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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."
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?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
...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!)
"If it's lost, it'll turn up. Things always do" "I love it when a plan comes together"
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.
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.
/. - 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.
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.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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!