drm


Top images of 2006

At the end of every year you always see the lists of top images and stories of the past year.  Here are a few of the images I am looking forward to seeing at the end of 2006:

-George W Bush being convicted at his impeachment trial

-Karl Rove’s perp walk and subsequent conviction in the Valerie Plame leak case

-Republicans loosing control of both houses of congress in November

-Tom Delay convicted on all charges in his corruption trial

-the final US troops returning from Iraq

-the RIAA announcing all file sharing lawsuits are dropped and previous settlements are refunded

-Record companies announcing they will never use DRM again and repudiating the DMCA

-prices of online music downloads being reduced to the point ($.20-$.25 per song) where file sharing of music becomes pointless except for old out of print recordings.

-More people listening to podcasts than Clear Channel radio stations

-The Thomas Moore Law center is disbanded and all intelligent design efforts are abandoned.

-Software and business model patents are ruled invalid and are permanently rejected

Clearly some of these items fall into the realm of fantasy (like the RIAA giving up on drm),  but some are definitely things that could happen this year.  What are some images or stories you would like to look back on come December 31 2006?


Ypsilanti Library offers eAudiobooks 1

ypsilanti libraryAs of last week the Ypsilanti District Library began offering a downloadable audiobook service. They are offering a service that is provided by a company called netlibrary.com. As I wrote in this post if you have an ipod or an Apple computer or one that runs on Linux, don’t bother signing up because the service provides books that are encoded Microsoft windows media audio DRM. You can only listen to the books on a computer with windows 2000 or XP and a recent version of windows media player. If you have an audio player that supports microsofts “plays for sure” drm you can transfer the book to that device too. Of course most of the inexpensive players don’t support plays for sure so you are out of luck just like the 35 million ipod owners out there. You can’t burn the books to cd either. All in all when you combine all the restrictions with the decidely limited selection that netlibrary offers, the whole deal seems like a waste of our tax dollars. Of course no one has yet come up with a copy protection scheme that actually prevents copying digital media. Any media that can be copied can be converted to another unprotected format, usually with any of several free software tools. Of course any further discussion of this would probably be a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) and I certainly wouldn’t want to distract the FBI from hunting terrorists by having to come after me.


I do buy music 10

For anyone who has been reading my recent rants on sony and drm, I just want to clarify something. I don’t have a problem with paying for music. I think musicians should be compensated for their work. I just don’t believe in supporting overpaid executives and lawyers for big media companies. In fact in recent months (coinciding with listening to podcasts) I have purchased more music than I have in a long time. It’s just that I now get it either directly from artists through their websites or from online stores like emusic.com that sell mp3 files with no drm and give a much bigger share of the proceeds back to the musicians. I have purchased music from Brother Love, Brad Sucks, the Arts and Sciences, the Black Furies, Jukebox Zeros and others. Demonstrate to the world that we don’t need drm. Buy non-drm music and boycott anything that is copy-protected.


Boycott Sony products!!

On top of all the other bullshit and lies from Sony over the past 2 weeks regarding their DRM rootkit (see my previous posts here and a good timeline summary from BoingBoing), it now appears that Sony themselves have violated a copyright. It looks like some of the software sony used is ripped off from the Lame mp3 encoder. Lame is an open source software project published under the GPL, which allows anyone to use it for free, but you have to acknowledge it and return any modifications back to the community for further use under the same license. Well it appears that Sony or one its DRM suppliers used the open-source Lame code and neither acknowledged nor gave back the modifications. For a company that makes so much noise about protecting their intellectual property, they don’t seem to have any qualms about stealing others work.

Sony in general is very consumer unfriendly. Ever since they release the playstation portable last spring they have constantly been releasing firmware updates for the thing. While they have added a couple of new functions most of the updates have done nothing more than disable the hacks that people have done to allow them to create and play their own games on the device. There are people out there creating there own games or emulators to play older games. Sony doesn’t like this because they don’t get a cut like they do when people buy new games from the store. So they play cat and mouse, but each time they do this it is defeated again within a couple of weeks.

I will no longer purchase any Sony products of any kind, including hardware, software, music, anything! I urge anyone reading this to also boycott sony. Clearly this company does not deserve to be in business any more.

Update: Boing-boing is keeping a running log of events in the Sony rootkit drm debacle here


Sony Music is Evil!! 1

Earlier this week it was revealed that Sony music has been installing a particularly nasty type of DRM on some of their audio cds. There is a technology called rootkits which gets into the lowest level of your computer operating system. At that level programs actually modified operating system instructions and redirect them. In this way for example if you list the files in a folder a rootkit can intercept the call and return a falsified result. By doing this files can be cloaked from view. This stuff was originally developed by hackers as a way of invading computer systems without being detected. Rootkits can be discovered with some specialized software like RootkitRevealer. A lot spyware and viruses use rootkit technology to prevent being detected and removed. A really good explanation of rootkits can be found by listening to to Episode 9 of the Security Now podcast. Security expert Steve Gibson explains rootkits in a very clear concise way. This is definitely worth a listen, as is the whole series if you use a computer with an internet connection.

Mark Russinovich is the guy who wrote RootKitRevealer and he was recently testing the latest revision on his own computer. In the process of testing, he discovered a rootkit on his computer. Of course as a security expert who knows how to protect himself, he was quite surprised at this. He wrote a very detailed description here. What he found is that a music cd he recently purchased had installed this rootkit as part of its digital restrictions management (copy protection) scheme. It now turns out that the software that Sony sureptitiously installed on his and countless other computers around the world was actually very dangerous and put a lot of people’s computers at risk. The sony drm was so poorly written that it cannot be removed without damaging the operating system. Virus and spyware writers can take advantage of this spyware to cloak their own malware now. Sony and other music companies use this drm technology allegedly to protect there music holdings from being shared on p2p networks and sold by pirates on street corners. The problem is anyone with any technical savy can get around this protection by simply disabling autorun on a windows computer to keep it from installing anything. Also copying the cd on a linux or mac computer will also bypass the drm. All the cds that have ever been issued with drm are readily available on file sharing networks.

The disgraceful part of this is that the only people who will be hurt by DRM are people who actually go out and pay money to the record companies to buy their music. So if you are foolish enough to be “honest” you will put your computer at risk of being hacked or damaged so that you have to reinstall your os and software. If you are sharing music you will be fine. Is this a good or ethical practise? Is it good to punish your honest customers while being totally ineffective at trying to protect your revenue stream? If you are going to buy a cd check the package for indications of copy protection or enhanced features. If there are any such markings put the cd down and walk away.

I don’t buy any music from labels that members of the RIAA anymore. This both because of the drm they use and the lawsuits that they have filed against, their customers. Boycott Sony Music and all members of the RIAA. Buy music from independant musicians through their websites or companies like EMusic, MagnaTune, Mp3Tunes and other music sellers that actually give a substantial amount of the money back to the musicians rather than overfed record executives like Edgar Bronfman and Howard Stringer. There are a bunch of links over on the sidebar, to new musicians I have found recently. There are also links to sites like the Association of Music Podcasters and the Podsafe Music Network. From there you can find links to lots of music podcasts where you can discover new music that is worth listening to and supporting.

BOYCOTT SONY!!!


Slashdot | Video iPod Apple’s First Bad Move?

Slashdot had a piece today pointing to a NY times article about whether the new 5th gen iPod
5G iPod may have been a mistake. The basic premise is one that many in the press have repeated in recent days that the video capability of the new ipod is in adequate. Frankly I think the whole discusion of the ipod’s video feature is pointless. Prior to this past Wednesday when he announced an ipod that could play video, when asked about it Steve Jobs always said it was a bad idea. He said that the experience of watching video on such a small screen would not be enjoyable. He was right. I also don’t think that very many people will be willing to pay $2 an episode to watch tv re-runs and music videos (actually who would want to pay any price to watch music videos?). In the first few weeks some curious people will surely buy them just to check it out. However, I think that sales will quickly wane. Watching video is a distintcly different experience from listening to audio. You actually have to WATCH the screen. When you are watching video, you generally can’t do anything else. I listen to my ipod in the car when I am commuting to work, when I am sitting at my desk writing code, walking at lunch, reading blogs, cleaning the kitchen after dinner, working in the garden, you get the picture. There have been a variety of digital video players on the market for well over a year. None of them have sold very well. The only portable device that plays video that has sold in any significant numbers is the playstation portable, and that is mainly because it is a great game machine. There have also been portable tvs around for well over a decade, none of which has been particularly succesful, certainly nothing that has done as well as the ipod.

There is also the issue of the copy protection. No big media company will allow their stuff to be sold without some stupid drm scheme. So that means that videos you buy from itunes cannot be burned to dvds (although you can back up the files to dvd for archiving, you just can’t play them on any dvd player). The only place you can watch them is on the computer or ipod. Who the hell wants to pay for video you can’t watch on your tv? This will I think be the deal breaker.

Over time there have been three commercially succesful classes of portable media devices that have sold in huge numbers. The first was the Sony walkman tape player ( and the countless clones). The second was the portable cd player. In both of these cases, the generic clones generally sold quite well because there wasn’t much to distinguish any of the players. Because of the limited capacity, the user interface was not very critical and they were all pretty much the same. The case styling varied a bit but functionally, they were indistinguishable. Then came the mp3 player. They did OK when the first Rio players came out but it wasn’t until the ipod that really high capacity players started to sell in huge numbers.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think the 5G ipod will be a failure. Not by a long shot. I think it will sell like gangbusters. It just won’t be because of video. Video is really a non-issue. Video will be one of those features like all the other “extra features” (think fm tuners, voice recording, etc) that most of the other competing players have but that hardly anyone uses. The ipod will sell for the same reason it has always sold. It is just the best digital audio player. The scroll wheel gives it the best control interface of any audio device. For high capacity players you need a interface that lets you easily scroll through long lists of audio files. The scroll wheel works because you can scroll through the list with your thumb without lifting. With the linear touch pads of devices like the creative and iriver players, you have to lift your thumb repeatedly to go through a long list. It just doesn’t work as well. The new version of the ipod has all the virtues of the previous generations (except for the faster firewire interface, now usb only) in an even thinner, better looking package. By making such a big deal about the video stuff, complainers are just whining about something that ultimately I feel will be irrelevant.


Library wants to offer books people can’t listen to 8

Do you use an Apple computer? Do you use a Linux based computer? Do you use an Ipod? Do you still use an older version of windows (pre-xp)? Do you only have a cd player? Well if you answered yes to any of these then the Ypsilanti library doesn’t seem to care about you. The Ypsilanti Public Library currently plans to offer a downloadable audio book service to there customers begining next year. Unfortunately they are getting this service from a company called netlibrary.com. All of netlibrary’s offerings are encoded with Windows media drm (their “plays for sure” tech). Unfortunately if you don’t have xp and don’t have one of the handful of digital audio players (mp3 players) that support this copy protection scheme you are SOL. You can’t listen to these books on a mac or linux machine. You can’t listen to them on an Ipod and you can’t burn them to a cd to listen to in your car. Oh sure there are ways around the protection. No one has ever come up with a copy protection scheme that actually prevents stuff from being copied. But that is a hassle. And since we are paying taxes to support the library, why should we have to deal with that? Approximately 70-80% of all the mp3 players sold to date are ipods (and they are quite inexpensive now starting at $99 for a shuffle). Itunes has about 75-80% of the legit downloadable music market. Clearly the market has spoken and largely rejected devices that use window media. And even if you have a windows media device that is more than about 8 months old or is one of the cheap ones they sell at Target, Wal-mart etc, you are also out of luck because they don’t support plays for sure either.

I would urge all Ypsilanti residents to contact Christy Havens at the library at

Christy Havens
Ypsilanti District Library
5577 Whittaker Road
Ypsilanti, Michigan 48197
734-482-4110 ext. 1375
havens@ypsilibrary.org

Voice your displeasure with this plan before it is too late.


The entertainment industry will soon disappear

And good riddance to it. The executives in the industry are obsessed with protecting their products and limiting what customers can do with it. Well once I buy something, it is mine and no one should be able to tell me what I can do with it as long as I am not putting anyone else in danger. The only reason I even vaguely support the itunes music store is because the drm that itunes puts on the songs is really just an afterthought and is easily removed. The first thing I do with songs from itunes is run jhymn and xtrip off all the protection. Most people apparently haven’t encountered drm yet, but I agree with this post from Tim Bray

There’s a lot of noise over the Open Media Commons DRM-for-the-masses announcement. Me, I thought Jonathan Schwartz’s little parable yesterday was way more interesting. What all the DRM dreamers don’t want to admit is that 95% or more of the population hasn’t yet encountered DRM, and when they do, they aren’t going to like it. They’re going to scream and scream and scream and get mad as hell and not take it any more. I’m talking about the honest people who play by the rules: they buy a house and the vendor moves out and pulls no more strings. They buy sofas and flowers and wine and paper and the store where they bought them doesn’t try to limit what you can do with them, and when the digital-media vendors try to horn in on this relationship, the response is going to be “you and whose army?” OK, if there’s ever a place where DRM is appropriate, it had better be open and non-monopolistic and all that. But the music and movie companies who are clinging to this idiotic idea that they can sell stuff to people and retain the rights to micromanage it, well they’re in for some really unpleasant surprises. People who are surprised, or think I’m a radical, should check out Cory Doctorow’s classic rant; for slightly different, but also stimulating angle, see Roger Sperberg’s The Law of Computer Entropy.

When exposure to drm becomes widespread, I think people will abandon the mainstream music and movie industry and go to more enlightened independants who don’t automatically assume everyone is a criminal, but instead treat them with some respect.


More on upcoming digital music failures

Om Malik has a good post about how most of the digital music download services are doomed to fail. I wrote about this yesterday and Om’s post just reinforces what I wrote.

Mobile music on phones via cellular companies is going to be the most overrated business move. Why? Mobile operators are not known for their ease of use, and even today (barring voice) new phones are inherently complex. Have you tried to look up calendar or contact information on a Motorola? Imagine downloading music, and listening to it on a phone.

The services that I think will suceed in the long run (besides iTunes) are the likes of emusic.com
that offer music from independant musicians (DEATH TO THE RIAA!!) completely free of any drm. The service is easy to use, relatively inexpensive, and lets users listen to the music anywhere they want thanks to the lack of drm.


Music Cell Phones will fail miserably

I have been reading lots of items in recent months about how analysts and cell phone providers are convinced that mobile phones and the providers music download services will defeat the iPod. I believe that they are all completely wrong for a number or reasons. Number one is the greed of the music industry and the cell phone companies. Right now iTunes and other music download services charge $.99 a song. I personally think that this is already to high given that the product is already crippled by DRM and lower sound quality than a physical CD (I won’t even get into the fact that most of the stuff pushed by the major labels is complete crap, that is for another time). Considering that the distribution costs are vastly smaller for downloading than phycical distribution, the labels have absolutely no justification pushing for higher prices which apparently exactly what they are pushing apple to do. The phone companies are even worse, they apparently want to charge as much as $3 a song. I don’t even get why people would pay that much for a 30 second clip to use a ringtone, who in there right mind would pay that much for songs that you have to download over the slow cellular network (probably using up your minutes at the same time).

Now, how this all affects mobile is that there will be a huge tide of MP3 players from a number of different vendors coming into the market, in the form of music-enabled phones. So what’s going to happen when you’ve got all these different phones being billed by carriers as iPod killers or replacements and people come to find out their music won’t play on them, or they can only listen to music that’s been bought from one specific store or service? They’re going to get pissed off, that’s what’s going to happen. They won’t buy music that’s tied to a specific device or has onerous limitations on what they can do with it — which will probably rule out any carrier’s download store from being a success. Regardless of how the record labels see things, people want to own their music, and owning music means being able to do with it what you like, and play it on whatever device you want. This means that vendors that focus on syncing, rather than playing along with carriers’ dowload shop dreams, will be the winners. Few operators understand this, though, and their stranglehold on the retail channel means it’s going to be hard for manufacturers to succeed.

Worse still than this is the drm restrictions that want to put on the music. The phone companies don’t want us to listen to music that we already bought, they want us to buy it all over again. Apple and Motorola have been working on a mobile version of itunes to use on moto phones for over a year. Apparently it has been ready to go for quite some time. The problem is the phone companies wont sell it. The phone has apparently been configured so that users can take music they have already bought from itunes, and load it onto their phones just like they do on an ipod. This is unacceptable to the phone companies because they only want people to buy music from them. of course they don’t want you to transfer the songs so if you lose, break or upgrade your phone, you have to start all over again. So you get to pay a lot more for a lot less functionality. Of course their are other issues like the poor battery life of a fun that is playing music, the lousy user interface, etc. Well I don’t think people are that dumb. People want there phones to be good phones, and there music players to be good music players. Most importantly they don’t want to get ripped off by their phone company.

Record and phone companies have shown no signs yet of common sense when it comes to business pratices, so I am confident that the mobile music business will be a miserable failure.