The example you provide here makes ESR look more like a copyright cowboy than SCO. And that's to my eye -- I'm already convinced that SCO is the Bad Guy.
SCO (and I'm thinking it's the ancient SCO, frankly) taking code from BSD and stripping that copyright does not give ESR the right to strip all copyrights from the file.
We saw this before at VBR time. I see 500s and 503s abounding. I'm more apt to say that the servers just aren't hacking the large portion of customers grabbing what they can when they can.
Unless drastic service (as opposed to pricing) changes are afoot at Emusic, proving ownership is as simple as going to your "my collection" page. Well, actually, except for albums/artists that have left Emusic, I guess. I am confident that information is still available somewhere, though.
Of course, if you're not infringing copyright by putting your Emusic files in your "share" folder, it's pretty much given nobody's gonna "swoop down on you".
The whole point of forcing you to use it was so that they could limit (most) people to 45 tracks in their queue at one time. Now you can only get less than that in a month. I would hope the download manager requirement would go away, and we could go back to the myriad other scripts that were available to deal with the problem rather than the piece of crap Emusic shoved down our throats.
Interesting take. I was of the mind (even before today) that ever-increasing broadband speeds and takeup were going to kill emusic, not necessarily a P2P mindset. Consider that when emusic started offering the old service, most people were on dialup and could only interactively grab an album a day, tops. That's probably around 500 tracks if they're hardcore users.
The mentality Emusic subscribers (myself included) seem to have adopted is that it's worth it under the (old) $9.99 plan to grab several things that you're not sure if you'll like or not, and delete if you don't. I probably kept about half. Secretly, I wished for a way to reward those artists whose albums I kept and rescind payment from those I didn't. But that just doesn't happen without invasive DRM and serious involvement from the business (the former I won't tolerate; the latter no business would do.)
Actually, I find myself thinking that the $14.99 membership would probably even be fair if I could listen to the whole track at lo-fi before choosing to download or not. The 30 second samples have led me astray far too many times.
The format is MP3 and they say they're keeping it that way. So, no DRM. (That's why Emusic is the only non-CD PC format I get my music in; the CDs are only un-"protected" ones btw. I listen to my music my way, thankyouverymuch.)
They are available around the world but licensing agreements do require them to keep certain tracks available to i.e. North Americans only. Mostly foreign stuff that's supposedly selling well in foreign countries.
Finally, part of the reason Emusic is still cheaper is that their catalog is largely eclectic and indie stuff, with a sprinkling of "sampler" albums from a sprinkling of "popular" artists. That stuff goes cheaper, so it can be sold cheaper. I don't know how much this trend will continue.
I agree with you that they did need to change to be profitable. I just think they made too drastic of a change here.
You can't do the $50 thing twice a year. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to subscribers that opened their accounts before October 8, and it's only good till November 8. You cancel it, it's toast.
As a current subscriber, I'm not so convinced it's the olive branch they intended it to be. Maybe at $25.
You are on play number 10 of 200 and you have not yet paid for this music. Stand on your head and type "I AM A CHEAPSKATE" with your nose to play this music, or register your copy today!
Well, now they can make guaranteed payouts to rights holders; I'm not so sure this is a death knell. Probably an intense metamorphosis in subscriber base.
We've been saying it on the currently-dead message boards for months -- if all of Emusic's subscribers downloaded as much as we did, they'd expire overnight, taking in less than a penny per track.
It was only a matter of time before they had to revamp their pricing structure. I just didn't expect so drastic of a change.
If you subscribe to the $9.99 plan and max it out monthly you're getting tracks for 25 cents. Not bad, but nothing like what we were getting.
My year was just about up, and I've got some pretty cool stuff. But I just don't know if it's worth it. Their $50 "olive branch" to subscribers certainly isn't.
...I'm sure the impact on the families for this expenditure is more likely to prevent them from supersizing their BigMac rather than preventing them from sending a child to college or paying for that family vacation to DisneyWorld. Be reasonable.
If this was all the Michigan government did, then okay, I could "be reasonable".
Problem is they're spending this kind of money over and over and over again.
Familiar with the phrase "nickel-and-diming to death"? Well, by time we've dealt with all these little initiatives, Disney World ceases to become an option.
Or, we could not waste the taxpayers' money on something so frivolous, reducing the cost of living for everyone, rather than provide a sweet employment deal to unemployed IT "professionals".
Able, sure. It gets sent from their customer premise equiment. (Where I work, ours sends no information, so we show up as "Unknown" or "Out of area". We don't telemarket, mind you, but it sure looks like it when I'm calling my own home.)
Allowed? Who knows. I imagine if a case ever got to court, they'd have some issues. Getting it there is pretty tough, since actually identifying these people essentially requires one to beg the phone company to let you ask your police department to tell the phone company to put a trace on your line for the off-chance they call you again. I did this once, you can imagine what the outcome was.
chroot is not a complete solution. You may be able to restrict people from getting at files above their chroot level, but there a host of other things a root user can do to the system that you don't want your customers to be able to do if they can affect other customers.
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The example you provide here makes ESR look more like a copyright cowboy than SCO. And that's to my eye -- I'm already convinced that SCO is the Bad Guy.
SCO (and I'm thinking it's the ancient SCO, frankly) taking code from BSD and stripping that copyright does not give ESR the right to strip all copyrights from the file.
We saw this before at VBR time. I see 500s and 503s abounding. I'm more apt to say that the servers just aren't hacking the large portion of customers grabbing what they can when they can.
It's not an expiring thing. You've always had to explicitly cancel. You should read things more carefully before you agree to them.
Too bad you didn't see the alternative...
You mean 10 albums, right? This is MP3, not FLAC.
50 was always the normal trial offer. 100 came with a special offer, usually in conjunction with some other company.
Yeesh. Did I say "dent"? The second "dent" should be "debt".
Unless drastic service (as opposed to pricing) changes are afoot at Emusic, proving ownership is as simple as going to your "my collection" page. Well, actually, except for albums/artists that have left Emusic, I guess. I am confident that information is still available somewhere, though.
Of course, if you're not infringing copyright by putting your Emusic files in your "share" folder, it's pretty much given nobody's gonna "swoop down on you".
Meaning they don't require you to stick around for a year, like they used to with the $9.99 plan. ($14.99 was three months.)
On the topic of the Linux download manager...
The whole point of forcing you to use it was so that they could limit (most) people to 45 tracks in their queue at one time. Now you can only get less than that in a month. I would hope the download manager requirement would go away, and we could go back to the myriad other scripts that were available to deal with the problem rather than the piece of crap Emusic shoved down our throats.
(Of course, there was always another solution.)
That would be Vivendi. If it makes a dent in their massive dent, I suppose it could be considered "ahead of the game" :-)
Interesting take. I was of the mind (even before today) that ever-increasing broadband speeds and takeup were going to kill emusic, not necessarily a P2P mindset. Consider that when emusic started offering the old service, most people were on dialup and could only interactively grab an album a day, tops. That's probably around 500 tracks if they're hardcore users.
The mentality Emusic subscribers (myself included) seem to have adopted is that it's worth it under the (old) $9.99 plan to grab several things that you're not sure if you'll like or not, and delete if you don't. I probably kept about half. Secretly, I wished for a way to reward those artists whose albums I kept and rescind payment from those I didn't. But that just doesn't happen without invasive DRM and serious involvement from the business (the former I won't tolerate; the latter no business would do.)
Actually, I find myself thinking that the $14.99 membership would probably even be fair if I could listen to the whole track at lo-fi before choosing to download or not. The 30 second samples have led me astray far too many times.
To bring you up to speed:
The format is MP3 and they say they're keeping it that way. So, no DRM. (That's why Emusic is the only non-CD PC format I get my music in; the CDs are only un-"protected" ones btw. I listen to my music my way, thankyouverymuch.)
They are available around the world but licensing agreements do require them to keep certain tracks available to i.e. North Americans only. Mostly foreign stuff that's supposedly selling well in foreign countries.
Finally, part of the reason Emusic is still cheaper is that their catalog is largely eclectic and indie stuff, with a sprinkling of "sampler" albums from a sprinkling of "popular" artists. That stuff goes cheaper, so it can be sold cheaper. I don't know how much this trend will continue.
I agree with you that they did need to change to be profitable. I just think they made too drastic of a change here.
You can't do the $50 thing twice a year. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to subscribers that opened their accounts before October 8, and it's only good till November 8. You cancel it, it's toast.
As a current subscriber, I'm not so convinced it's the olive branch they intended it to be. Maybe at $25.
Shareware music, hmm.
You are on play number 10 of 200 and you have not yet paid for this music. Stand on your head and type "I AM A CHEAPSKATE" with your nose to play this music, or register your copy today!
I certainly hope so. Under their new pricing plan, some of the music I've grabbed recently I'd get cheaper at a used CD store.
(Yes, we still have one or two of those around.) :-)
Well, now they can make guaranteed payouts to rights holders; I'm not so sure this is a death knell. Probably an intense metamorphosis in subscriber base.
We've been saying it on the currently-dead message boards for months -- if all of Emusic's subscribers downloaded as much as we did, they'd expire overnight, taking in less than a penny per track.
It was only a matter of time before they had to revamp their pricing structure. I just didn't expect so drastic of a change.
If you subscribe to the $9.99 plan and max it out monthly you're getting tracks for 25 cents. Not bad, but nothing like what we were getting.
My year was just about up, and I've got some pretty cool stuff. But I just don't know if it's worth it. Their $50 "olive branch" to subscribers certainly isn't.
If this was all the Michigan government did, then okay, I could "be reasonable".
Problem is they're spending this kind of money over and over and over again.
Familiar with the phrase "nickel-and-diming to death"? Well, by time we've dealt with all these little initiatives, Disney World ceases to become an option.
It's not just about Big Macs anymore.
You forgot:
Not buying the damn things
Pros: Taxpayer money not wasted, kids do schoolwork instead of playing games, many others
Cons: Kids don't get to have Half-Life tournaments in the cafeteria anymore
Or, we could not waste the taxpayers' money on something so frivolous, reducing the cost of living for everyone, rather than provide a sweet employment deal to unemployed IT "professionals".
Able, sure. It gets sent from their customer premise equiment. (Where I work, ours sends no information, so we show up as "Unknown" or "Out of area". We don't telemarket, mind you, but it sure looks like it when I'm calling my own home.)
Allowed? Who knows. I imagine if a case ever got to court, they'd have some issues. Getting it there is pretty tough, since actually identifying these people essentially requires one to beg the phone company to let you ask your police department to tell the phone company to put a trace on your line for the off-chance they call you again. I did this once, you can imagine what the outcome was.
Of course not. But can they? Sure.
The real test of copyrightability should be "what is the minimum incentive we can give the producer that is sufficient to have the work produced".
All retroactive copyright extensions fail this test, of course.
Er, DRM? That sounds like a standard EULA to me. Certainly not an open license, but it's a far cry from DRM.
chroot is not a complete solution. You may be able to restrict people from getting at files above their chroot level, but there a host of other things a root user can do to the system that you don't want your customers to be able to do if they can affect other customers.