well duh?

[kalpol]

I don't think that's going to be the case. Yes, we'll lose the tactile experience of flipping through boxes of albums (and let's face it, that has about a .01% success rate). But I've preserved digital data for quite a long time, and there's no reason my kids won't be able to browse music directories and share music from virtually 20-year-old music files.

Re:Well duh?

[PIBM]

except if it's drmed and there's no auth server left...

Re:Well duh?

[sm62704]

Let's rephrase that. Children of today will have to repurchase mom and dad's music collection at some point in the future.

How are they going to do that when all the music in the collection is "out of print" and the record label has gone bankrupt and all the keys are missing?

Re:Well duh?

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Generally, hackers seem to do a pretty decent job keeping up with the iTunes DRM so users can strip it fairly painlessly; I guess the hope is that when iTMS finally kicks the bucket, there'll be at least one hacker with enough talent and free time to crack the DRM one last time, so everyone who cares enough can strip it.

Re:Well duh?

[iminplaya]

DRM could cause an entire generations music to be lost.

Not at all. It's a great opportunity to sell and constantly resell your product with minimum effort. Oh, if only us mechanics could do the same. I could charge for every hour you use your machine, every mile you drive your car. *sigh*

Re:Well duh?

[Von Helmet]

Thats a good point IT WILL HAPPEN. Itunes might be arround for 20 years but some day it will be closed. I think the longevity might be the sadest part of all. Unless Apple in the end pushes some automajic code in a later release that strips the DRM from any protected files it finds most people won't ever be bothered to do it, and won't be thinking about it when ITMS shuts down.

Why would Apple write code to strip the DRM when DVD-Jon already did it for them?

Re:Well duh?

[seanonymous]

If Apple's Fairplay isn't broken in 20 years I'll personally perform all of your favorite tunes for your children.

Re:Well duh?

[seanonymous]

If Apple's DRM isn't cracked in 20 years, I'll personally perform all your favorite tunes for your children.

Re:Well duh?

[Spatial]

Beyond that, you can discover good music in television commercials (the only thing that make them worth watching)

Damn it! Demolition Man was right!

Re:Well duh?

[Elbowgeek]

Interesting you should bring this up. Back in the 80's and early 90's we had several companies attempting to DRM their software through floppies which transferred a license to the hard drive (Lotus, I'm looking at you). You could do this once with Lotus software, and you could transfer the license back to the floppy to be installed on another computer, but if your hard drive crashed you were stuffed.

So we've been down this road before - we would purposely buy cracked copies of software in order to just be able to do business efficiently, even though we'd bought legitimate licenses.

Re:Well duh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny. I'm sure my grandparents said the same thing about The Beatles, Pink Floyd and The Who.

Re:Well duh?

[TomRK1089]

Oh, believe me, I rely on Pandora for pretty much all my music now -- especially more obscure stuff like traditional Celtic music and old folk artists from the 70s.

Re:Well duh?

[adolf]

My garage sale is called "thepiratebay."

Hope this helps.

Re:Well duh?

[dangitman]

Why can't they just crack the DRM? It never worked in the first place.

Question!

[neokushan]

I am not a Lawyer (And I refuse to say IANAL - it took me 3 months to figure out what that meant), so I'm curious as to what the legal implications are for downloading DRM free versions of songs you LEGALLY own (in one form or another)?
I know that in the case of software, it's perfectly legal to download pirated versions providing you legitimately own it (ROMs in particular are a good example of this), but what about media?

Re:Question!

[geordie_loz]

Erm.. YSYRTSIYTIIIYPA (You Say You're Refusing To Say IANAL Yet There It Is In Your Post Anyways)
:)

Re:Question!

[Anonymous Coward]

unfortunately it is not legal to download pirated ROMs even if you own the original. Though I doubt it would ever go to court.
People have been prosecuted for downloading versions of software they own, most commonly a european release of a game that they own as a US release.
And going back to ROMs and rips, the code you download is often not identical to the original e.g. a crack or patch has been applied making it a copyrighted derivative work.
You do not expect to get free copies of remixed music when you own the original, ignoring the *anything is free to download* argument.

Re:Question!

[neokushan]

I'm glad your homepage is broken =P

Re:Question!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I am not a lanyard, but I'm pretty sure it IS illegal to download commercial ROMs weather you own the original media or not.

Re:Question!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I don't think it's legal to download ROMs. It depends on your jurisdiction, of course.

Here in Sweden, we have a (relatively new) principle called "lovlig fÃrlaga", literally "legal source". That is, if the material was illegally distributed (for example, a movie was uploaded via bittorrent), then it is illegal to download it. This means that in Sweden, it's illegal to download songs from a CD you actually own.

I don't know where you're from, but I'm guessing U.S.A... And I find it hard to imagine that your copyright laws would be more lax than ours.

Re:Question!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll never people who refuse to use the well-known acronym IGYHIB.

Re:Question!

[jmpeax]

I refuse to say IANAL - it took me 3 months to figure out what that meant

This website is very useful: Acronym Finder

Re:Question!

[sanosuke001]

Actually, the companies owning the software say it isn't legal. (Same for ROMs) Though, your common sense and fair use would seem to point in a different direction.

If it were legal, then sharing music online would be ok. The people downloading it would be getting sued and they would have to prove that they own a legitimate copy in court. But, this is not the case. The file sharers are being sued because you are not allowed to give a copy to anyone else. Fair use states that you can make a copy for personal use from your own copy. Downloading a copy is not covered; though it should be. Not everyone is tech savvy and downloading is sometimes their only course of action and getting around DRM is often too difficult for most to make a viable backup.

That is whats wrong with all of this. They make their customers out to be thieves and try to control something they really can't control effectively.

Re:Question!

[Anonymous Coward]

And I refuse to say IANAL - it took me 3 months to figure out what that meant

3 months? Really? Did it never occur to you to google it?

Re:Question!

[houghi]

I am not a Lawyer

I am glad you (and others, including the once using IANAL) point this out as it is my understanding that unless specified, you ARE a lawyer and I always take whatever I read online as legal advice.

(Oh, IANAL)

Re:Question!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not a Lawyer (And I refuse to say IANAL - it took me 3 months to figure out what that meant),

You shoulda JFGI...

Re:Question!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yarp. Just because some nitwit puts a disclaimer saying that it's illegal to download ROMs if you don't own a legitimate copy first, it doesn't suddenly make it legal to do so because you do own a copy. That's like saying "It's illegal to kill someone with an unregistered gun." The (il)logical leap of "Oh, well, my gun is registered, so I can kill whomever I want" isn't suddenly true.

Re:Question!

[Anonymous Coward]

"And I refuse to say IANAL"

sure.

Re:Question!

[Oh no, it's Dixie]

And who doesn't use the acronym INPWRTUTWKAI? Absolutely ridiculous.

Re:Question!

[skeeto]

IANAL, but I am pretty sure, in the context of copyright, you can download anything you want without infringement. It is the uploading part, where you are making copies (and why they are called copyrights) and distributing them, that is infringing. With P2P like BitTorrent, the uploading part is part of the deal. This is why all those RIAA lawsuits are targeted at people who are potentially uploading (i.e. distributing) music.

For example, let's say you visit a website that distributes material under copyright without permission of the copyright holders, and you download something they falsely claim to be permitted to distribute. Can you be held responsible for infringement? The website made the copies. How could you possibly know whether or not they have permission to do it? If the copyright notices are gone, who would you even ask?

Or how about this: can you get in trouble if someone throws copyright infringing UDP packets at you?

Here is where the distinction between copyright infringement and theft is important: when someone infringes on a copyright by making a copy (say, burning a CDR copy of an "All Right Reserved" CD), and then giving that copy to you, you cannot be charged with receiving stolen property (unless your buddy got his CDRs by hiding them in his hoodie at BestBuy and walking out).

Re:Question!

[sm62704]

I, Robot. You, ANAL

Re:Question!

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a grey area at best. The issue is that you're making a copy without permission. Maybe fair use covers it - fair use certainly covers "phase shifting" an audio CD to an mp3 player (according to the 9th circuit court I believe) - maybe it doesn't. Are you willing to take the risk of getting caught up in a dragnet & fighting in a legal arena to find out? I'm not.

Re:Question!

[31415926535897]

I know that in the case of software, it's perfectly legal to download pirated versions providing you legitimately own it (ROMs in particular are a good example of this), but what about media?

IANAL either, but from the perspective of downloading media you own ("have a license to use"), you're probably okay. However, the person you're downloading from likely does not have the legal right to distribute the copyrighted content. My guess is that if you are downloading from an unauthorized distributor, you are probably committing contributory infringement, which is just as bad as actual infringement (in the law's eyes anyway). I'm just saying you should be careful before you assume something is legal.

Re:Question!

[Anonymous Coward]

>I know that in the case of software, it's perfectly legal to download pirated versions

No, it isn't. There is a tolerance on that, and that's it. Some companies even explicitly forbid this, for instance RARE: try to retrieve old Spectrum games from the Ultimate era (Alien8, SabreWulf, etc.). You will find it is difficult because they don't allow it, even though the game ran on computers that most people would not even be able to connect to their current TV sets! That's ridiculous.

Personaly, I think it _should_ be legal. But it is _not_ the case.

Re:Question!

[omnichad]

What about cd-ROM's?

Re:Question!

[penguinbrat]

IIRC - The point of DRM was essentially like a EULA for music that they can yank at any given time, just as the EULA can be rewritten at any given time - you only bought the license to listen

Re:Question!

[tehcyder]

I refuse to say IANAL - it took me 3 months to figure out what that meant

So you spent 3 months thinking /. was some odd gay sex forum?

Re:Question!

[neokushan]

Look around, particularly at the majority of the "frost piss"s lately. Is it really that big a leap?

Re:Question!

[tehcyder]

Yes, but what's funniet is that the GP stuck around for 3 months, probably convinced he was turning gay with all this bottom-related lewdness flying around, and he couldn't be bothered to Google "IANAL"...

Re:Question!

[Cajun Hell]

I know that in the case of software, it's perfectly legal to download pirated versions providing you legitimately own it

Are you sure you really know that, rather than merely assume it, since it would make perfect sense? Can you cite a law or court ruling?

Anyway, back to music: The mp3.com case's ruling was that sending someone a song they have proven that they already have, is copyright infringement.

There's no reason the situation would be different with software.

Write your legislator.

Re:Question!

[neokushan]

Kind of like how you couldn't be bothered to read the other comments, where you would have found out that he was being distinctly Ironic?

Re:Question!

[TeknoHog]

IASOATMTWPOA (I always spell out abbreviations, thus mooting the whole point of abbreviations).

Re:Question!

[the entropy]

When that happens to me I simply ask my computer:

entropy@entropy-laptop ~ $ wtf is IANAL
IANAL: I am not a lawyer
entropy@entropy-laptop ~ $

Re:Question!

[jollyreaper]

I am not a Lawyer (And I refuse to say IANAL - it took me 3 months to figure out what that meant)

I always figured it was like Craigslist personals...

And consumer faith with them

[MikeRT]

The music industry's inability to conceive of a good reason for why people would need to break DRM for a good purpose has just helped Apple once more. Yes, their stuff is protected by DRM, but it can also be burned to a CD as audio tracks. No one in their right mind will buy music this way again except through Apple until someone comes out with a system that is as laissez faire as Apple's.

Re:And consumer faith with them

[peragrin]

right thought wrong reason.

Yahoo was mainly a subscription site, as most windows media sites are. once the servers stop you lose your subscriptions. They may rig the setup to keep playing for a year instead of a month, but sometime soon all that music you spent money on is gone.

Apple sells DRm, and DRM free tracks, you keep it working even if apple goes boom.

Re:And consumer faith with them

[greyhueofdoubt]

unless they buy music from amazon, which is cheaper, higher-quality, and drm-free...

I'm just saying that there are other options out there that don't require subscription or passwords.

-b

some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[thermian]

I buy drm protected audiobooks from Audible, and intend to continue doing so, because their service is excellent. Their catalogue of audiobooks is the best I've found.

They actually provide a rip to cd thing with their software, so you can go direct to unprotected mp3. A lot of people miss this point.

I prefer to use goldwave to convert the files to mp3 as soon as I download them, mp3 album maker to join them into one big file, then audiobookcutter to split into ten minute chunks. All in all about ten minutes work. Certainly its equivilent to the time it takes to rip a bunch of cd's

That way I get the immense convenience of downloading my two audiobook fixes a month, and avoid most of the problems caused by drm.

I'm not sure that they approve of customers using goldwave. Ok, I know they don't, but they still get my money each month, and will continue to do so as long as they keep getting in books I want.

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[Rogerborg]

Serious question: why do you rip to mp3 instead of to wma or ogg or some other more efficient format? mp3s are stone age; their only remaining use, so far as I can see, is as a common format of exchange on p2p.

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[EdgeyEdgey]

How much more would you pay to be able to directly download the whole book pre-split into 10 minute chunks?

You can work it out. Take how much you get paid an hour, divide it by 6. That's the going rate for 10 minutes of your life.

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[thermian]

the iPod doesn't use Ogg, and I see no advantage to using wma.

Besides, audiobooks are voice only, 32bit is more then adequate, and mp3 is fine.

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[MightyYar]

I actually prefer to rip voice files using Lame with:
-V 9 --vbr-new -mm

It still plays on an mp3 player or car player (and not just the few that support OGG Vorbis), and is smaller than the smallest option available for AAC in iTunes. Lame also does a really nice job - the only part that sounds bad is the introductory music. The file size is outstanding - about 15MB per CD!

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[Rogerborg]

I see no advantage to using wma.

And I see no ships.

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[thermian]

I use lame too, but that's lame_enc.dll with goldwave.
I've not tried to reduce file size, not when I have no storage issues. Possibly I'm being wasteful, but with 500Gb external HDs going for £60, I haven't seen the need.

Also, the new readings of the Dune books have a cast, and frequent bits of background music, so I put the encode rate up for those. It seems to work well.

I can't tell any difference between the original aa files and my rips.

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[Anonymous Coward]

You can work it out. Take how much you get paid an hour, divide it by 6. That's the going rate for 10 minutes of your life.

Only if you consider every minute of his life as work. Not all time is a salable asset. Problem is, there is a certain amount of time in each day that no one will pay you for. Leisure time really is worth less than work time. And past a certain point (generally agreed to be about 8 hours) the more time bought from one seller, the less valuable each additional minute bought is.

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[sm62704]

They actually provide a rip to cd thing with their software, so you can go direct to unprotected mp3.

So what's the point of the DRM?

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[MightyYar]

I don't have space issues on my hard drive, but I like to condense as many things as possible onto a single CD for playing in cars.

Also, I tend to keep a copy on my server so that I can listen from any computer (work, wife's computer, laptop in coffee shop, etc) so I like the size to be small to handle flaky connections. At the 35-41 kbps that I seem to get, I can even stream files on my crappy GPRS phone connection!

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[@madeus]

Serious question: why do you rip to mp3 instead of to wma or ogg or some other more efficient format?

Really, that's a serious question?

Neither AAC or WMA currently have the same level widespread support in players as the MP3 format (although it's getting better). Support for Ogg by vendors is very limited to the point of being almost non-existent.

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[Anonymous Coward]

the iPod doesn't use Ogg, and I see no advantage to using wma.

You're right, it's probably overkill for voice but the iPod *does* do AAC which is (to my ears anyway) at least as good as Ogg or WMA at the bitrates I use.

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[Rogerborg]

Yes, it's a serious question.

My $30 unbranded ChiPod clone, bought 2 years ago, plays WMAs. A quick trawl through Amazon didn't turn up anything that can't play WMA. I'm really not sure where I'd even buy a player today that doesn't support it. Can you find any, or are you too busy holding the telescope to your eye patch?

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[thermian]

I've never tried aac, I might convert a book and see if I like it.

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[thermian]

They actually provide a rip to cd thing with their software, so you can go direct to unprotected mp3.

So what's the point of the DRM?

I've wondered this myself. I'm guessing its to appease paranoid book rights holders, because it doesn't help the consumer in the slightest.

Given that they often get books before they appear elsewhere, it must be a strategy that works.

As I said above, the drm won't stop me buying their books, they have a good catalogue, but I'd like to see it gone all the same.

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[The Warlock]

I use Moonshell as my portable audio player, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't support WMA. It does support AAC, Ogg, FLAC, etc, though.

Also, is there a Linux-based WMA encoder that doesn't suck?

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[Anonymous Coward]

The first link from that search says you're misquoting.

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[said213]

I have a Sirius Stiletto (100) which, I believe, does not play WMA. As a side note; It also is not compatible with Windows Vista.

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[citylivin]

"mp3s are stone age"

So is the wheel

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[billcopc]

That's the going rate for 10 minutes of your life.

Every time someone says this non-truth, I roll my eyes so hard I see the back of my head.

Do you work 24/7 ? Do you not value your downtime ? Have you ever had fun in your life ? If you measure everything by the cost of not working, then how much are we costing you when you post on slashdot ?

I've got a toonie you can shove up your ass!

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[EdgeyEdgey]

Exactly my point! The GP is wasting 10 mins of his 'downtime' with every book just because Audible are clinging to a business model with ineffective DRM.
Audible can charge at least $1 more for this stripped down service (assuming a minimum wage of $6).
Although you do have a point. Why I am posting on slashdot for free, when I could be shoving toonies (?!?) up my ass.

Re:some of us can work arouynd it without bitching

[dangitman]

The serious question is: "Why the fuck would anybody use WMA?'

Yahoo Music is a Rental Service

[Jellybob]

I may be entirely wrong, but I thought that Yahoo Music worked on a rental basis, where you could listen to as much music as liked so long you kept paying the service fee, so this isn't quite as bad as the OP made it sound.

People havn't *bought* the music, so they havn't lost something that they paid money for, expecting it to continue being available for the rest of time.

Re:Yahoo Music is a Rental Service

[brianmotzen]

According to their FAQ you can also buy individual songs : http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/music/music/getmusic/launch-11.html

(Disclaimer : I don't use Yahoo Music so I don't know if the FAQ is outdated or not)

Re:Yahoo Music is a Rental Service

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the heck is this modded troll??? Even if he is wrong, it still doesn't look trollish!

Wake up slashdot mods!

Re:Yahoo Music is a Rental Service

[punkr0x]

Not true. They have basically two services. You can listen to unlimited music for a monthly fee. You can also buy individual tracks/albums for around $1 a song. All of it is protected by DRM.

Re:Yahoo Music is a Rental Service

[Alexpkeaton1010]

I think you had the option of both subscribing and buying songs. I became a subscriber when they had a deal of $79 for 2 years unlimited. At that price I don't mind renting my music. Since I'm only 1 year into that 2 year deal, I'm slightly annoyed by this.

Re:Yahoo Music is a Rental Service

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo Music used to be MusicMatch music (I think they had their own too, but still).

I got screwed by this back when I was retarded and bought music tracks from them because they were 99 cents and available. I am a techie, and upgraded my computer a few times, had a drive crash once.. things that either didn't allow me to 'unregister' the computer, or I just forgot and reformatted the box before giving it to another relative.

After I hit my five box limit (over many years, its surprisingly quick how fast you can hit this), I lost my songs. I was going to call and complain to them about this, but it looks like its pointless anyway (I had maybe three dozen songs from them or so).

I use Amazon now for my music purchases, and am happy with it. Also I can copy them to the downstairs computer to listen to while cleaning the hou... I mean, building microchips from scratch while hacking.. things..

Re:Yahoo Music is a Rental Service

[olivebridge]

I may be entirely wrong, but I thought that Yahoo Music worked on a rental basis, where you could listen to as much music as liked so long you kept paying the service fee, so this isn't quite as bad as the OP made it sound.

People havn't *bought* the music, so they havn't lost something that they paid money for, expecting it to continue being available for the rest of time.

almost correct. Yahoo Music actually had two services, one for streaming, one for downloading.

you could pay a monthly fee to stream as much music as you wanted, on-demand...

... and/or you could pay $1.00/song to download and burn WMA files.

i enjoyed the streaming option a lot. at one point i was paying $5.00/month for access to more than two million songs. i never used Rhapsody or Napster so i can't compare features but i think Y! had the cheapest streaming service by far.

now since Y! Music canceled this option, i use free alternatives like last.fm and Pandora.

the nice thing about Y! was that i could play specific songs or albums in addition to the random "this station is similar to X artist" tools found on last.fm and Pandora. skipping tracks was unlimited, unlike Pandora.

sometimes i would be streaming music on Y!, hear something great a number of times, and then i would decide that the song is so great that i would then go back to Y! to actually buy the song.

i've burned all my Y! downloads so i'm not worried about this shutdown.

Isn't it ironic...

[Solo-Malee]

...that this story follows that in the UK where six ISPs have now agreed a deal that will see hundreds of thousands of letters sent to net users suspected of illegally sharing music. Now I suppose there'll be a few more trying to get replacements for tracks that yesterday they were able to listen to and today they can't.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7522334.stm

I just hope that the BBC picks up this latest music industry/tech fiasco and asks the question...

"Who is looking after the consumer?"

Me, I'll always be buying the original CD (preferably from an indie artist!)

Re:Isn't it ironic...

[Yer Mum]

So first the servers you check your DRM'd music against are taken down then you receive nasty letters/a reduction in service from your ISP/your ISP stops providing you a service/a possible fine if the law changes/etc... when you try and download songs you already own through eMule or BitTorrent so you end up buying the CD if you really care about the music.

It's genius, I never knew there were so many ways to pay for the same thing.

Why MSN Music store was going.

[Kingston]

There is a good article here covering DRM issues and the decision, since revoked, to shut down the MSN music store licence server. It boils down to:

So the trail leads back to the licence server - which Microsoft is turning off for its customers. Why is it doing that? According to Rob Bennett, who wrote the shock email, it was too complicated to support. "Every time there is an OS upgrade, you saw support issues. People would call in because they couldn't download licences. We had to write new code, new configurations each time,"

So it was too much hassle to support, and as for the customers who had purchased music, they thought forever - they could take a running jump.

Re:Why MSN Music store was going.

[Elbowgeek]

Well my turntable is quite a simple beast, and can always be repaired by me. And upgrades are actually *fun* to do and only improve the sound quality (which is awesome already).

No! Downloading ROMs ain't necessarily so...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not a Lawyer (And I refuse to say IANAL - it took me 3 months to figure out what that meant), so I'm curious as to what the legal implications are for downloading DRM free versions of songs you LEGALLY own (in one form or another)?
I know that in the case of software, it's perfectly legal to download pirated versions providing you legitimately own it (ROMs in particular are a good example of this), but what about media?

It depends upon the jurisdiction that you're in, in many places this is also illegal. The USA (and any country that has a trade agreement with them) have anti-circumvention measures that make obtaining ROMs illegal.

For example Nintendo products are generally protected in this way as the storage mechanism is always custom designed for the console unit it question, it's not like making a "backup" of a Playstation DVD.

nb. I'm not condoning the fact that downloading of ROMs is illegal, just making an observation.

appropriate captcha: echelon

For now, DRM doesn't interfere with my music

[Dekortage]

I buy several albums from iTunes a year (probably 20+ albums). Since I have a Mac, and an iPod, and I burn the music to CD to play in the car during my lengthy commute -- Apple's DRM doesn't really bother me. When possible, I buy their DRM-less albums, and I have occasionally used the "convert to MP3" feature so I could make an MP3 CD... but so far, Apple's DRM has not interfered with my music listening.

Maybe if I wanted/needed a different music player, or I cared about saving a few pennies and buying music from Wal-Mart, then I'd start caring about this. But for now I don't.

Re:For now, DRM doesn't interfere with my music

[pandrijeczko]

Sorry, but this sounds like fanboi speak. I would suggest that you have adapted your music listening to accomodate Apple's DRM - after all, downloading a non-DRMed track format would probably not require any conversion at all before being able to make a CD for the car. I also fail to understand, even to this day, why anyone would buy an album from iTunes? I can, to a degree, understand why some people want to get individual tracks (although I'm an album person myself & can't think of a worse way to listen to music than treating it like a bag of "Pick N Mix" sweets) but every time I have looked on there, not that I would ever use iTunes, I have easily been able to source the actual CD at a lower price. Well, whatever works for you, I guess, but I'd really like to understand what the big deal is with downloadable music - okay, maybe if you need a particular piece of music at 2am in the morning possibly... because for less money, I can have a tangible disk, sleeve notes to read, at excellent quality that I can then rip myself at whatever bit rate I see fit.

Re:For now, DRM doesn't interfere with my music

[Dekortage]

I would suggest that you have adapted your music listening to accomodate Apple's DRM

We may be arguing semantics about listening habits: if Apple's model happens to fit my habits, do you still think I am adapting to them?

because for less money, I can have a tangible disk, sleeve notes to read, at excellent quality that I can then rip myself at whatever bit rate I see fit.

Hey, that's fine for you. I live in a rather rural location, albums on iTunes are cheaper than physical media at nearby locations, and generally speaking, I just don't have time to browse the aisles at a music store to learn that they don't have a copy of the specific album I want. Liner notes are cool, sure, but not important enough to me.

Re:For now, DRM doesn't interfere with my music

[Cajun Hell]

In other words, a DRM customer's attitude is, "fuck the future." That would explain a lot of today's politics. I can only hope that you are an insignificant minority, but I know that you're actually very typical and in the overwhelming majority.

Maybe if I wanted/needed a different music player, or I cared about saving a few pennies and buying music from Wal-Mart, then I'd start caring about this.

Can that really only happen after you get fucked over, or is there some way that seeing the inevitability of eventually getting fucked over, would make you start caring? Is there anything that can be done about this? (I ask you because presumably something that would make you care, would make a lot of other people care too, and then the situation could start to change. Yes, I'm an optimist.) Seriously: what would it take, to change your position before you get fucked? Is there any way to persuade people to consider their future?

long live Amazon

[misanthrope101]

Amazon has gotten more of my money for DRM-free music than I had previously spent on music my entire life. I'm not even that big on music, but somehow I ended up with about 25 Nina Simone albums, about the same number of Billie Hoiday, 15 CDs or so of Dinah Washington, and who knows what else. Never would've bought this stuff if they'd DRM'd it.

Re:long live Amazon

[MtViewGuy]

Thank you very much for mentioning the Amazon MP3 store! :-)

In short, Amazon's MP3 store is the first truly viable alternative the iTunes Music Store for these these reasons:

1) The cost in many cases is much lower than iTMS on a per-song and per-album basis.

2) Amazon encodes their MP3's using the LAME 3.97 encoder with 256 kbps variable bit rate encoding, which results in excellent sound quality that is almost the same as the uncompressed CD original.

3) Because the MP3 files have no DRM restrictions, that means no hassles copying the music with third-party programs to your portable music player.

4) Amazon's MP3 downloader program automatically puts the playlist into either Windows Media Player 11.0 or iTunes, which means easy syncing with your favorite portable music player that uses these programs to copy music to your player.

It's small wonder why I've bought several albums through the Amazon MP3 store and are searching for more albums to download. That explains why older music stores that use DRM restrictions are rapidly falling by the wayside.

Re:long live Amazon

[Plantain]

5) Not available outside of the US

Even with a fake name and address, they go to extreme measures to stop the poor Aussies from getting their music :'(

Back to the iTunes monopoly I go!

(if you != fed; do s/iTunes/bittorrent/)

Re:long live Amazon

[MasterOfMagic]

I go with AllOfMP3, now under a new name (that we dare not speak!). They offer all music in MP3 format using LAME or bladeenc in CBR or VBR modes. They offer a lot of music (I'd say about 35-40% on average for the stuff I listen to and 100% of the new stuff they add) in FLAC, Monkey's Audio, MPC, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, MP3, raw WAV, and probably a few formats that I'm forgetting. It's all DRM free, and $0.02/MB for downloading. Oh, and it works on any OS with a web browser that accepts cookies, and works outside of the United States. (Pair Firefox with DownThemAll for the downloads page and you've got your music downloading app.)

IANAL, but from what I've read they're legal in the US (they pay their licensing body fees). They're good, and the content industry hates them. They tried to pay the artists, but the body representing the artists rejected it.

Re:long live Amazon

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to mention that Amazon has a Linux port of their download program.

Also the download program is only needed for full album purchases.

Re:long live Amazon

[Leebert]

5.) I steal Pepsi points from cow-orkers and get free music. (don't drink the stuff myself)

Even aside from that, I've paid for quite a few Amazon MP3s. I love it! WHY are people still using iTunes/etc anyhow? It makes no sense to me.

Re:long live Amazon

[Taibhsear]

Viable alternative to iTunes? sure. Alternative to a CD? Hardly.
1.) $0.99 per song x 15 songs (about average for an album I'd say) = ~$15 per mp3 album. CD albums are this price or lower (and those prices are already a scam and a half). eMusic has by far the lowest cost per track ratio for mp3s I've seen. (used to be better, but I guess everyone needs to pay bills...)
2.) 256kbs is hardly what I would call 'excellent sound quality.' Decent for headphones for a fairly broad scale of musical style? Sure. 320kbs non-variable is 'moderately acceptible' on a 7.1 surround sound system. FLAC, APE, (lossless) are 'excellent sound quality.' I have yet to see lossless tracks for sale on amazon.
3.) Absolutely. I concur.
4.) This invalidates your third party comment of #3. Linux has neither WMP or iTunes. (yes I know, wine, etc... but not natively) I for one don't need a downloader program, nor do I want one automatically doing anything. Just download and put the damn file where I tell you to. I'll do the 'syncing' thankyouverymuch.

So you are paying high quality full cd (with physical copy, liner notes, artwork, and case) prices for a barren mid quality mp3 album with no frills. You sir are getting ripped off. The way my math has it, you should take the retail price of the cd, subtract a proportionate amount for the lack of a physical copy or liner notes (unless you can get the artwork and notes in the metadata), divide this amount by the number of tracks, divide that number by the ratio of lossless quality bitrate (frequently between 1100 and 900kbs) to the mp3's bitrate (frequently between 128 and 320kbs), and you should have the proper cost for an mp3. I'm guessing it is going to be drastically lower than $0.99. (If you wanted to get even more legit I'd say charge per length of each track, not pay the same for a 15 second intro that you do for a 5 minute song.)

Re:long live Amazon

[zoogies]

If you buy an entire album from Amazon, it'll be at an album price. The 0.99 or 0.89 thing is only when buying individual songs.

For example: Maroon 5 Album

Price: $8.99. Songs: 18.

The price of the CD version is $9.99, actually.

Also, perhaps my ear is untrained, but I think 256kbps is pretty darn good quality. Maybe my standards are just too low, but it's good enough for me. (Then, I've never had the luxury of a 7.1 sound system).

Re:long live Amazon

[MtViewGuy]

2.) 256kbs is hardly what I would call 'excellent sound quality.' Decent for headphones for a fairly broad scale of musical style? Sure. 320kbs non-variable is 'moderately acceptible' on a 7.1 surround sound system. FLAC, APE, (lossless) are 'excellent sound quality.' I have yet to see lossless tracks for sale on amazon.

I would agree we do prefer lossless compression formats such as Apple Lossless or FLAC for best sound quality, but between the facts that:

1) Few portable music players support the FLAC format "out of the box."

2) Apple Lossless is not really that usable outside of an iPod.

3) Apple Lossless or FLAC formats take up a lot of storage space on a per minute basis.

You can forget about downloadable albums in FLAC or Apple Lossless formats from a major retail site anytime soon.

Amazon has go to with the solution that all portable music players can use and also not tie up the broadband connection downloading very large music files. As such, they did an excellent compromise with the 256 kbps variable bit rate MP3 format, which sounds very good even on most home stereo systems. I do think, though since server storage space costs very little money nowadays, Amazon should offer an option to download the file in unlocked 256 kbps variable bit rate AAC format, since iPods represent the vast majority of portable music players out there and many newer portable music players can play back unlocked AAC files.

Re:long live Amazon

[trawg]

It was rejected, IIRC, because the figure they were going to pay was something they plucked out of their air, rather than the officially sanctioned royalties that they should have been playing. ie, they were going to pay what they felt was fair, rather than what the music industry felt was due.

I can't remember for sure but I think that's the way it went down.

Re:long live Amazon

[MasterOfMagic]

From their website:

Do you pay artists?

We pay Russian Licensing Societies [ed: ROMS and FAIR, the societies authorized under Russian law to grant rights to use intellectual property for the industry that they were established, regardless of the copyright holder's approval of these societies to do so - ROMS and FAIR are for music, see the AllOfMP3 FAQ for more] 15% for all music. The Russian Licensing Societies will in turn pay the copyright owners, not necessarily the artists. Despite no legal requirement to do so, we are currently considering paying original performing artists 5%, regardless of who owns the copyright to the underlying work.

They follow the laws as required in Russia when it comes to compensating copyright holders for their work. Now, about the music industry's refusal to accept payments from ROMS:

IFPI refused to receive money from the Russian royalty collecting entity ROMS (Russian Organization on Collective Management of Rights of Authors and Other Rightholders in Multimedia, Digital Networks & Visual Arts). Although ROMS operates within the law, IFPI insists that the only entity which could act on behalf of the labels and other rightholders and collect royalties is the Russian branch of IFPI (RPA - Russian Phonographic Association) and refuses to accept anything from ROMS.

Therefore, if they claim that they're not getting a cut from AllOfMP3, then they don't understand Russian law or are lying.

Re:long live Amazon

[olivebridge]

Thank you very much for mentioning the Amazon MP3 store! :-)

In short, Amazon's MP3 store is the first truly viable alternative the iTunes Music Store

yes, i love the Amazon MP3 store. the Amazon downloader software works on Windows and Linux, too.

Re:long live Amazon

[Anonymous Coward]

Calm down, shill.

And that is why

[Anonymous Coward]

And that is why I only buy non-DRMed "plus" songs from iTunes. While I trust Apple, and love their products, I think putting trust into DRM is asking for just a weeeee bit too much.

Re:And that is why

[keytoe]

Also remember that Amazon has DRM free MP3 files for a dime cheaper and has a better selection of independent label musicians. I'm not affiliated at all - just a happy customer.

i have an excellent comment to make

[circletimessquare]

please send $5 to my pay pal account to read my comment

(oh man, i'm going to be a millionaire! it works for the music industry!)

Re:i have an excellent comment to make

[illumastorm]

*torrents comment*

Re:i have an excellent comment to make

[AttillaTheNun]

too late - I downloaded a "liberated" version of your DRMed comment on the internet.

ho ho ho and a bottle of rum.

Re:i have an excellent comment to make

[Anonymous Coward]

ho ho ho and a bottle of rum.

Santa is a pirate?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Or 3...developing profiles for targetted marketing

[dyfet]

I am surprised the author missed an important reason for DRM, being able to track and form marketing "profiles" of captive "consumers" based on their listening habits. By it's very nature, DRM schemes have to validate what music one has, and collect statistics while it is being played, and all tied to user identities. Rather convenient, eh?

Of course, the closed source "legally protected" tamper-free DRM client (and associated licensing server) may do more than just keep track of what your listening to and when. Like other source-secret client applications (such as Skype), it can also snoop on registry keys, or other information, perhaps to further expand the potential for target marketing. Even homeland security can get into this act. Imagine, listen to too much pink floyd, and get on the early list for the new FEMA camps ;).

Yahoo! Music Going Dark

[Dan East]

I know video can go dark, but shouldn't music go quiet?

Re:Yahoo! Music Going Dark

[hansraj]

I was about to call you a grammar nazi, but then I thought that maybe you prefer being called a semantics nazi.

Re:Yahoo! Music Going Dark

[omnichad]

Last time I turned off a server, the lights turned off AND it got quieter.

Re:Yahoo! Music Going Dark

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's Rihanna, yes.

Re:Yahoo! Music Going Dark

[Trogre]

Nah, it's the internet site, "Yahoo! Music" that's going dark, not the music itself.

Though as a result the music itself is, in fact, going, as you say, quiet.

Obligatory 'PlaysForSure' reference

[Burz]

Customers who have purchased music from Microsoft's now-defunct MSN Music store are now facing a decision they never anticipated making: commit to which computers (and OS) they want to authorize forever, or give up access to the music they paid for. Why? Because Microsoft has decided that it's done supporting the service and will be turning off the MSN Music license servers by the end of this summer.

article link

Re:Obligatory 'PlaysForSure' reference

[Anonymous Coward]

Google: fairuse4wm

Funny captcha, given I'm AC: 'signed'

S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music

[EmagGeek]

If you want to save your Yahoo! music, you can re-record it using two S/PDIF interfaces without losing any quality. There are no D/A conversions involved. You just need some decent recording software. Just tell Windows to use the S/PDIF as the default audio output device.

On Linux, I recommend Ardour for recording. www.ardour.org

On Windows, Audacity does a nice job.

Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music

[Anonymous Coward]

the S/PDIF output of such compressed audio file has already the audio artifacts from that compression (excluding "lossless" compression formats)

Converting this raw output back to a compressed file format will introduce artifacts AGAIN to the resulting wave (double compression), sounding awful enough.

Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music

[Mascot]

If you want to save your Yahoo! music, you can re-record it using two S/PDIF interfaces without losing any quality.

This is not something I have researched, so I'm making a good number of assumptions and qualified guesses here. I'm sure someone will set me straight if I'm way off.

I may be missing something, but unless you can manage to get Windows to output the raw unencrypted data stream, I don't see how this would help any.

In my experience Windows will take the audio and make a PCM stream out of it if you tell it to use S/PDIF as default device. Which means you end up with much the same as you would if you burned to CD and used that as a source for further processing. Either way, you end up having to add a lossy step somewhere along the way to make it practically useful.

Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music

[Anonymous Coward]

That's still D/D conversion, same amount of loss as transcoding -- That is to say, enough that if you redistribute your files as pristine you'er a jerk and will get nuked, but fine for casual listening or rare songs.

Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music

[gboss]

Yahoo music -> decoder -> S/PDIF (uncompressed PCM).

As long as you record the S/PDIF losslessly, for instance on a CD or using FLAC, you will have the same quality as listening from the yahoo music original.

If you encode it back to mp3/aac/ogg, etc., then it will have another lossy compression generation and the quality will degrade.

This is not as bad a reduction in quality as using the "analog hole":

Yahoo Music -> decoder -> D/A -> A/D -> encoder

Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music

[punkr0x]

The problem is to get the same quality you will end up with a much larger file.

Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music

[EmagGeek]

I didn't recommend re-encoding it in my original post.

Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music

[EmagGeek]

I think some have misunderstood my suggestion. I did not mean to suggest a recompression after the initial decompression.

DRMed File -> Decomp -> S/PDIF Output -> S/PDIF Input -> Uncompressed File -> Burn to CD / Output to Speakers

Obviously if you recompress you're going to have a lossy step, but that's not a requirement. If you're buying music online, you probably don't care much about quality anyway. If you care about quality, you buy the CD and convert it yourself, or you find a place that sells files compressed with a lossless codec like FLAC.

Seriously, why do you even need to use compression anymore? Your average album is what, 45 minutes / 450MB uncompressed and maybe about 325MB FLACed? How is that even significant anymore on today's storage landscape?

MP3/AAC and all these lossy codecs are being completely obviated by cheap hard disk space and gargantuan FLASH. The only real reasons to use them anymore is to reduce the number of bits that have to be moved from one place to another, and to squeeze more onto portables. Quality is not really as important on portables because usually people are in noisy ambient environments and the artifacts in the music are easily drowned out by background noise.

Back when Flash was small and expensive, I used to encode my music at 48kbit MONO for my MP3 player, which I used for cycling and running. Nowadays, my music at home is all uncompressed on my server and 192kbit on my portables.

Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music

[mypalmike]

Are you speaking from experience? I've done this to 160kbps mp3, and there are no noticeable artifacts.

Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music

[Xarius]

Wouldn't you just convert the raw output to a lossless format then?

Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music

[Anonymous Coward]

You could reencode the new raw file with a lossless codec to save _some_ space, but I agree it's not as good as the original file since it will sound the same but it will take up more space.

Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music

[Mascot]

I think some have misunderstood my suggestion. I did not mean to suggest a recompression after the initial decompression.

DRMed File -> Decomp -> S/PDIF Output -> S/PDIF Input -> Uncompressed File -> Burn to CD / Output to Speakers

That's how I understood you. The reason I replied was, I don't get why you'd bother jumping through hoops like that.

If the Yahoo software allows you to burn it to CD, wouldn't you get pretty much the same result? DRMed File -> CD PCM -> FLAC should turn out pretty much the same as DRMed File -> PCM over S/PDIF -> FLAC.

I never bought DRMed music myself, so obviously don't know Yahoo's solution. But I read elsewhere that Yahoo had recommended burning to CD and ripping as a "solution" to them shutting off the servers, so I assumed that's an option when I wrote my reply.

Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music

[Anonymous Coward]

There have been tricks for removing DRM on iTunes, both for Windows and Mac (they're broken now) that relied on the fact that the decrypted AAC stream had to exist for a while in memory.

The Windows versions involved decompiling iTunes, finding out what address the streams were stored at, and then running a program concurrently with iTunes to copy the streams into new files.

The Mac version relied on an API provided by apple in OS X that allows a kernel patch to be performed temporarily for only one process: they changed the malloc() function somehow.

A similar approach might be tried for Yahoo, except I doubt that it has enough users to make anyone care that much.

Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music

[EmagGeek]

Fair enough. I don't use the service either, and I didn't know whether they actually allowed you to burn to CD since that seemed like a trivial way to circumvent the DRM.

I honestly thought that if the solution were really that trivial, it would have been total non-news and hence not made it to the front page...

What the hell was I thinking? hah...

Where's the list of these failures?

[v1]

Is anyone keeping a list somewhere of all the places that have folded or closed a service and have as a result left people with unusable content? This is at least the third story I've read on /. about this sort of stunt, and we've also read where DRM supporters are always saying this sort of thing never happens, I'd love to see that list stuffed in their mouth.

Re:Where's the list of these failures?

[mypalmike]

Most yahoo music subscribers paid for a monthly all-you-can-eat platter of music selected from millions of songs. There was no implication of permanence. It was more like a subscription radio station that you got to dj yourself, with the bonus that you could choose some to throw on your Nomad when you were away from a computer.

Re:Where's the list of these failures?

[Optic7]

Wrong. You could "buy" the individual tracks too, which gave the rights to burn to CD, etc (similar to iTunes), for 79 cents each track.

Re:Where's the list of these failures?

[mypalmike]

Read my post again. "Most yahoo music subscribers...". Most. Most. Got it?

Re:Where's the list of these failures?

[Optic7]

Yes. Agreed. :) I just saw a lot of people saying that no one was going to be affected because Yahoo only rented music, and picked yours to reply to.

I'm no fan of DRM, but...

[kaos07]

Whenever I do buy songs online, I buy them a store that sells them at 320kbps in .mp3 form with no restrictions whatsoever.

I really don't like DRM. I've been bitten by it in the past with iTunes locking me out after too many computers were authorised to play tracks I legally purchased. Anyway. The argument coming from this story against DRM doesn't make much sense to me. "The validation servers are offline". All that's showing is that the one possible benefit that can come out of DRM is no longer there. And in this specific area it's at the same level as non-DRM music. That's a tad confusing so I'll explain further.

The only positive I can ever see coming out of DRM systems is the fact that once you've "bought" something, you can download it again and again. Say if you reformatted or something. This is obviously negated by limitations such as the above iTunes example. However other DRM services like Steam pull this off brilliantly. I've downloaded my Steam games several times after formats and computer changes, and they work fine. Now while this is a limited concept in most DRM systems, it's non existant in non-DRM online stores. I don't know any online store without any kind of DRM that allows you to download a song or an album and infinite number of times once you've purchased it.

So tying this back to the story, the validation servers going off-line simply means that if you lose a song, you can't re-download it. Just like if you bought a CD, or downloaded from another music store without DRM.

Re:I'm no fan of DRM, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know any online store without any kind of DRM that allows you to download a song or an album and [sic] infinite number of times once you've purchased it.

That's really too bad for you, since they do exist (well, okay, maybe not "infinite", but at least large). The obvious example would be eMusic. Since I personally have been pretty happy with eMusic, I haven't gone hunting for alternatives, so I don't know about whether you can download repeatedly from, say, Amazon. It makes perfect sense for an online store to let you download your stuff repeatedly, since you've got to be logged in to your account anyway.

Being able to re-download something isn't an advantage of DRM: it's an advantage of digital distribution. The only actual advantage to DRM that I've seen is that it allows the rental and Napster-style subscription business models. Frankly, I'm not interested in either one, so it isn't an advantage from my perspective, but some people like the all-you-can-eat subscription music buffet.

What the closing of Yahoo! Music does is remove the advantages of digital distribution (since you can't download your music again later) and leave your already DRM-ed music more crippled than it was before (since you can't move it from platform to platform and you're SOL whenever your current box moves on to the great landfill in the sky).

Re:I'm no fan of DRM, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that you Jerry?

lewis

[lewismark87]

as i am a big music lover , i used to browse through many sites..
its a good thing that Yahoo started an online music store... something i was hoping for...
where the reputation of yahoo comes in ..
but it has to be seen how much it will live up to it..
-------
Lewis

Did you see it? One more time? You won't get faked out here!

http://www.SelectWealthSystem.com/?t=wc

On a similar note

[Grimbleton]

I have a few DVDs which I can't play on my computer running XP. I get DRM errors in WMP and a few other programs. Is there any way to get around that? I don't want to rip them or anything, I just want to be able to play my purchased media on the hardware I choose.

Re:On a similar note

[Anonymous Coward]

unfortunately the important aspect is not that you purchased the media, its that you purchased a restrictive license to play the information on the media. The license happens to not allow you to play it in the way you were trying. Im sure you can try other methods and find one that you are allowed to do and is satisfatory.

Re:On a similar note

[FrozenFOXX]

Yeah, try out VLC (VideoLAN). If that doesn't work, use Linux. I have no problems playing anything using the DVD libraries (like libdvdread and so forth) and Mplayer-based players (Kaffeine).

How much would it cost to keep the servers?

[Joce640k]

Leaving a DRM server online would cost them peanuts. Is it really worth all the bad publicity?

Re:How much would it cost to keep the servers?

[yuna49]

I wondered the same thing when Microsoft announced the end of its service.

Perhaps the contract with the music companies requires some type of licensing fees as long as the server is available online? Perhaps the contract with the music companies requires them to take the server down once the music service itself is discontinued? I can imagine either or both of these being true.

Re:How much would it cost to keep the servers?

[Dan541]

But think how much money they can make by forcing users to buy their music again.

Three months? Ever hear of "google"???

[Joce640k]

Go to google.com, type "IANAL" into the little box...

Re:Three months? Ever hear of "google"???

[neokushan]

Well done on missing both the point of my post and the sarcasm held within it.

Re:Three months? Ever hear of "google"???

[Anonymous Coward]

I refused to say GOOGLE, it took me 3 months to figure out what that meant, then I stumbled onto a computer where somebody had already typed "GOOGLE" into the little box before I got there...

Re:Three months? Ever hear of "google"???

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried that. I inadvertently put a space in a unfortunate location. Needless to say, no sites about lawyers came up.

Re:Three months? Ever hear of "google"???

[dkf]

You got some random page about the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority?

Re:Three months? Ever hear of "google"???

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I tried that with "MILF". At work.

Re:Three months? Ever hear of "google"???

[Anonymous Coward]

Read about the parody porn film regarding the release of the newest Apple product...

Re:Three months? Ever hear of "google"???

[kalirion]

Better yet, use google image search....

Re:Three months? Ever hear of "google"???

[Dirtside]

Wow, goatse links are getting really desperate these days. ;)

Re:Actually, I think the real news is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunatly - Yes - they aquired and then totally 'broke' the great Musicmatch player.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicmatch

Numbers?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be interesting to try and agregate the data on the number of users affected by this move is, and how many songs there are that they're losing access to.

Well that sucks...

[The Dancing Panda]

But it's not really as bad as slashdot would have you believe. Yahoo music is a subscription service, mostly, so unless Yahoo plans to continually take your money after the servers are shut down, this is no problem. Sure, the people using it will be slightly inconvenienced, but there are other subscription services. No one on a subscription service should think they have any right to that music once they cancel the subscription, just as I don't have a right to the Howard Stern show after I cancel Sirius.

Furthermore, Yahoo Music's 0.99c songs are all, as far as I know, Non-drm'd MP3's. People that bought the songs should have no problem listening to them. DRM is really a non-issue here, as it doesn't affect anyone in a manner that they wouldn't expect.

Re:Well that sucks...

[Optic7]

This incorrect information keeps getting repeated in this thread. Yes, they were a rental service, but you could also "buy" individual WMA tracks for 79 cents in addition to renting. "Buying" gave you roughly the same rights as buying them from iTunes, i.e. burn to CD, etc.

I do subscribe to their rental service because I still think it was worth it ($3/month for listening to unlimited music of my choice - low price due to a special deal I received), but I'm sure glad that I never "bought" any of their tracks. Thank $DEITY for Amazon MP3 store.

"It's not fraud..."

[msauve]

Unless there are unfulfilled contractual commitments. I'm not suggesting there did, but if Yahoo had promised something like "you will have the ability to move the license for your music to another computer at any time in the future," then yes, the parent company would be committing fraud by closing down that portion of the business.

Two words: Class Action

[Fuzzzy]

You bought a CD. You have the right to use it. You have the right to play it using another CD player.
You bought a song. You have the right to hear it. You have the right to transfer it to another playing device (i.e., computer).
Your CD is a property. The right to hear a licensed song is a property too, despite what the license may claim.

Now, the second party pulls the license away. It renders your property nontransferable, hence eliminating some of your property rights. The court may monetize the lost rights into compensation.
A successful class action may discourage future DRM schemes, once DRM owners are forced to keep their servers up and running forever.

Re:Two words: Class Action

[Evets]

Rather than a class action, isn't there an existing law in place regarding abandon-ware?

Maybe it has to be abandoned for quite some time, but the gist of it (from what I remember) is that it's perfectly legal to circumvent security measures if the company no longer supports the software.

Now that I think about it... isn't that in the DMCA?

Hahaha!

[Kamineko]

Take that, Alicia!

Umm DMCA anyone?

[tarrantm]

How is removing DRM from the music not a violation of the DMCA? Then how can Yahoo get away with telling people to break the law?

This is great news...

[Anita Coney]

How is Joe-Blow going to learn about how draconian and pointless DRM is unless crap like this happens?! This is exactly the sort of stuff we need to happen to get that message across.

Honest question as I don't know...

[Slazer]

"The only possible rationales could be 1) to control piracy (which, obviously, it has had no effect on, thanks to the CD and the fact that most DRM is broken)"

What DRM isn't broken?

Pirate

[aussie_a]

This is one case where I condone pirating. Its what I'd do if I liked any of your new fandangled noise.

The background story

[LabRat007]

I believe it all started as music match long long ago. A great service. Yahoo! purchased it and started messing around with the service making it a pile O' poo (breaking features for instance and not repairing them). The person(s) responsible for Music Match started another service: www.slacker.com which is quite nice, at least the web radio bit. I have yet to make use of any of their pay services.

Just a little FYI.

If anyone remembers this more clearly, please let me know.

Here's one for you - now thats costumer service..

[Barsteward]

http://www.last.fm/music/Tight+Fit/_/The+Lion+Sleeps+Tonight

Another rationale

[Monoman]

They just don't get it. The music industry needs to change the business model but they are too dumb to realize it. They clearly do not realize many of their customers (kids/teens/young adults) absolutely see nothing wrong with downloading music for free and sharing it with all of their friends. DRM doesn't work and never will.

Their new business model must give away the music. They can make money on merchandising and other business arrangements.

Re:Another rationale

[cdrguru]

Excuse me, but all I want is the music. And nobody I know will pay for it, now that it is all free.

Business? I see no hope for a "business" of any sort whatsoever here. Revenue = 0. This isn't a business, it is a charity for freeloaders.

they're all thieves and robbers

[baldsue]

They stole my music months ago when they took over Musicmatch Jukebox. Many years ago I was foolish and bought a forever upgrade key to MM and upgraded whenever they told me to. The last time the upgrade was to Yahoo Jukebox and all my DRM music became unplayable. I've boycotted Yahoo ever since. And I will never buy another piece of DRM music. As far as I'm concerned, they deserve Microsoft.

get free music (free as in beer)

[redGiraffe]

Forget about the people whoring their music and see what else is out there, you might be surprised (in a linux over windows kind of way). Try these:

http://www.last.fm/music/+free
http://www.jamendo.com/
http://www.em411.com/
http://www.archive.org/

The missing link is finding music that suites your taste without trial and error, but the more people start listening and recommending to friends the easier it will become.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Say what?

[Foerstner]

You get them home and they may work, and they may continue to work. If they do, you might have got a good deal, but there is absolutely no guarantee that they will work, nor that they will continue to work in the future. In contrast, DRM-free goods are guaranteed to work for as long as you want them to. In contrast, DRM-free goods are guaranteed to work for as long as you want them to.

If anything, you get a better after-sale guarantee with a DRM'ed product, because they're produced by companies that want you to keep doing business with them (eg. iTunes, Windows Genuine Advanage.) Most DRM-free products (eg. CDs, Linux) come with no guarantee of any effort at continued functionality.

Sure, a skilled or educated user/hacker can use and extend unrestricted products without restrictions, but that's far from a guarantee. That's a user exercising his rights and skills.

Protected Music Converter

[Secret Agent Man]

This program, while shareware, has done wonders for me when converting from DRM-ridden music to MP3s with no restrictions. For those who lack decent recording capabilities, this program will do it for you. It has a shareware limitation of 14 days, and you also have to be at the computer to keep clicking the "OK" button (it's nagware too). I can't speak for quality differences either, not being an audiophile, but I know I've not heard any loss of sound quality.

Our campus signed up with Ruckus, a music site where we can download songs for free, but they're full of DRM (have to phone home once a month to stay active.) Using PMC allowed me to not have to worry about that anymore. Give it a shot.

The other thing wrong

[Mateo_LeFou]

is that the --ahem -- "content industry" wants it both ways. They want you to acknowledge that the music you buy is licensed, not sold, and thus that they retain control of it. However, if it's the *music is licensed, you still have a right to the music if, for example, the CD is damaged or destroyed. Try and get a free replacement CD under the(ir) theory that what you bought was not the CD but the right to hear the music on it.

I only like the unlimited streaming music

[bihoy]

I have no interest in buying music to download and I don't use their software to rip my CD's.

While I am no fan of DRM I actually like having unlimited streaming music that I can play on both my laptop and my music player.

To me these services are only useful as an online music source that I can customize. I can listen to exactly what I want. I like creating my own playlists as well having them auto created according to what I listen to. This, to me, is the only real value in these services.

I have Yahoo Music (which was acquired from MusicMatch when they went under) and have now converted it to a Rhapsody account (who aquired my Yahoo Music account. I only hope that Rhapsody stays afloat before my 1 year subscription expires.

So far I am very pleased with Rhapsody. Much more so than with Yahoo Music and Music Match. Mostly because the player actually works all of the time (crossing fingers). The only downside that I have noted is that some of the tracks (about 15%) that I had from Yahoo are not available in Rhapsody. Most of them I do not care about. Those that I really like I will buy the CD and rip.

Just my two cents.

The advantage of physical media

[elrous0]

I hear people saying today that physical media is dead and that everything is going to be downloaded in the future. Much as I love the convenience of being able to download stuff, it's stories like this that remind me why I still get off the couch and go down to Best Buy for most of my movies and music. Say what you will about physical media, but nothing beats the reassurance that it's MINE and can't be turned off by a second party on some arbitrary whim. I will not download anything that's got DRM on it unless it's a rental (because that's always what it is anyway).

They sold their customers to Rhapsody

[bihoy]

You keep the terms of your contract until it expires at which point your services continues with Rhapsody's terms and higher prices.

At least they know ahead of time

[The Gaytriot]

So they can try the burn and rip method to remove the DRM. Either that or they can start downloading torrents of all their legally purchased music, just so they can continue to use it.

This is good ...

[Hohlraum]

People need to learn the hard way. There is no substitution for really getting screwed over.

Gaah! NOOOOO!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Just sell the shit cheap and shoot for volume instead, no protection needed"

That's exactly the planning that led us to the pablum of ClearChannel radio playlists, current pop music, reality TV shows, etc. ("ad nauseum", literally).

I would hate to see us left with nothing but content that will sell to 90-95% of the population.

Funny you mention this

[BLKMGK]

I've not bought a NEW CD in literally 7-10 years. My SO has bought a few but she doesn't have the issues with the RIAA that I do. Anyway, recently I got an iPhone and I've wanted some of the newer music that's around on my phone.

Having discovered Amazon's service while looking for a comedy track I'd heward on MySpace (Show Them To Me - it's a hoot!) I started looking further in the Amazon catalog. I've now found about 8 different tracks I like and even a full album that I know I'll never find in a store! All of them are nice unprotected MP3 files, probably watermarked, but play quite nicely on ALL of my hardware.

So, after YEARS of buying no new CDs and sticking to used media in bookstores I've begun to tenatively buy music again. Sorry Apple, but I'm not interested in DRM'd files....

In defense of Yahoo Music service (sort of)

[Qwavel]

I am/was a subscriber to the Yahoo Music Service. I loved it. I had extremely convenient access to almost everything. I no longer worried about what I owned and just focused on rating stuff.

I believe that the value for my money that I got for this service - even if it dies today - is much greater then with buying CD's or buying individual tracks from iTunes. I paid a reasonable amount of money ( $10 a month) for a great music experience.

Let's face it, all of this music is pretty crappy sound quality, so I don't want to buy tracks at $1 a pop that will be obsolete in 5 years when higher quality multi-track formats become available. The stuff from Yahoo is 192Kbps WMA which is reasonably good by today's standards but still pretty crappy.

And now that the service is going dark, everything is transferred to Rhapsody. I have 8 months remaining on my Yahoo account and they are transferring that 8 months to rhapsody, along with my music collection (if I want). So I do not loose the music as others seem to be implying. As before, I have to keep paying to keep my collection alive - that is the deal that I have agreed to.

BUT now the negative.

From the FAQ it appears that Yahoo is not going to transfer my music rating to the Rhapsody service. The music rating ARE my collection, so this really screws me up. If someone wrote an app that culled my rating from the Yahoo Music service I would be thrilled.

Rhapsody is Real. That sucks. I'm scared to install their application on my computer.

Rhapsody is only available in the US. Yahoo Music was available in other countries. What are the users in other countries supposed to do?

Re:In defense of Yahoo Music service (sort of)

[ProppaT]

I fully agree. I loved the service and used it about 8 hours a day. That's a lot of frickin' music for what came out to $7/m.

I haven't looked into Rhapsody yet, but if it's Real that's a crime. I refuse to put that garbage on my computer. What makes matters worse, I've already gotten the "transfer to Rhapsody" screen on my account. I clicked okay and tried to transfer my account. No where on any of the screens did it say what software was required, etc. What makes matters worse is how buggy the service transfer is. It wouldn't let me transfer my account because, apparently, I have a Rhapsody account already under my e-mail address. I must have gotten bored one day decided to try it out. But they really need to put a disclaimer up that you'll need Real player to use the service.

And I'm pissed as all hell that my music ratings are going away. I have thousands upon thousands of ratings under my name (IRL, I own thousands of cds, records, etc...not to mention everything I would listen to on Yahoo), so that's a giant slap in the face as far as I'm concerned.

That is very comforting.

[jotaeleemeese]

Let wait computers brake and if all the necessary keys can be recovered....

Rip... uh... Mix, Burn, Rip...

[argent]

All my iTunes tracks are already on CD, and re-ripped. If I couldn't do that, or if there were limits on how I could burn a track, I would have maybe 1% of the iTMS tracks I do. For movies, I bought one season of one TV show. For eBooks, I have one DRMed eBook now... because it's a special edition with hypertext annotations by Vernor Vinge, and because the DRM isn't locked to a specific device. The rest were a set of free credits that came with a PDA with Microsoft Reader on it, and that program was so annoying to use I didn't bother.

DRM only works... in the sense of making a profit for the content owner... when it doesn't really matter.

Sarcasm?

[jotaeleemeese]

Something that nobody understands as sarcastic can't be a sarcasm.....

Re:Sarcasm?

[neokushan]

Since when was understanding it a requirement for it to be Sarcasm?

Buying DRM'd tracks is a joke..

[Rinikusu]

Yeah, this is pretty much what everyone warned about when DRM reared it's ugly head a few years ago.

However, that's not all it's good for. I use Napster. I don't buy tracks from Napster (well, I might do it now that they offer DRM-free MP3s), but I do use their subscription service. It's like an on-demand radio station. I can download my favorite tracks to play offline (for a month or so), and I also use the "To-Go" service with my Cowon D2. I spend about what I'd normally spend a month on CDs and I find the selection to be quite good. If I quit subscribing, I don't get to listen to the music I 'downloaded', but honestly, that doesn't bother me that much. I've found I just don't care too much about the physical product anymore. I've been steadily reducing my physical footprint over the years and CDs add clutter. Clutter is bad.

So, if you bought your DRMd music, you get what you deserve. As a subscription service, it works extremely well for what it is.

The blindest of all people ....

[jotaeleemeese]

... are the ones that refuse to see.

So you are paying around $300 of your hard earned cash per year in order to be locked out.

What will happen with all your music if a better music gadget hits the market, or you simply get fed up with the one you have?

You are being locked down from head to toe, and you say you are not being affected? People that become locked down by proprietary formats don't realize how much it is affecting them until it is too late to do anything about it.

Mate, you are dancing to Apple's tune and have no say about it.

Jeez, don't you see what lock down is doing to MS costumers?

Re:The blindest of all people ....

[Dekortage]

I think "blindness" can easily refer to people who like shouting "fire" when they smell the tiniest whiff of smoke. But let's see...

"Paying... to be locked out." Right, because if Apple turnes off the iTunes servers, my music... keeps playing. And I can convert it to MP3 in a second, without burning it to CD first. Or I can burn it to CD as often as I like. (I'll have to change the burn playlists every once in awhile, oooooh.)

"What happens if a better gadget hits the market?" Then I convert over to MP3 and go on with life.

"You are being locked down from head to toe... [you won't] realize how much it is affecting [you] until it is too late to do anything about it." Locked down from head to toe? Are you serious? This isn't Gitmo, a Chinese prison, or a Nazi concentration camp. We're talking about one audio format (AAC) which has easily-circumnavigated DRM restrictions on it. It affects a small portion of the music I listen to. If Apple disappears tomorrow, all of this will still work. It's not like Yahoo or MSN, where the music stops working when the server goes down. And it sure as hell has zero impact on me personally, not when compared to real injustices in the world.

"You are dancing to Apple's tune and have no say about it." Somehow, I am under the impression that easily-converted formats and essentially unlimited burn-to-CD options means my dancing is actually to my music instead of to Apple's. It may be in an Apple-sponsored format today, but it doesn't have to be tomorrow.

"Jeez, don't you see what lock down is doing to MS costumers? [sic]" Yes. Don't you see the differences between Apple's lockdown and Microsoft's lockdown? I can actually swallow Apple's without choking. Maybe you cannot, and that's fine, but nobody is forcing you into it. Buy the physical CD and stop griping.

Re:funny vs. flamebait

[Anonymous Coward]

really now... hmm.

Yea, downtown Houston has gotten dark also

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't even bother to take your keys away before stealing your shit, though

Went right over your head.

[msauve]

The comparison of quality loss is between the originally purchased (more accurately, licensed) tracks and the end result.

Sure, an original CD converted to MP3 is better than a WM->CD->MP3, but that's not a fair comparison, since the purchaser of the latter was never promised, and had no right to expect, full CD fidelity.

Rather, the comparison is the loss from (original) CD->MP3 vs. the loss from WM->CDR->MP3, which is comparable - the end result of the latter will be worse than the end result of the former, but the originals already differed in quality by about the same amount.

And, as I said, it's the consumer's choice whether to recompress using lossy compression.

not bad, good.

[frovingslosh]

Sure, it's bad news and yet another example of the sheer....

Boy, another editing mistake by the /. editors, they let the word "bad" slip through when the proper word was "good". A DRM based service dies. Anyone foolish enough to have bought DRM encumbered products gets punished, those who priated the music can continue to enjoy their copy. All is right with the world.

Yahoo

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had Yahoo unlimited music for a while.

you download a DRMed song and it plays for about 20 days.. after that you have to "re-license"..

oh well.. i guess i'll finally have my subscription cancelled, after yahoo refused to do it in the past.

Obligatory

[T3Tech]

Yahoo had an online music store? ZOMG!

Glad I didn't take the Yahoo! Music job

[Anonymous Coward]

I went through several rounds of interviews with Yahoo! a couple years ago. They wanted me to join their Yahoo! Music Engine (YME) team. YME was an IE AJAX application built around a collection of ActiveX plug-ins.

Excited though I was about the prospects of joining such a high-profile company and product, I couldn't get passed the nagging voice in the back of my head telling me that such a product was doomed.

New tag: Lucy!

[TaoPhoenix]

Can I start a new tag for these events?

Lucy:

  Come buy some DRM music from my online store, Charlie Brown!" ...

"Oh well, I'm tired of this game. I think I'll close the online store. Sorry Charlie."

/Lucy

Knee-jerk reaction...

[mypalmike]

Yeah, that DRM-ed music from yahoo really really sucked. Having all-you-can eat access to millions of songs on demand for a few bucks a month was horrible. I'd rather pay more for satellite radio and listen to pre-selected songs that I don't like.

Re:last match

[TaoPhoenix]

Wrestling:

Hacker vs. DRM

"iTunes has retired. Now the Hacker needs to do his work One Last Time".

/Wrestling

It was fun for a while

[istartedi]

I had 1000+ songs for a little over $100. I could have had a lot more. If you download a lot of songs, subscription is competitive with permanent download. There's no way I would have purchased all that stuff on iTunes. The enduring value for me is the playlists I built, and they can't really take those away. I know that in the future I can find the music again.

I allowed my subscription to expire several months ago, not because of DRM; but because of BUGS IN THE APP. When a license expired, you had to re-download the music even though the file was there on your drive. Because the tracks in any given playlist tend to be downloaded at random times, playlists would become corrupted with random unlicensed tracks. There was no way to bulk-renew licenses on all your tracks without tediously selecting expired tracks and re-downloading the entire file. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. Previous issues included lock-ups, and an "upgrade" that simply didn't work, and couldn't be downgraded until I got in touch with a support person who gave me the magic URL.

The failure is, IMHO, not about DRM. Apple and others are still DRM'd. The failure is about what happens when SAAS isn't properly maintained. At least now I have a feel for what it's like when SAAS is starting to fail.

Having a music collection managed via SAAS? No big deal. It's a relatively minor inconvenience and not a high priority for me. Having mission-critical data managed via SAAS? Insanity!

Misleading summary

[Eravnrekaree]

Yahoo did allow consumers to download DRM Less copies of songs they had purchased. But the monthly song rental service used DRM, but consumers would lose access to those soings if they had chosen to cancel that service, and knew it. The monthly service allows you to download unlimited songs, as long as you keep paying the monthly fee, you can still listen to them. You do not pay a per song fee for these and you dont own them, so if you stop paying the fee, you cant listen to them. This is not so with the songs you purchase outright, those have no DRM and you can listen to those even after you cancel.

other services from yahoo

[saintsfan]

i seriously question yahoo's business strategy here. ok, maybe their music store wasn't working out. things happen. but the customers who paid aren't to blame, yet they're sharing the responsibility. at the time, they probably didn't realize the faults of drm- they just trusted yahoo.

so this calls into question- what will these customers (or you) do when yahoo tries to offer another new product? do you trust them not to back out once you've invested time and/or money leaving you holding the bill; yahoo is in the tech industry where innovation is required to stay competitive. you dont want your customers to avoid trying new things

Re:other services from yahoo

[/dev/trash]

They're gonna be a MS company this time next year. So no I don't trust em.

yahoo! music unlimited kinda sucked

[traftonian]

I started out using yahoo's "launchcast", a $2/month music service that just played random music based on your preferences (but not whatever song you wanted on demand). Eventually I upgraded this to yahoo! unlimited, which was like $6/month plus $.79 per track purchased. I never actually purchased a track. Anyway I was happy enough with the service except the yahoo! unlimited software itself was awful. I was able to seamlessly transfer over to Rhapsody the other day and it appears that I'll get the lower yahoo! price for another year after my current term expires. Anyways, DRM is lame but it is a sad necessity to try to put an end to rampant piracy by typical echo boomers who have been raised to have no morals or respect for copyrights.

Re:yahoo! music unlimited kinda sucked

[Creepy Crawler]

Im pirating PRECISELY because of rampant drm.

I get more quality, more rights, and more freedom... and a better price to boot.

Step 3

[pseudorand]

It's Step 3 of the RIAA's plan. Step 1: Fool consumers into giving up the ability to exercise their rights under copyright law via DRM. Step 2: Scare those who won't cooperate by suing little girls and murdering kittens. Step 3: ??? Step 4: Profit We now know that step 3 is "Close down the business that runs the DRM key servers, forcing consumers to re-purchase all the music they thought they already owned. Wahahahaha." (Okay, I admit, the evil laugh at the end wasn't part of the official RIAA document.).

If the "biz" is looking for something to blame...

[Kazoo the Clown]

If the music industry is looking for something to blame for the rampant rise in illegal filesharing of music, this sort of thing ought to be a prime candidate. Just hearing of this sort of thing is probably enough to cause many people to choose not to waste their time with "legal" music sites...

The consumer is king.

[singingjim1]

I'm thankful that as a consumer I ultimately have the final word regarding products that survive in the marketplace. DRM is doomed to fail if only for the simple reason that no one wants it except the producers of it. No product can survive if that's the case. Hell hath no fury towards defective-by-design than a well-informed consumer. Keep spreading the news. DRM is dead.

What a load of BS

[Orig_Club_Soda]

I buy DRMd music and haven't had 1 problem. Stop whining.

Re:What a load of BS

[Desirsar]

You'll be fine until the service you buy from closes and similarly shuts down the license server.

Re:What a load of BS

[Orig_Club_Soda]

Actually, I am fine regardless. You just have to know what your are doing.

Music Piracy

[speardane]

This is just as much an act of Piracy, as illegal downloading unpaid for Albums. Yahoo (in conjunction with the Music labels which encouraged it to use DRM) should be prosecuted with the same vigour the RIAA uses.