DRM to make a comeback?

Some people at the RIAA think music DRM will make a comeback:

You know how all the record labels have been dropping their requirements for DRM on their music, opening up more and more venues for DRM-free music? Well, according to David Hughes, head of RIAA technology, that’s just a temporary condition. From now on, we’re going to increasingly rent our music with subscription services that will use DRM to take it away from us if we stop subscribing.

Hughes believes that per-track purchases are going the way of the dodo in favor of these other models, and that’s why DRM will have a resurgence. “I think there is going to be a shift,” he said. “I think there will be a movement towards subscription services and they will eventually mean the return of DRM.”

Hughes is almost certainly wrong on this. DRM restricts customers’ freedom, and they don’t like it, which is one reason why the RIAA had to get rid of it. (The other reason is to compete with Apple iTunes, which otherwise would dominate the paid download industry, to the detriment of the RIAA).

FucksYouUpForSure

Remember a few years ago when Microsoft released a music DRM system called PlaysForSure? The idea was that a load of online music stores would sell music in this format, and lots of different MP3 players would support it, and so if a customer bought “PlaysForSure” music they could be sure it would play on their “PlaysForSure” music player.

(Of course, if you want music that really does play for sure, get it in MP3 format, since that is supported by essentially all music players and computers. PlaysForSure, because it’s a DRM system, is intrinsically about preventing stuff from working, rather than making it inter-operable. So Microsoft’s name for their system is essentially fraudulent.)

Anyway, some people fell for the Microsoft lies and bought PlaysForSure music, although the system was never a big success, and Microsoft didn’t support it for their own Zune music player.

But now, Microsoft are turning off the servers which authenticate PlaysForSure music:

Along with that, Microsoft shut down its failed online music store, and now for the kicker, it’s telling anyone who was suckered into buying that DRM’d content that it’s about to nuke the DRM approval servers that let you transfer the music to new machines. That means you need to authorize any songs you have on whatever machine you want — and that’s the only place they’ll be able to reside forever. And, of course, any upgrade to your operating system (say from XP to Vista) and you lose access to your music as well. By now, hopefully, everyone is aware of why DRM is problematic, but it’s nice of Microsoft to give one final demonstration by basically taking away more rights for the music it sold people with the promise that Microsoft would keep the music available.

The moral of this story? Never, ever buy DRM’ed media or any DRM system — the companies selling it will fuck you up the arse as soon as they think it’s in their interests to do so. Instead, get media in an uncrippled format — either buy it, or if it’s not legally available in a non-DRM format, acquire it via a P2P network such as BitTorrent.

Windows Vista copy protection cracked?

Techdirt is reporting that the copy protection on Windows Vista has been cracked:

More than a year after Windows Vista was introduced, hackers have finally developed a clean crack of Windows Vista. There have been a variety of workarounds for Vista’s copy protection before now, but this is the first time someone has figured out a way to install a cracked version that would pass all of Microsoft’s various anti-piracy checks.

Surely the really effective copy protection mechanism on Vista is that it is so crap no-one would want to copy it?

Swedish MPs want to legalise file sharing

Slashdot is reporting that 13 Swedish MPs want to legalise file sharing. Yay!

If Microsoft were honest…

If Microsoft were honest, this is what Windows Vista boxes would look like:

(via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories)

Music DRM is dead; movie DRM will die

Warner Music is to sell non-DRM’ed MP3 files:

Warner Music has announced that it will begin to sell non-DRM’ed MP3 music files on Amazon, making it the third (of four) major labels to sign up for DRM-free distribution of their music, Universal and EMI being the other two. Only Sony BMG have held out — and that’s the same label that gave us the infamous Sony Rootkit, a dangerous hacker-tool that Sony infected millions of PCs with in a failed bid to prevent copying of its music.

Sony is now the only holdout, and it’s likely they will move to non-DRM’ed music during 2008. Thus the battle over whether music will be delivered in an open format, or whether the music corporations will control us while we listen to it, is essentially over.

The moral of this story? That selling your customers deliberately substandard products and treating them like criminals is not, in general, a good business strategy.

Moving on to the motion picture industry, both it and the music industry have struggled to cope with the new world where copying information and transmitting it around the world is quick, cheap, and effortless. The music industry has felt the pressure earlier, because music has less information that movies and is thus encoded as smaller files — 4 MB for a song, 1 GB for a film are typical. But the underlying pressures are the same.

Expect movie producers to start giving up on DRM by 2010, as it becomes apparent that (1) it doesn’t prevent people making and distributing unauthorised copies, and (2) it pisses off would-be customers. Instead movies will tend to be financed by cinema audiences and merchandising, and also state funding such as with the BBC in Britain or its equivalents in other countries. Movies might get less revenue, but this won’t reduce the number made since they will be cheaper to produce due to advances in computer graphics and machinima.

UPDATE 2007-Dec-31: according to Ed Felten, earlier this year, Warner’s CEO Edgar Bronfman said that selling MP3s would be “completely without logic or merit”.

Western Digital commits commercial suicide

I’ve just made a mental note not to buy anything from hard disk manufacturers Western Digital, ever again (or at least, not for a long time). Why? Because they are selling a remote hard disk that won’t less you copy sound and video files to other computers.

According to Boing Boing:

This is the most extreme example I’ve seen yet of tech companies crippling data devices in order to please Hollywood: Western Digital is disabling sharing of any avi, divx, mp3, mpeg, and many other files on its network connected devices; due to unverifiable media license authentication’. Just wondering — who needs a 1 Terabyte network-connected hard drive that is prohibited from serving most media files? Perhaps somebody with 220 million pages of .txt files they need to share?

Wired say there they have a workaround for this. I have a better workaround: to never buy any Western Digital products ever again, and to advise all my friends to do the same.

(via Jack Schofield)

Say no to the Swiss DMCA

In October this year the Swiss government rushed through a DMCA-like law that would criminalise circumvention of DRM and filesharing. Some people don’t like this law, and fortunately in Switzerland there is a provision that if they can get a petition with 50,000 signatures on it, the law goes to a referendum:

Referendum against the Revision of the Copyright act as of 5. October 2007

A dangerous law has been passed on the 5th October by both the Parliament and the National Council almost without resistance. The revision represents massive advances for legal protection of copy protection mechanisms.

It is my conviction that such technical copy protection measures are of no merit for the consumer and will ultimately also harm the content producer. A law that puts such measures under special protection is hence just as ill advised.

The petition needs 50,000 signatures to make it possible to overturn this law. So tell all your friends about the campaign for a petition. The URL is http://no-dmca.ch/index.en.html

(via Boing Boing)

DRM is bad for you

Looks like the mainstream media are cottoning on that DRM is bad for consumers:

If you unwittingly downloaded music with inbuilt rights restrictions, you could find it stops working. That’s hardly fair, says Shane Richmond

If the manager of your local record shop arrived at your door saying that his store had gone out of business and he needed his records back, you’d think he’d gone mad. You certainly wouldn’t give him back the music.

Sadly, real world norms don’t always apply online, as customers of the Virgin Digital Music Club recently discovered. The online shop, which sold more than two million songs in two years, has announced its closure. Unfortunately, they are taking the music with them.

The Virgin store had two types of customer: those who bought and downloaded music from the site occasionally will be unaffected by the closure; however, those who joined the site as subscribers, paying monthly to effectively ‘rent’ their music, will be left with nothing. From tomorrow, the digital rights management software (DRM) built into the files, which prevents illegal copying, filesharing and piracy, will also ensure that any songs they have copied to a digital music player will stop working, because users will be unable to renew the monthly subscription license that gives them continued access to the tracks.

Becky Hogge, executive director of the Open Rights Group, which campaigns for consumer rights online, says: “If reputable brands such as Virgin can do this, then the lesson is that DRM music is not a safe purchase unless the provider allows you to rip it to a DRM-free format such as a CD. It also shows that the law is lacking and the public needs protection against this kind of abusive misuse of DRM.”

The lesson for consumers is simple: just say no to any product that contains DRM. And if there is no DRM-free authorised source for some content you want, you are better off getting an unauthorised copy from a P2P file-sharing network than buying a DRM-crippled copy that may one day disappear in a puff of smoke.

The perfect DRM system!

In their efforts to stamp out illegal copying, the movie industry has come up with the perfect DRM system: one so good that it prevents even legitimate bought copies from playing on legitimate DVD players. The films affected are the Blu-ray releases of ‘Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer’ and ‘Day After Tomorrow’. High Def Digest has the details:

Two of the most eagerly anticipated next-gen releases in recent memory have hit a series of playback snags on select Blu-ray players [...] incompatibility issues with some players have hindered playback of the discs.

The most severe problems have been reported on Samsung’s BDP-1200 and LG’s BH100, which are both said to be incapable of playing back the discs at all. Less catastophic issues (error messages and playback stutter) have been reported for Samsung’s BDP-1000. The discs appear to play back fine on all other Blu-ray players (including the PlayStation 3), although users have reported lengthy load times of up to two minutes.

It has been widely speculated that these issues stem from the use of BD+ copy protection on the two discs. We contacted Fox for comment, but so far there’s no official word from the studio.

Way to go, Movie industry! I’m sure putting onerous restrictions on legal, bought copies will foil those evil movie pirates. Meanwhile if you want to watch one of these films, both are available on The Pirate Bay, without the crippling DRM.

(via Slashdot)