Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others - Pogue's Posts Blog - NYTimes.com

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others

Decreases my already low level of desire to get a Kindle. Stick around for the punchline at the end.

Daring Fireball Linked List: September 2007

Daring Fireball Linked List: September 2007

A Variation on the DVR, Without Ad Skipping - New York Times

A Variation on the DVR, Without Ad Skipping - New York Times

Funny how they're trying to turn in the ability to fast forward, present in every VCR since the 70s, as a feature that you might want to pay for. This is typical of the big media approach to DRM, conflating it with actual features.

Dinosaurs with Jetpacks. at Shots Ring Out (on Universal and DRM music)

Dinosaurs with Jetpacks. at Shots Ring Out (on Universal and DRM music)

"By refusing to sell DRM free on iTunes Universal allows[them] to ensure that DRM-free tracks sell horribly."

Boing Boing: Google Video robs customers of the videos they "own"

Boing Boing: Google Video robs customers of the videos they “own”

A case in which the doomsaying about DRM was totally right.

iTunes Plus and EMI's DRM-Free Music Hands-On

iTunes Plus and EMI’s DRM-free music hands-on - Engadget

Worked as advertised for Engadget, though I haven’t tried it myself. You can click a button to upgrade (for a fee) your entire library to higher quality, copy-protection-free versions.

EMI to Offer Songs on iTunes without Copy Protection

EMI to offer songs on iTunes without copy protection

But no Beatles. Interestingly, singles at a higher quality will cost $0.30 more, but albums will be the higher quality for the same price.

Steve Jobs v. Underwear Gnomes

Steve Jobs v. Underwear Gnomes

“Look, the computer industry is not holding out on you […] We’ve been fighting piracy of our wares for thirty-five years, now, and we’ve lost every round. […] Why do you think we can do better for the recording industry?”

Daring Fireball: Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso's Response to Steve Jobs's 'Thoughts on Music'

Daring Fireball: Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso’s Response to Steve Jobs’s ‘Thoughts on Music’

Reading Between the Lines of Steve Jobs's ‘Thoughts on Music'

Reading Between the Lines of Steve Jobs’s ‘Thoughts on Music’

“The music industry wants a magical DRM format that gives them—not Apple, not Microsoft—complete control over all digital music. And a unicorn and a rainbow.”

Who Killed TiVoToGo?

Who Killed TiVoToGo?

EFF piece on why you can’t move shows from your TiVo to your computer on the new HD units.

The Pig and the Box

The Pig and the Box

Peculiar little parable about copy protection.

WSJ.com - Free, Legal and Ignored

WSJ.com - Free, Legal and Ignored

A few colleges have tried giving students free access to music, but they use services like Napster whose downloads don’t work on iPods and can’t be played once they graduate. Whatever happened to plain old mp3s?

Everyone's Dumping UMD Movies - Kotaku

Everyone’s Dumping UMD Movies - Kotaku

Oh joy. I’m so glad this is a failure. Seriously, we need standard software to copy DVDs to iPods, PSPs, etc. easily. To hell with Hollywood’s “piracy” concerns.

Velvet Squibs

An article today on C|Net called iPod undermines Microsoft on copy-locked CDs says that SunnComm has gotten a flood of complaints about Contraband, the new Velvet Revolver album, because it won’t play on iPods due to idiotic copy protection software. According to their representative, 80% of the comments they’ve gotten are compatibility complaints because the CD comes in the WMA format which won’t play on iPods¹.

According to the article, the only reason that the entire music industry doesn’t support only Microsoft’s WMA is because iPods won’t play it. While I still maintain that a war over file formats is a stupid war, it’s interesting that by refusing to support WMA Apple has in a way defended we consumers from a copy-protected monopoly, even if only by forcing us to use one system over another.

But the lesson that record labels need to learn isn’t about which crippled file format to use, it’s that consumers don’t care about file formats. People want to buy their music and play their music. They want to be able to make copies of their music. Copy protection only stops legimitate consumers from being able to do things they should be allowed to do, like listen to music they paid for on mp3 players they paid for. Someone who doesn’t know how to get around copy protection² isn’t the one who’s going to be burning 10,000 copies of an album and selling it on street. It’s the annoyed customer who just bought an album they can’t listen to who gets stopped by this technology.

According to C|Net:

[…] labels see the success of BMG Music’s Velvet Revolver disc, as well as a handful of other recent releases, as a good sign and say they’re now likely to go ahead with more experiments.

I’d hazard to guess that exactly zero people who bought the CD said, hey, have you heard about this new copy protection? I better get this CD and try it out. The success of Contraband wasn’t the DRM, it was the music.

If I go to the store and pick up a physical copy of Contraband, I buy a disc that I can’t make a copy of and can’t listen to on my iPod. It I go to the iTunes Music Store, I can buy a version that lets me do the latter but only lets me do the former seven times due to iTunes’s FairPlay DRM. That iTunes’ user rights are less restrictive than others doesn’t make it a good choice, just a slightly less crappy one.

Are these my only options: Buy the CD that BMG won’t let me use like I want to, or buy the iTunes track that lets me do it but restricts me (and is a lower quality file). Suppose that I were able to get enough people worked up over copy-protected CDs that I organized a sizable boycott. Would I be sending the right message to the record label? Wouldn’t I be hurting the artist in doing so? Sorry musician, I know you worked really hard on these songs, but because your record label decided to install some software no one’s going to hear to them.

Consumers don’t care about file formats. We don’t want copy protection. Stop trying to sell it to us.

Further reading: Cory Doctorow gave an excellent speech to Microsoft on this issue. Read it or listen to it.

1. Actually, the iPod can play WMA-formatted songs, but that feature is disabled. ↩
2. Most DRM software can be deactivated by holding SHIFT while inserting the disc. In fact, holding SHIFT should, sadly, be standard practice when insterting any CD into a Windows environment left Spyware destroy us all. ↩