Music industry shoots itself in foot, again

IFPI Advises Kids to Use LimeWire and Kazaa:

Together with the charity Childnet, IFPI recently launched a campaign to educate kids, teachers and parents about the dangers of filesharing. Ironically, the legal alternatives they suggest direct the kids to LimeWire, Kazaa and sites that sell hardcore adult movies.

The RIAA are worried

The RIAA are worried. Worried that someone, somewhere might still not hate them, after they’ve treated music fans and musicians alike with contempt for years. To rectify this, they’re trying to pass a law that would allow them to seize people’s houses (in the USA, at least) if they’re caught with unauthorised music:

I was just alerted that the House of Reps has passed HR 4279, with the lovely name, PRO-IP (Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008). Like the doublespeak PATRIOT Act and Peacekeeper missiles, PRO-IP puts local law enforcement in a position to demand the forfeiture in criminal proceedings of stuff used to violate copyright. Which means that instead of the RIAA simply trying to collect fines, they can also incite local authorities to collect all the computers and related gear that was used to pirate.

If this bill is passed in its present form by the Senate and signed, that means there’s no more pro forma RIAA lawsuit payoffs, because if you wind up settling with the RIAA, you could still lose all your stuff in addition to any fee you paid them.

In fact, you could lose your house even if you haven’t pirated music:

This is particularly irksome in light of the MSN Music shutdown, about which the EFF has written a strong and powerful letter. It is increasingly likely a normal person could have purchased music legally from an online site, burned it to an ordinary audio CD, and in the right set of circumstances be branded a pirate because the original “granting” authority no longer exists to prove that the consumer was a legitimate purchasers.

If this law passes, I’m sure a few well-publicised cases will turn everybody against the RIAA and their increasingly desperate tactics, not just in the USA but in other developed countries. And then the backlash will begin: politicians will find they can’t get re-elected unless they stop sucking up to the RIAA, and they’ll start enacting sensible copyright laws, ones that recognize that the Internet, with it’s ability to instantly, effortlessly copy and transmit information, isn’t going away.

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.

Norwegian state broadcaster puts show on BitTorrent

From Boing Boing:

NRK, the Norwegian state broadcaster, just made one of their most popular TV shows available for free through bittorrent. Without any DRM or restrictions. Free for the planet to watch. Because this is a completely legal download people seems to seed it happily. Making the bittorrent technology work exceptionally well, giving the audience very high download speeds. The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation will keep on with experiments like these and try to make more content available through this technology in addition to the more traditional channels of streaming, podcasts and DVD sales.

Now why can’t the BBC do that? (The short answer is: because the government won’t let them).

Swedish MPs want to legalise file sharing

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

The decline of the recording industry

The Economist has a good article up about the decline of the recording industry: The music industry from major to minor.

It won’t tell you anything you don’t already know ifyou’ve been following this sage, but it is a good summary.
(Note that I call it the “recording industry” rather than the “music industry” because there are lots of economic activities about music: for example manufacturing, distributing and selling musical instruments, teaching people to play musical instruments, playing music in front of live audiences, being a venue for the above, making and selling clothing with images of bands on it, etc. These industries are not, as far as I am aware, in decline the way the recording indsutry is. Maybe that’s because these industries are based on making something people want whereas the rcording industry is based on rent-seeking.)

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.