In order to enjoy this music you will have to give up control of your computer, which also stores your private documents and acts as your press.
Um........no. You may have to give up control of some media files downloaded from a website which you haven't got many, if any, legal rights over anyway.
Worse, no immunity at all will be given to people who use the service
They get the immunity from prosecution that comes when you haven't committed a crime by downloading music illegally.
DRM is a bad deal and companies that offer music without DRM are going to win this game.
Yes, that's why Allofmp3 is the biggest online music store in the world. Newsflash: nobody outside Slashdot, and maybe a few others, really cares. Most people understand the rationale for copy protection, in that people will take anything not nailed down. DRM just happens to be the nail that's used.
It's too little too late. If they would actually present the world with something more like their old radio model, they would be making a much better start.
They have something much like their old radio model. It's called internet radio.
By the way, there's nothing stopping you using music to "amuse your friends", provided you're not making a copy of it. Nothing stopping you lending it to a friend, so long as they don't rip a copy. That's perfectly OK under copyright law. (I will admit that this is a flaw in DRM, that you cannot realistically lend a DRMed file to someone, unless of course you burn it to a CD as CDDA and lend them that.)
Re:It's like nothing we've seen .. since Linux
on
A New Kind of OS
·
· Score: 1
Yes, but tell the teenage girl who just wants to talk to her friends on AIM that she needs to know about her computer's internals because it's a complex thing...there's got to be a certain level of abstraction for people who aren't of a technical nature to be able to use technology like cars, computers etc...
Then maybe we can vote out the entertainment industry whores who gave us unconstitutional trash like the DMCA and 75 year copyright protection in the first place.
They did. They were called "the Clinton administration".
It's a useful shorthand for "acquire through copyright infringement". Can we please not play the silly semantics games for once? It doesn't strengthen your argument, it just makes you look like you haven't got a rebuttal.
I get the feeling you are confusing Apple's download service, the iTunes Music Store, which DOES impose DRM on you as a matter of course, and Apple's jukebox software, iTunes, which does NOT impose DRM on you if you use it to rip a CD or play already extant MP3s. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that was a simple oversight, and not you wanting to spread FUD about iTunes.
However, Cory is wrong on a lot of things:
Apple's limit for authorised PCs is five, not three.
It takes some doing to have five PCs which you own which are going to have seperate copies of iTunes Store music on. A far saner alternative would be iTunes' music sharing feature.
If you burnt a purchased album as a normal audio CD, then you wouldn't have the problem of keying in metadata, as CDDB would recognise it as that album.
WMA DRM is NOT compulsory if you rip your CDs with Windows Media Player. It is an easily-disabled option which is also presented to you quite clearly as a dialogue box when you first rip a CD. This box makes the caveats of using DRM quite clear.
Oh yeah, if the "choice" about adding DRM to your ripped CDs was so clear, how come so many people have gotten burnt that Doctrow can walk onto M$'s campus and wag his finger at them?
I would presume, looking on the date on that linked article, that the choice was put in after the EFF guy talked to MS about it. It was certainly very clear the last time I used WMP10 to rip a CD.
By my definition, every Dell is a lemon out of the box because it runs Windoze.
I can just imagine you saying this out loud, with a really really smug expression on your face.
substantial environmental savings can be had if people would just use decent software and had more durable machines.
Decent software like Linux, which has problems doing power management on many laptops, and makes features like hibernate very hard to use properly? I never could get even APM to work on my laptop under Linux, one of the many reasons I went back to Windows on it.
DRM makes even that simple task painful, so the new pain of subscription music is extended to your old media.
Ripping with iTunes does not add DRM to your music. Ripping with Windows Media Player can add DRM to your music, but it's a choice you are given very clearly when you first rip a CD with it.
Both iTunes and WMP do what you say, but the lock you to a specific machine to one extent or another. WMA is famous for being impossible to transfer to another computer. iTunes is equally onerous when you run into their R - restrictions - of DRM.
WMA as a format, unless DRMed, can be played on any number of computers you wish, and even on alternative OSes (I once got your beloved Amarok to play WMA-fancy that!). iTunes has restrictions on DRM, but as you can deauthorise PCs as and when needed, they're almost transparent. Of course, caveat emptor applies; if you want to buy DRMed music you should be well aware that it will stop you moving it from PC to PC.
If you've been a good customer and have hundreds of CDs, you will resent having to encode them again.
Um...no.
It gets worse when you want the freedom to put your music onto portable players. Like I said, all this has really stopped is honest users who want to do normal things with their music.
What's that? Apple's AAC, both DRMed and otherwise, works on the most popular personal audio player available? And that Microsoft's WMA, DRMed and otherwise, works on Creative's audio players, as well as those from Archos etc? And that twitter's talking bollocks again?
I've been happier encoding my CDs with ABCDE, and now Konqueror. They get the tags right and give you a choice of formats, FLAC, ogg or mp3. Needles to say, I can put my music onto as many machines as I want and the CD is now just a nice, last resort backup.
(I'll give you one thing, ABCDE is a nice, no nonsense ripper. Shame it has such a problem with enhanced CDs...)
Funny, I just reripped all my CDs (reripped into 128kbps to save battery life and storage space on my iPod) and none of the tags were incorrect. More to the point, I can play all the files on just about anything that can play AAC. Your point again? All you're saying is what I've been saying for ages; that buying CDs keeps you far away from any problems you may or may not experience from buying downloads.
I particularly love the people who say that real artists don't want money for their work, and instead should live off warm fuzzies and burger flipping jobs, as a way to justify not paying them the few dollars it takes to buy an album.
I think it goes "Information wants to be free; Entertainment wants to be paid; You just want to be cheap."
Then don't buy from iTunes. I find the iTunes DRM a minor annoyance at best, but I can live with it (I have about 15 songs at the most bought from iTunes). You're always free to buy CDs, where even the worst DRM can be got around using a shift key and the sound quality is guaranteed good.
a) No they don't get all the money. b) Yes, artists are entitled to money, as are record executives and everyone involved in producing a CD. Record labels don't just sit on their asses and do nothing, you know. c) Even if artists got a pisspoor share of royalties, I'm sure they would much rather prefer it to the fuck all they would get if stuff was P2Ped.
Again; not liking record labels is not a justification to steal or P2P their (for want of a better word) products.
I was actually thinking about this the other day. It quickly occurred that proving that you own a particular CD would be a pain in the ass. For a start, most people don't keep receipts, and my local record store doesn't print the title/artist of the CD on the receipt anyway. Then there's trying to associate the receipt with a person (ever seen an address printed on a receipt (Amazon excepted)?)
Even if you had the physical disc, there's little you could do to prove you had it in your possession. You could have someone handle it physically, but that would be costly and take ages to check a CD. You could take a picture of it with a digital camera, but then just about any picture of a certain CD taken with a digicam could be used. You could send it in I suppose, but then you've lost the CD. Basically, such a system wouldn't work for all sorts of practical and financial reasons.
The only really safe way, in conclusion, is to get some cheap CDRs on a spindle and keep a personal, lossless copy (under your fair use rights) safe and sound in case the original CD breaks.
Apple does, in fact, let you re-download tracks that you've bought in case they get deleted.
Um, no they don't. I know because I tried yesterday (new HD, so reinstall and rerip of CDs). I ended up having to use EphPod to recover the M4P files from my iPod.
Re:Confusion About Abbie Hoffman
on
Steal This Film
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· Score: 1
I honestly wouldn't have ever guessed that. Your English is great.
Seconded.
Re:How Downloading Pirated Video Cost Me $400+
on
Steal This Film
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Why did you do this? Was the downloaded copy of poor quality? Took too long? Inconvenient? All of these problems can be fixed and will be over time.
Maybe he just, I dunno, wanted to support the people who made the show?
That's a fair point. Unremittingly, however, the majority of piracy isn't as good intentioned or good natured as that; a lot of it is based more around the concept of getting something for nothing.
Re:Steal This Film fails to persuade...
on
Steal This Film
·
· Score: 1
The problem with "fair use" today is that nobody wants to "play fair". Today it is easier to redistribute digital content around the world than it is to make a tape or disc to play in your car.
The answer from many young people is that because it is so easy and cheap to do so, they should be allowed to do it freely. Obviously, this attitude doesn't have a lot of deep thinking behind it, as this movie shows.
That's not really a reason to abolish fair use rights, and in my view there CAN be no reason. As I've said before in previous comments, "fair use" doesn't really come into the debate on P2P, only really into the debate on DRM.
The other side that people keep ignoring is that non-digital physical distribution is still necessary today. There are a lot of people that are either not "connected" or otherwise choose to buy physical objects. Nearly all of the "abolish the RIAA!" rhetoric that you hear utterly fails to address these people. WalMart is still selling CDs. When they stop perhaps we can talk about there only being digital distribution and the complete elimination of physical CDs, DVDs and so on.
This is very true...I prefer CDs to sources like iTunes for buying albums for the simple reason that CDs are far more durable than data and offer better flexibility and sound quality. Not to mention, in some cases they're cheaper (my local record place, Track Records, has a large shelf of CDs, quite a few of them recent, which come to £6.99 each, 3 for £20 and 5 for £30, easily beating iTunes on album prices. This is of course ignoring Amazon, where cheap CDs abound.).
Slashdot Mirror
And watch those same newspapers be taken to court for breaking the same law the NYT is trying not to break.
(I hope. The jaded, Private Eye reading side of me doubts it tbh...)
In order to enjoy this music you will have to give up control of your computer, which also stores your private documents and acts as your press.
Um........no. You may have to give up control of some media files downloaded from a website which you haven't got many, if any, legal rights over anyway.
Worse, no immunity at all will be given to people who use the service
They get the immunity from prosecution that comes when you haven't committed a crime by downloading music illegally.
DRM is a bad deal and companies that offer music without DRM are going to win this game.
Yes, that's why Allofmp3 is the biggest online music store in the world. Newsflash: nobody outside Slashdot, and maybe a few others, really cares. Most people understand the rationale for copy protection, in that people will take anything not nailed down. DRM just happens to be the nail that's used.
It's too little too late. If they would actually present the world with something more like their old radio model, they would be making a much better start.
They have something much like their old radio model. It's called internet radio.
By the way, there's nothing stopping you using music to "amuse your friends", provided you're not making a copy of it. Nothing stopping you lending it to a friend, so long as they don't rip a copy. That's perfectly OK under copyright law. (I will admit that this is a flaw in DRM, that you cannot realistically lend a DRMed file to someone, unless of course you burn it to a CD as CDDA and lend them that.)
Yes, but tell the teenage girl who just wants to talk to her friends on AIM that she needs to know about her computer's internals because it's a complex thing...there's got to be a certain level of abstraction for people who aren't of a technical nature to be able to use technology like cars, computers etc...
Then maybe we can vote out the entertainment industry whores who gave us unconstitutional trash like the DMCA and 75 year copyright protection in the first place.
They did. They were called "the Clinton administration".
I wasn't under the impression that there was some artificial limit on the amount of financial success you can have.
It's a useful shorthand for "acquire through copyright infringement". Can we please not play the silly semantics games for once? It doesn't strengthen your argument, it just makes you look like you haven't got a rebuttal.
However, Cory is wrong on a lot of things:
Oh yeah, if the "choice" about adding DRM to your ripped CDs was so clear, how come so many people have gotten burnt that Doctrow can walk onto M$'s campus and wag his finger at them?
I would presume, looking on the date on that linked article, that the choice was put in after the EFF guy talked to MS about it. It was certainly very clear the last time I used WMP10 to rip a CD.
By my definition, every Dell is a lemon out of the box because it runs Windoze.
I can just imagine you saying this out loud, with a really really smug expression on your face.
substantial environmental savings can be had if people would just use decent software and had more durable machines.
Decent software like Linux, which has problems doing power management on many laptops, and makes features like hibernate very hard to use properly? I never could get even APM to work on my laptop under Linux, one of the many reasons I went back to Windows on it.
OH LOOK! Yet another bullshit twitter post.
DRM makes even that simple task painful, so the new pain of subscription music is extended to your old media.
Ripping with iTunes does not add DRM to your music. Ripping with Windows Media Player can add DRM to your music, but it's a choice you are given very clearly when you first rip a CD with it.
Both iTunes and WMP do what you say, but the lock you to a specific machine to one extent or another. WMA is famous for being impossible to transfer to another computer. iTunes is equally onerous when you run into their R - restrictions - of DRM.
WMA as a format, unless DRMed, can be played on any number of computers you wish, and even on alternative OSes (I once got your beloved Amarok to play WMA-fancy that!). iTunes has restrictions on DRM, but as you can deauthorise PCs as and when needed, they're almost transparent. Of course, caveat emptor applies; if you want to buy DRMed music you should be well aware that it will stop you moving it from PC to PC.
If you've been a good customer and have hundreds of CDs, you will resent having to encode them again.
Um...no.
It gets worse when you want the freedom to put your music onto portable players. Like I said, all this has really stopped is honest users who want to do normal things with their music.
What's that? Apple's AAC, both DRMed and otherwise, works on the most popular personal audio player available? And that Microsoft's WMA, DRMed and otherwise, works on Creative's audio players, as well as those from Archos etc? And that twitter's talking bollocks again?
I've been happier encoding my CDs with ABCDE, and now Konqueror. They get the tags right and give you a choice of formats, FLAC, ogg or mp3. Needles to say, I can put my music onto as many machines as I want and the CD is now just a nice, last resort backup.
(I'll give you one thing, ABCDE is a nice, no nonsense ripper. Shame it has such a problem with enhanced CDs...)
Funny, I just reripped all my CDs (reripped into 128kbps to save battery life and storage space on my iPod) and none of the tags were incorrect. More to the point, I can play all the files on just about anything that can play AAC. Your point again? All you're saying is what I've been saying for ages; that buying CDs keeps you far away from any problems you may or may not experience from buying downloads.
Yes, I'm "doing as I'm told", and not following my own moral code. You're being such a badass rebel, you know, ripping people off.
Fair enough :)
Ah, I didn't know you had to contact Apple beforehand...never mind :)
The rootkit could be got around using the shift key, or disabling autorun. Also, the rootkit is no longer being circulated, is it?
I particularly love the people who say that real artists don't want money for their work, and instead should live off warm fuzzies and burger flipping jobs, as a way to justify not paying them the few dollars it takes to buy an album.
I think it goes "Information wants to be free; Entertainment wants to be paid; You just want to be cheap."
Information is public property, DRM is just a challenge
Information is certainly not public property unless it's actually in the public domain. Like it or not, until it is it's owned by rights holders.
Then don't buy from iTunes. I find the iTunes DRM a minor annoyance at best, but I can live with it (I have about 15 songs at the most bought from iTunes). You're always free to buy CDs, where even the worst DRM can be got around using a shift key and the sound quality is guaranteed good.
a) No they don't get all the money.
b) Yes, artists are entitled to money, as are record executives and everyone involved in producing a CD. Record labels don't just sit on their asses and do nothing, you know.
c) Even if artists got a pisspoor share of royalties, I'm sure they would much rather prefer it to the fuck all they would get if stuff was P2Ped.
Again; not liking record labels is not a justification to steal or P2P their (for want of a better word) products.
I was actually thinking about this the other day. It quickly occurred that proving that you own a particular CD would be a pain in the ass. For a start, most people don't keep receipts, and my local record store doesn't print the title/artist of the CD on the receipt anyway. Then there's trying to associate the receipt with a person (ever seen an address printed on a receipt (Amazon excepted)?)
Even if you had the physical disc, there's little you could do to prove you had it in your possession. You could have someone handle it physically, but that would be costly and take ages to check a CD. You could take a picture of it with a digital camera, but then just about any picture of a certain CD taken with a digicam could be used. You could send it in I suppose, but then you've lost the CD. Basically, such a system wouldn't work for all sorts of practical and financial reasons.
The only really safe way, in conclusion, is to get some cheap CDRs on a spindle and keep a personal, lossless copy (under your fair use rights) safe and sound in case the original CD breaks.
Apple does, in fact, let you re-download tracks that you've bought in case they get deleted.
Um, no they don't. I know because I tried yesterday (new HD, so reinstall and rerip of CDs). I ended up having to use EphPod to recover the M4P files from my iPod.
I honestly wouldn't have ever guessed that. Your English is great.
Seconded.
Why did you do this? Was the downloaded copy of poor quality? Took too long? Inconvenient? All of these problems can be fixed and will be over time.
Maybe he just, I dunno, wanted to support the people who made the show?
Just to clarify, I do think it's ethical to break existant DRM for the purposes of fair use (but no more than that), and that the DMCA is a crock.
That's a little like saying stabbing someone is justified, because you're allowed to manipulate objects in physical space in any way.
You have the right to, yes, but it doesn't make it ethical or right to do so.
That's a fair point. Unremittingly, however, the majority of piracy isn't as good intentioned or good natured as that; a lot of it is based more around the concept of getting something for nothing.
The problem with "fair use" today is that nobody wants to "play fair". Today it is easier to redistribute digital content around the world than it is to make a tape or disc to play in your car.
The answer from many young people is that because it is so easy and cheap to do so, they should be allowed to do it freely. Obviously, this attitude doesn't have a lot of deep thinking behind it, as this movie shows.
That's not really a reason to abolish fair use rights, and in my view there CAN be no reason. As I've said before in previous comments, "fair use" doesn't really come into the debate on P2P, only really into the debate on DRM.
The other side that people keep ignoring is that non-digital physical distribution is still necessary today. There are a lot of people that are either not "connected" or otherwise choose to buy physical objects. Nearly all of the "abolish the RIAA!" rhetoric that you hear utterly fails to address these people. WalMart is still selling CDs. When they stop perhaps we can talk about there only being digital distribution and the complete elimination of physical CDs, DVDs and so on.
This is very true...I prefer CDs to sources like iTunes for buying albums for the simple reason that CDs are far more durable than data and offer better flexibility and sound quality. Not to mention, in some cases they're cheaper (my local record place, Track Records, has a large shelf of CDs, quite a few of them recent, which come to £6.99 each, 3 for £20 and 5 for £30, easily beating iTunes on album prices. This is of course ignoring Amazon, where cheap CDs abound.).