Swedish MPs want to legalise file sharing

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

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”.

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)

MPAA says democracy is illegitimate

Dean Garfield, executive vice president and chief strategy officer for the MPAA, was recently interviewed in ZDNet, where he was asked about the Pirate Party. Here’s the question and his answer:

Do you think that the Pirate Party’s attempts to battle you guys at the ballot box is a legitimate way to work out these issues?
Garfield: There’s nothing about what the Pirate Bay does or what the Pirate Party does that is legitimate. There’s nothing philosophically principled about it. They steal copyright content and accept advertising dollars based on taking other people’s work. There’s nothing noble about it.

Let’s be clear about this. Garfield is specifically saying that it is illegitimate to use democratic elections to elect politicians that won’t do what the MPAA wants. Well at least we can commend him for his clarity and honesty on this issue. No doubt the MPAA prefers politicians who can be bribed to do its bidding.

Swedish Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge responded by saying:

“This can only be seen as MPAA calling democracy illegitimate. We are a registered political party finishing in the top ten in a parliamentary democracy. That these people claim it would somehow be illegitimate to change laws through a parliamentary process shows just how corrupt to the core they are. On the other hand, I think the statement may be partly out of fear. There’s one thing that beats all their lawyers, war chests and monopolies. Just one. That one thing is votes in a democratic election, and that’s what we have and they don’t.”

The MPAA are showing their true face here. Yet another reason why everyone should boycott them. Don’t go to the cinema or buy a DVD unless you’ve checked beforehand that no MPAA-affiliated company will be getting a penny of your money. If in doubt, either don’t watch the film, or download it using BitTorrent. Don’t help these scumbags to harm you.

(Link from TorrentFreak)