Slashdot Mirror
Chronicling the Failures of DRM
Barence takes us to PCPro for a look at the failures of DRM and a discussion of its impending death. Quoting:
"Luckily, DRM is dying, at least in the download sphere. Napster's Dan Nash believes that DRM-free is 'the general way things are going.' In his opinion, record companies 'have no choice but to adapt;' those that 'stick to DRM on a pay-per-download basis will not remain competitive.' In the US, Napster has joined Amazon in selling DRM-free content in MP3 format from all the major labels. ... Going DRM-free makes sense not just for consumers, but for the industry. Deutche Telekom says three out of four technical support calls its Musicload service had to deal with were the result of DRM. And when it offered a DRM-free option to artists they saw a 40% increase in sales."
Yes, we all know DRM sucks. and is broken, and no one wants to accept it (unless it is from iTunes..). Now, this is great for the end user to know - but even better if people in industry would pay attention!
The MPAA/RIAA want you to pay every time you watch or listen to their media. They feel that people don't pay often enough to hear the same old crap.
It's spelled Deutsche Telekom, not Deutche.
They pretty much own the audiobook download market, and DRM has been an important part of their strategy from day one.
I'm pretty certain its what keeps getting them new titles to release. Book publishers aren't exactly keen on digital formats if they aren't protected from instant dissemination.
As for myself, well blow me if the drm doesn't 'fall off' within ten minutes of my purchases.
Not that I then share them, in spite of the horror stories spread by the drm producing companies.
I paid for them, and I don't see why anyone else should have them for nothing, it's just that I don't see why I should keep the drm around, restricting my ability to play them back on any device I choose when I am in all other respects abiding by the end user license.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Right now you can pick free music that at who the hell knows what quality cuz you can upsample anything and it might be a little chopped off or extended if they re-recorded it through the sound card to unprotect it and some files require weird codecs that don't play in every player. Or you can pick DRM music that won't play everywhere and the quality could be degraded and some players might choke on it and some PCs won't rip it or play it after it's been ripped and transferred. It's really pretty even when it comes to the quality of the product. If they'd cut the crap and give you a full quality recording you can do anything with, you'd go with the paid one. Then again if it's not protected, there would be a lot of full quality unprotected versions on p2p also.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
But before I get modded down as a troll, it's true: DRM turns your purchases into glorified (read: overpriced) rentals since the companies that so graciously allowed you to pay them to use their product can STOP you from using it any time, for little or no real reason (see: Mass Effect and BioShock's DRMs, Steam, the Yahoo! Music store debacle, Zune not "PlayingForSure" after all, etc.) And consumers may finally be getting fed up with be treated like the criminals - especially when the DRM-free pirated versions are vastly superior to our legitimate ones.
Game publishers haven't figured this out yet. Nothing like a 3 forever use no revoke, DRM key.
Om, nomnomnom...
....is, it's about time.
The companies that are using DRM are finding concrete, solid evidence that people will pay if they STOP using DRM. The stereotypes of users that they felt were accurate, and reinforced by entities such as the MIAA and such, are, in fact, inaccurate, and now they can start taking that realization to the bank.
Common sense begins to prevail. Imagine that.
There are three things I want from an online music store.
So far the only store to do that was allofmp3.com, now mp3sparks.com. Sadly even when mp3sparks.com is up you have to travel some strange paths to fund your account. Magnatune.com has the right idea as well, but their catalogue is much more limited.
Loose lips lose spit.
In the US, Napster has joined Amazon in selling DRM-free content in MP3 format from all the major labels.
A percentage of iTunes tracks are DRM-free, but certainly not all.
The big question is: why won't the labels allow iTunes to sell all of their tracks DRM-free?
Obviously the labels would love to eliminate the iTunes policy of 99-cent only pricing, but there must be something more than that.
Wow, what a blast from the past.
There's someone who knows something about dying.
Generations from now, when 3-D printers allow us to fabricate whatever objects we have the basic atoms to create, and virtual technology allows us to experience whatever reality we have the blueprints for, issues like this will be felt through time like a tidal wave. Look at how the fundamental Christian values of early America have shaped everything we believe and experience today (regarding modesty, entertainment, science, etc.)
If companies are allowed to hold a vice-iron grip on every thin slice of entertainment that exists in our life then life in the future will be miserable and hateful. This is a triumph because it hints at a future that will allow free P2P trading, not of music, but of atomic blueprints of critical medicine and devices that will make all of our lives easier. What incredible news.
As with most failures, there are those who have invested heavily in this technology, particularly Microsoft, so don't expect it to just go away.
DRM is something we'll have to fight for a long time, not because we don't care for it, but because it appears to make some kind of sense to people with power and money.
Fortunately, there is no easily-deployable-in-the-real-world DRM that is undefeatable.
It's about the cost. Most people would pay for legitimate music. But then again, when you have to pay for gas, rent, food, etc..., entertainment is way low in one's list of priorities.
If music was made more affordable and/or reasonable, it wouldn't be much of an issue, most people would pay, I'm sure of that.
The problem started off as "Music was too expensive" CDs where like up to 30$ a CD at one time during the peek years.
When the internet kicked in and the MP3 format was created, eventually download sites and peer-to-peer was the way to go for cheap (and free) music, so, obviously, the music industry lost revenues.
Instead of understanding and adapting their price model, they used DRM, and it made things worse.
So, it's coming full circle, they don't have much choice anyways. If they want to have a music industry, they have to work with the system and they need to adapt their pricing.
Basically, this is what's I've always understood about protection schemes in computing: It's made by man, it can be broken by man.
Copy protection and DRM will never work in the long run, there is always someone out there who can figure out how it is done and break it.
your post lacks coherence and content; please, remedy this in the future
...as a matter of fact, this week.
Had a customer come in with a problem. His old computer was dying (hardware, bad capacitors on the MB), we copied his data to a new PC he purchased, set him up and out the door...
Boomeranged. seems he had audio files, some purchased, some of his own creation, in ATRAC format. Of course, he could not play them on his new PC. Seems that Sony recently dropped ATRAC and shut down their licensing servers, too.
Fortunately, we were able to resurrect his old PC, which was still in our boneyard, and run it long enough to export his DRM'ed files to WAV. Lost his meta-data, cost him a couple hundred $ in labor, but we got his stuff. He left happy, and we talked with him about DRM and how it hosed him.
When It Counts.
because someone should tag this "the invisible hand of the market does something right for once". if they can.
If a bad market and poor long-term profits ruled, then spammers would be out of business, too. As it is, far too many companies and business models rely on it. Hampered or not, failures or not, the practice will continue much like the use of social security numbers as a citizen ID number continues: because people have learned to expect it.
Has BD+ been cracked yet? I've heard tons about it early on (especially on slashdot), but nothing at all in the last few months. Is it possible to play a Blu-ray disk on Linux?
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
This is on topic: this is what DRM is like!
The thing I find most galling about DRM is that we've already been through the same thing, in the early 1980s, with the software "copy protection" wars.
Vendors of copy protection systems would sell their snake oil to software companies, the new uncrackable copy protection would get cracked within months of release, everyone who wanted warez could get copies, but the idealistic suckers who paid for theirs clogged support lines with problems, when the not-quite-standard disk formats turned out to be not-quite-compatible with many diskette drives.
On August 19, 1986, The New York Times reported that "At best, copy protection does nothing good for legitimate users and only annoys software pirates. At worst, it makes it difficult to install software onto a hard disk and to make backup copies that are vital if the original is lost or destroyed. It slows the performance of some programs and causes snarls in others. It can be a pain for networks of PC's hooked together to share data and peripherals. And, worst of all, there have been reports that some ''killer'' protection schemes have destroyed hard disk files, inadvertently or otherwise.... Software makers who have abandoned copy protection this year seem to be avoiding bankruptcy, and they have certainly gained goodwill. When the goodwill comes from big corporate buyers (including the Federal Government, which has refused to buy copy-protected software), it is likely that the losses from pirated software can be offset."
By the end of 1986, all major software publishers had abandoned copy protection, including the longest holdout, Lotus... but not before the failure of Lotus Jazz, a Mac program, which, according to John Dvorak, failed in part because its copy protection was too hard to break.
Why do we need to go through all this again? As the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Of course all those other attempts have failed. It's because they didn't use my super secret (and soon to be patented) method for riskless, full control family friendly DRM 2.0.
Now shut up until I close the deal with these twits, would ya?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
From TFA, "The online music industry has evolved so that, while there are open file format standards - notably MP3 - the major companies have so far preferred proprietary or licensed file formats protected by DRM systems."
The problem with that statement is MP3 has never been an open format. It too requires a license to use. The difference is that the spec is public, so anyone can license the technology.
For an actual open format with freely available source code, check out ogg.
Really, talking about game copy protection as an example does not help.
Game studios are one of the companies most reluctant to drop such client annoying technology.
Game copy protection has been for a very very long time and is still alive.
Goig more ontopic, I have always thought that AllOfMp3 was ahead of its time, maybe 10 years ahead of its time. Not technologically, but "corporatically".
The sad part, is that AllOfMp3 showed us that it is possible to do lots of wonders with technology, wonders that could make life more confortable, but due to corporativsm greed, we have to wait until people and corporations grow to understand the way things should be done.
The next step of course will be a USA company (say Amazon or Apple) starting to offer music in several lossless or lossy formats as AllOfMp3 did.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Are these computer generated, or does somebody seriously write these?
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
LOL
In regards to Software Protection, fear drives it.
The fear that if you're the only software without copy protection, everyone will pirate it. Then, your company's revenue tanks for the next 18-24 months until you get a new version. Without revenue, you can't fund R&D for the new version. Meaning you, Mr. CEO, is out of a job. Most likely many of your employees too.
So, in the face of this possibility, many companies are willing to put up with losing a couple sales by inconveniencing customers and paying tons more in support costs to ensure their only revenue stream continues to flow.
In regards to DRM for music/movies:
It's kinda the same thing. But I don't understand why music/movie companies are so risk adverse since they have such large revenue streams outside of online distribution. They'd be wise to try it now, while the online distrubtion industry is still small, and then switch to DRM if they run into problems. It's much riskier to switch later once the industry is huge. That applies to movies. DRM on music is just silly.
It's great that mainstream retailers such as Amazon are now offering popular music in MP3 format. In the last six years, I have purchased a grand total of about three CDs. I have never purchased music online before today. But in light of this sea change in ditching DRM, today I purchased a single from Amazon.
I was surprised to find that the MP3 Downloader program was offered for Windows, OSX, and Linux versions for Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE, and Debian. It was optional, so I didn't even use it.
The entire process took 20 seconds. The selections were not limited to independent/foreign bands that I've never heard of. The single was $0.89. Watch out, iTunes.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Worrying about the size of an audio file is soooo 1990s'.
How about they give me it in a lossless format and I get to decide how to compress it.
No sig today...
I must have missed the news where iTunes/iStore no longer uses DRM. Or iTunes/iStore is "dying".
Most problems with MS windows are amplified by DRM. I have had system crashes at multiple occasions, and when trying to reinstall XP on a new HDD I run into issues like this:
- The version of XP you have is upgrade only, and can not be used on a clean HDD.
When trying to recover by installing from CD:
- The version of XP you are trying to install is older than what is on the PC (upgraded with service packs). This is for upgrade only.
I also have a test machine with multiple languages and test with different HW configurations. After using it for a few years, now, every time XP is reinstalled, I have to call MS to get the license key.
I agree with TFA: DRM'ed products will fail.
What a breeze to install Ubuntu.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
If you offered the choices of "lose less money" and "make more money" to an executive in any industry, it would take them quite a while to decide which was more appealing on any particular day of the week. Picture a teeter-totter or balance scales.
DRM lets them lose less money while impeding consumers.
DRM-free lets them make more money with happy consumers, with the unquantified fear of how much they're losing.
The whole idea of copyright is to give to the creators a limited time period exclusive right to all the copies, to sell or give away or rent as they see fit, because in theory this promotes the arts and sciences. OK,swell. At some time, though, even with the extensions, that copyright will fall into public domain. If it is pushed out with DRM, how is this possible? It will remain DRMed. It appears to violate the provisions, and the spirit of copyright. Are all these creators now placing non DRMed copies in some escrow account styled vault, so that they can be released when they fall out of copyright time limit provisions? If they aren't, if this isn't happening (and I do not know if they are or aren't) they seem to be in violation of copyright, and as such, IMO, their works should be seized and immediately released into the public domain with no restrictions as an appropriate "fine", or public restitution.
There, corrected it for you.
It sounds like Magnatune is for you. I can't speak to item #5 ("Quality sound. Not this poorly-engineered stuff that's merely designed to be "louder" on radio, but instead music that is designed to sound great and which faithfully reproduces the art."). But Magnatune is merely a licensee; the artist licenses Magnatune to distribute their works. So I think it's a pretty good bet that the artist has mixed the recording so that you'll get what the artist considers good enough to represent their work.
I'd also add:
Digital Citizen
The first problem is just you refusing to buy actual XP (at the time).
I know I'm not alone in missing allofmp3. Aside from the fantastic prices, what made the service so great was it's flexibility. Choosing your own format & bitrate,. highly customizable. It was just the best. A pleasure to use. Even if they charged the greedy western prices, it would be the best place to purchase music. Why can't any of these big business music dealers figure it out and make a site that works like that? God I miss allofmp3.
Honestly, no one would give a shit about DRM if it didn't interfere with normal music listening activities. If the end user were not inconvenienced by DRM, no one would give a hoot about it. The problem isn't DRM, it's greed. Consider this scenario: a fan purchases a song from an online store. That song can be authorized on any number of devices with nothing more than a password. The playing device never has to phone to a server. There are no limits to the number of copies that can be made, nor the number of devices that it can be played on. The DRM is an open format that any manufacturer can use. The only thing preventing anyone from listening to the song is a password. If this were the case, I theorize that it would cut out a large percentage of casual piracy, yet would never inconvenience the listener (save the initial authorization procedure which would only take seconds). Or course OMFG the RIAA might have to accept some losses in it's battle to prevent 110% of music copying. Oh noes! And, oh gee, perhaps an open standard would create a DRM that can be cracked. So what? In the end if they actually did a study of actual numbers I imagine they would find their sales went up, word of mouth would create new fans and sales, and the DRM would create just enough of a hindrance to prevent rampant theft, save for those who are hell bent on stealing all their music no matter what. The problem is that the RIAA and other groups like them see piracy in black and white terms. If it exists, they are loosing money. That is an immature way to view business and human nature. If they were willing to accept some losses as inevitable, they could recoup much more by lowering the DRM bar so that it is virtually invisible to the honest user.
Ugh of course I proof read everything but the title. DEAD! Not DEAN! http://www.astrobasego.com/shirtarchives.html
You *use* software in some other business, and that's where you make your money. There is SO much other business out in the real world, why are you limiting yourself to just "selling software"? Inertia? Never stopped to think there are other ways to make money? Scared? Either way, here you go, a way out of your apparent self inflicted dilema.
Develop it and share with other developers so you can then go out and really do some productive stuff by using it. Go open source and pick some industry to specialise in to use that software you develop and get from others.
This is the true big picture long term money scenario with open source, it goes way beyond even the "selling the service" level, which is barely a sop to business reality and is already a saturated and bloated over priced market. Just say no, think BIGGER than that. The entire planet uses computers and software now-to do other stuff, said stuff being valuable and lucrative.
Limiting yourself to a very tiny niche that is already crowded is sort of silly. You have created an artificial boogeyman that is scaring you into not making any money, or you fear you won't. Get rid of the "software, inc." mentality and go back to "business is booming, so much variety it is hard to choose just one!" type of thinking. Use software as a tool to do something else, stop thinking of it as the end product, it is the beginning tool you use to go make real products. Really, just grok that and *instantly* all of a sudden your business opportunities are magnified by 100,000% as soon as you have that mindset change.
The last part of the article:
That said, the future still isn't entirely DRM-free. "For rental, or subscription, or whatever the model is that develops, there needs to be some sort of DRM to track usage," said Wheeler. Dan Nash agrees. That's hardly unreasonable; you can't expect to copy tracks willy-nilly when they're being rented. What you can and should expect is that DRM won't get in the way of you doing what you've paid to do - enjoy the music you love.
Because after all, you can't possibly do this when you physically rent a disc! Why is it so hard to accept that if you can 'access' something there is no reason you can't also 'store' it, and that there shouldnt be, either. For instance, youtube is great if you have a highspeed net connection, but useless if you want to take some of those videos to watch somewhere there is no Internet (Well, at least the way its designed, I'm aware there are, cough, 'workarounds'.)
Accepting any DRM is accepting all DRM, proprietary formats and devices, and vendor lock in. The only way it doesn't monopolize everything is if it isnt allowed to start to begin with.
What happens when the human race slowly develops cyborg-like technology, and the act of making a copy to a computer or device blurs further with the act of watching it, because we become 'devices' ourselves.
I seem to have this idea that thousands of years ago, storytellers memorized entire books worth of information. People that originated stories wanted to make sure as many people as possible told the story to as many others, to ensure they werent lost. Now that we have the ability to save 'stories' in more permanent form, now its all about making money.
I can just imagine it now, 50,000 years in the future, historians will find the equivalent of the rosetta stone for our time, but will be unable to read it (or perhaps even recognize it) due to some form of drm.
Yes, it's been cracked. But there's no code out there that most of us can use. I think some commercial outfit made their own interpreter (BD+ relies on some embedded code, IIRC) and many of the details are still secret.
So it's cracked, but I don't know that you can play it on Linux.
I have an idea. Instead putting DRM on PAID music, why not put DRM on FREE music?
A customer get to download any DRM enabled music in a website for free, but the DRM only allows the customer to play the music for 10 times. After that, if the customer likes the music, he/she can purchase from the website and get a DRM free music that can be played anywhere. Win-win for both side.
DRM on audio is going away, partly thanks to Apple forcing the labels to release DRM-free music to compete with the iTunes store.
However, people have accepted rights management on video storage and playback for over a quarter century now, and there's no evidence that they will stop. Sure, most of the schemes have been broken, but they still technically are protected.
First, there was the VHS tape. Then came VHS tape with Macrovision, analog rights management (by screwing with the signal on the tape). People seem happy with this, renting more and more videos and buying tons of pre-recorded tapes. Nevermind that there's a ton of devices out there that will help fix the video signal and thus bypass the protection, most people don't use 'em.
Second, the DVD. Oh wait, it has encryption on it (DRM), as well as locking the analog outputs (the video encoder of a DVD player has to support Macrovision). DVD's have surpassed VHS as the dominant video format these days. Sure the encryption is broken, and ripping a DVD is trivially easy, but it's still protected media, and most uses of DVDs don't involve breaking the DRM.
Next-gen media also still has DRM - encryption on the defunct HD-DVD, encryption, media locks, and special VM on Blu-Ray. Again, it's possible to break it, but most people still don't bother.
People have accepted rights management on video playback devices, and it's unlikely to change anytime soon. Even video download services don't seem to raise much of a fuss, compared to music.
But it doesn't.
Heck, I can download lots of DRM'd songs easily and apparently legally off of Youtube for free. Anyone can buy a single CD or record off of the radio or off of an internet stream and then there is a free, easy to use copy in the wild.
In today's age, you can get a song in seconds-- it used to take a lot of effort.
So DRM only punishes the customers who would pay you for a *fairly* priced service (and hint-- putting 13 40 year old songs on a DVD that could hold 2000 songs in mp3 format and charging $20 is not a fair price) and doesn't prevent everyone else from having easier to use ( and probably even quasi-legal ) free recordings.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I don't want DRM. I want to be able to pay my $.99 for a single song (mp3, flac, ogg, aac, etc, etc) and I want that song to play on each and EVERY SINGLE ONE of my digital multi-media capable devices. The one and ONLY limitation should simply be the available codecs on those devices.
That same philosophy holds true in my desire for video products as well. I don't want the DVD publishers to convince me to spend an extra $5 on a DVD with a "digital copy" of the movie that I can't play on anything other than !!ONE SINGLE WINDOWS MACHINE!! The ability to simply burn the movie off the DVD (a very very simple task) makes the DRM of the "digital copy" that much more infuriating!
As an average customer, a non-audiophile and a non-videophile, I want the grand unification of digital multi-media. I want it all to work on ANY digital multi-media player ~I~ want to play it on! Unless I explicitly "rented" the media, I want to play it WHENEVER and HOW EVER OFTEN ~I~ want to!
And what of piracy? With DRM or without, piracy will still be there. If the world went completely DRM free, piracy wouldn't be much different. You go to purchase the media file (say, off Amazon or iTunes) and the file is clean. No viruses. Nothing that will harm your system. Even if that same media file was found on a p2p network, how do you know it hasn't been infected? It's simply safer to buy it.
I purchase most of my music from amazon.com, and always, DRM free.
iTunes is by far the most convenient online music store I have come across in terms of use. So what do I do???
I willingly break their DRM and convert to a more portable format because:
I don't get the problem with DRM. The choice is not "DRM" or "No DRM" but "DRM'd content" and "No content". I'd rather have DRM'd content than not have the content in the first place. Obviously having that content without DRM would be ideal, but then that's not a problem with DRM but with the content owners not wanting to share.
They started out this way. I guess they've come full circle!
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Arghrr, you made me read the parent post.
In the Apple II era we had disks with laser holes, during the early years of the PC there were dongles and special disk formats etc ad infinitum. EVERY instance of that disappeared over the years other than for the Really Hugely Expensive Programs that could afford the support burden.
The benefits don't even come close to the costs and disadvantages, which is why idiot outfits such as the RIAA are barking up the wrong tree. COST is the only control factor, and the RIAA keeps remarkably quiet about experiments in some countries where price lowering resulting in nuking local piracy overnight. As for software, backing up protected code was a &%ç sod to do, currently still demonstrated when you have to re-install Windows on a box with new hardware.
And I would like the MPAA to explain why I, as a reasonably cash rich tourist, cannot buy an OFFICIAL copy of a movie when I'm in Thailand but have to obtain a pirated copy to ensure I can play it when I get home due to region lock. As a matter of fact, I talked to some people in the UK in the business and they hate it as well - and this are people actually IN the business. In other words, the region lock stopped them getting my money. Stupid or what? In whose interest were they working again?
Dum, dumb, dumb. But give it 5..10 years and this whole cycle will happen again.
wasn't the OP's free time. It was work. And as long as you aren't lying to get paid for it, it's fine.
TBC for VHS. Necessary when DVD's started to come out because your TV only had the one or two connectors and one was to your HiFi and one to your VHS, so chaining the DVD through your VHS didn't work nor the other way around. Broken and trivially. Hell, now you can get storefront DVD/VHS boxes that copy your VHS to DVD and ignores Macrovision. THAT'S how broken that is.
DVDs get ripped trivially. Hard to get code from the storefront to do this, but a quick search brings up rippers that break encryption and if you want to, you can even buy them. Trivially broken.
BluRay is not really taking off, despite the urgent need to get us to buy the old stuff (StarWars: Extra Special Director BR Edition with dangly bits) and to undo the trivially broken DRM on DVD's. Hell, if they really cared about the customers, they would have stuck with DVD and used the newer, better and more effective compression to fit the DVD movie on a single side of a dual-layer DVD. Put the extras on the other side (and/or the SD version for old DVD players). Cost? Bugger all. Maybe getting people to know which version they got (if your DVD player can't be upgraded to play h.264/Mpeg4) so you don't get too many store returns would be a little awkward, but that would be it.
But they had better compression with a much bigger storage medium. Why? You aren't going to be able to sell ST:ToS yet again on a single BD disk for anything like the profit you'd get for selling five episodes per disk unless you price it so high no bugger will buy it. They did it so they could get a brand new encryption in with phone home, disabling codes and a closing of the analogue gap to the TV (because of the VHS->DVD players you can get in store).
Let's look at the demographics of "people who buy stuff online" and "people who know about DRM". Could it be that the intersection is pretty large?
My dad doesn't know jack about DRM. But he also won't ever buy a song or movie online. His idea of music is that he has some kind of flat, round thing in his hand that he puts in some machine and presses a button and there be sound. Until not so long ago, his idea of a movie was some square thingie called VHS tape being pushed into some other machine and with two buttons pressed, one on the machine and one on his telly, he gets to see it. Took him a while to accept that the things that make music look quite the same as those that make movies.
On the other hand, when you're looking at the average online shopper, you have someone who knows a hint more about the internet than "there be porn". And sooner or later he does get in touch with DRM, and usually it's not something he likes because it limits his ability to use content. What is the result?
Either he doesn't understand. Then he will simply stay away from it, entirely. He can't tell what is DRMified and what isn't, so to err on the secure side, he will stop buying content online. He does not want to drop money on something he possibly can't use and won't get a refund for.
Or he does understand, reads about it and gets really pissed at it.
In either case, the net result is lower sales.
How many here would have bought online if it wasn't for DRM? I know I was in the situation more than once. I buy a lot online. Yet I never bought music online. Simple reason: It ain't important enough for me that I dig through information whether or not the music is DRMcrippled, so I just don't buy. If I could be sure that the music I buy will work with my player because there is no DRM that keeps it from working, I would buy.
It's just that simple.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well when I was a kid I'd take a trip
every summer down to the Music Strip
to visit the stores in the Post-Napster1.0 World.
I'd run my computer mouse along
the world wide web, after doin' a GREP,
and one day I happened to catch my self a true Song.
Well, I stuffed it down in a 3rd Party pod,
Added a couple ringtones on top,
And when jogging day came I took it for a run.
So I turned down Maple, up Vine, to Arkham,
across the field for the Flea Market parking,
and jogged down Main when that Song went totally beserk.
The DRM-Enabled Device with Hash Tables
tried to run the codec Fable(tm) on this plain ol' MP3.
It went to look for a license that never existed;
The song just started playing while the Server persisted,
trying to lock down a Song that was already free.
The Day the Song went beserk,
On that DRM'ed Musical Clerk,
During my morning run across Main Street.
It was a fight for survival
'Led to an MP3 Revival,
and Indie Bands all shouted Halleleujah!
Well, Eighty Seven DRM servers were cleared,
Five hundred thousand tunes reappeared,
and seven Boards of directors fired the CEO's on the spot.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
First for the Apple ][ when it was done with ill-formatted disks, then for CP/M and DOS via dongles, and finally for DVDs with frivolously bad software. --dave
davecb@spamcop.net
iTunes will indeed convert a WMA into it's AAC format.
And it will import MP3 files to it's library just like that. Not only that, drag those files into a playlist and burn a perfect audio cd.
Apple winks at DRM. Come on, even when the 8GB iPod Nano stores 1,200 songs who is going to spend $1,200 to buy their music over again in digital format? If you scale up to the 60GB models you're looking at about $9K just to fill the thing with music.
With all due respect, what iTunes makes of a DRM locked song when it writes to CD is a bit like going from DAB stereo to mono playback of a 78rpm record using a rusty bent nail as needle.
And they got the naming wrong. iTunes should be iTunes minus, and iTunes plus should be iTunes.
I now have a list of about 300 records I would have bought on the fly if they had been availeble in unlocked format - so the loss for them is mounting up. Hell, I may even go back to CDs, at least it gives me something to throw at the RIAA if they ever mistake me for a file sharer (I sooo wish, they wouldn't know what hit them). I am NOT going to mess around again the next time I upgrade a system, it has started to piss me off so much I'm seriously considering ditching the whole iScam altogether, i.e. iProd Nano, I-collect-more-fingerprints-than-the-UK-government-iPod Touch and I-really-don't-know-what-multitasking-is-iPhone 3G, although getting rid of the latter may be a bit more complex as it's a company phone. Which is a pain because under the glossy interface lies a great void of usability unexplored, my Sony Ericsson P1i beats the crap out of it in terms of functionality and security (for some work we do we need the graphics, but even that we had to fix because its Javascript and Flash support either does't exist or is crap, can't remember - and that too was a load of rubbish where our dev guys gave up waiting and coded on some hacked phones until Apple finally deemed the planet worthy to receive its product).
I've just gotten very comfortably rid of one Redmond based Hitler in my IT, I am unliky to walk into the shiny halls of Apple with the same control freakery in place, rollneck or no rollneck sweater. I rather have rough, ready and working for me than all shiny pretend and at the whim of someone else, in that respect the iPhone has been ginormous disappointment.
If you need the gloss, fine. I don't, I prefer to spend my money on stuff that works for ME. Call me funny, but I consider the premise of putting down good money for something an indication that I have a certain desire to see something do work for me, and nobody else. I don't need it to work as an advertising panel for someone else (unless they pay me, of course), I don't need it to act as a US industrial espionage node and I don't need it to act like a cop who assumes I will break the law the moment he turns his head.
There. EOR (End Of Rant) :-) Now what was I doing?
Insert
I know you don't think artists should ever get paid for anything, but DRM is going to stay to make sure that, on some level, you freeloaders are forced to actually pay for somebody's work. Crazy concept, I know.
The only reason Napster and those other services were allowed to sell DRM-free was because the industry was trying to shake up iTune's dominance a little. Didn't work, of course. Nobody uses Napster, and it's amusing seeing pirates trumpet it as some kind of anti-DRM victory.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Um, if their product is so bad, why are people pirating it?
"Sufferin' succotash."
Most hi-def equipment sold these days support HDMI with HDCP, so DRM is by no means dead.
Hello in there. Is anybody home?
Reading this thread, it seems that everyone assumes that the people who manage the most successful media industry in time and space suddenly become drooling idiots on the subject of online music.
The more reasonable assumption would be that the effects of DRM are exactly what they intended: make online music a pain in the ass and push a public perception that getting music from the internet is at least immoral and likely illegal, so that people will buy music CDs and DVDs instead. Keep that up for as long as possible, until there's a viable online music business model that can't be ignored.
If you want to be rid of DRM, find and promote a profitable way to sell music online.
Surely, the /. collective brain can come up with something.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
O yeah, they're written by real humanoids! I used to collect mimeographed/xeroxed screeds that I'd find stapled to telephone poles when I was stationed in Texas in the pre-public internet days. This internet stuff doesn't have the same "single-spaced legal-sized margins packed with additional hand-written material" intensity that those old nail-ups had, but it's the same exact tone of hysterical righteousness. I've always wanted to write a program that'd generate this stuff, but I think it'd be pretty difficult to come up with the right mix of disjointedness and thematic coherence...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
SlySoft leveraged the research of others and then went on to do a great deal of their own. They constantly update their product and when new BD+ crypto hits, fairly frequently, they work around it ASAP to provide updates.
While their software doesn't allow you to directly play the files on Linux it DOES allow you to get access to the files sans crypto.
Sadly no one has provided a one step DVDShrink like app to do anything with these files. No one has come up with an "open" player that can do menus etc. either :( So, folks such as myself end up using tools like eac3to to pull the content off into containers MKV for playback. I happen to like to compress the files for better storage and I use X264 to do it along with meGUI.
In the end I have VERY high quality files that play GREAT on Linux using XBMC. It's not the same since I lose the extra, the menus, and other things but until people write something to decode all that I am stuck :( Ripping\storing still beats having to have a zillion pieces of media on a rack in my living room though!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
For all you music lovers out there â" there is a loophole in the Napster website â" you can get the 10 MP3 deal using 3NAP107 as the promo code https://sms.napster.com/ns/registration/standard/create_account.html?codestr=3NAP107