'Bruce Schneier, a famous cryptologist — or at least as famous a cryptologist as cryptologists are likely to get in this century — once described attempts to make digital bits uncopyable as “trying to make water not wet.”'
and
'Tom Lehrer’s description of folk singers as “the people who get up on stage and come out in favor of all the things that everyone else in the audience is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on”'.
> 'Tom Lehrer’s description of folk singers as “the people who get up on stage and come out in favor of all the things that everyone else in the audience is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on”'.
I love this quote from the story. "Apple calls these songs “iTunes Plus”, because it sounds so much better than calling everything else “iTunes Minus.”"
I really think that Microsoft customers must have some kind of Stockholm-syndrome thing going on in their brains. This is not the first time Microsoft has screwed its customers, and it won't be the last. And yet, for reasons passing my understanding, people keep coming back for more.
One is, don't buy drm'd music (and movies!) - we all knew that.
The other is, immediately play the music, send it with audio out to your stereo and through audio in back to the computer and record it. This limits the fun and is boring work, but then the music will be 100% drm free.
As for europe, this is even legal, because you don't break drm and recording comes with a quality loss (depending on your stereo and soundcard) - means, its not a copy.
The license on playsforsure lets you just burn the music to CD for playing in your normal CD player. Then you could re-rip it in FLAC or something lossless. I think that re-ripping back to a lossy format ends up being double bad when you burn from a compressed file to start with. Alternatively, you can just remove the DRM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_DRM#Removal
It can happen to iTunes customers. The difference is Apple is continuing to support the songs they sold whereas Microsoft is backing out of its former promise to let consumers play the songs for as long as they own the devices.
But Apple is continuing to support their songs because the iTunes store is profitable at the moment. What happens if all the labels decide to pull their content and offer their own service? Suddenly Apple might not be so willing.
Does iTunes do the same dial home approach? If not, the point may be moot.
it does when you authorize a new computer. But apple makes it incredibly east to migrate your data either from old computer to new or from time machine backup. And I wouldn't be surprised if it synced iTunes authorization keys to .mac
Even if Apple shuts down the iTunes store I expect them to keep up the authorization server as long as possible.
Good post, and great writing. I owned a few Plays For Sure players (great ones too, actually) but never bought any DRMed tracks. I did use the time-based DRM (Rhapsody To Go), with which at least it was understood from the get go that you were renting the music.
Unfortunately even that didn't work very well, so I gave up on it rapidly. At least in my experience most of the other people who had those players didn't bother purchasing DRMed tracks.
I wonder why MSFT doesn't just give customers the same track for free with no DRM. It wouldn't be that expensive for them, and would foster some serious good will, whereas their current position will do the opposite.
'Bruce Schneier, a famous cryptologist — or at least as famous a cryptologist as cryptologists are likely to get in this century — once described attempts to make digital bits uncopyable as “trying to make water not wet.”'
and
'Tom Lehrer’s description of folk singers as “the people who get up on stage and come out in favor of all the things that everyone else in the audience is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on”'.