The latest episode in the war between music companies and their paying customers (the one where Sony decides it’s OK to surreptitiously take over your PC so you can’t make a copy of the music you thought you bought from them) has finally pushed me over the edge.
I’ve been a big buyer of prerecorded ‘media’ for over 35 years. I have two or three hundred vinyl LPs, several dozen 45’s, a hundred or so audio cassettes, and roughly 60 prerecorded reel-to-reel tapes. They are jammed in my closet with a couple hundred VHS tapes, 450 CDs, and 500-odd DVDs. (Mercifully, I skipped the 8-track, Betamax and laserdisc formats.)
Part of my media collection
I have to believe the record companies and movie studios would consider me a good customer. But with every day that passes it becomes more and more obvious that the greedy bastards who run these media companies prefer to treat me (and all their customers) like criminals. They continually expect us to pay more for less, and even then they are not satisfied. They want to pretend to ’sell’ us their product, but they don’t want us to actually have it. Well I’ve had enough.
From this day forward I will never spend a another dime on content that I can’t use the way I please. If I can’t copy it to my hard drive and play it using the devices I want, when and where I want, I won’t be buying it. Period.
They can all take their DRM, and their broadcast flags, and their rootkits, and their Compact Discs that aren’t really compact discs and shove them up their bottom-lines.
Additional Thoughts
Nov 11 – 8:50 AM
I’m blown away by the reactions my little tirade has produced. A raw nerve must have been hanging right out there in the open.
But there’s a few points I want to add/clarify.
- I said I was going to stop buying content that is burdened with these ridiculous and futile restrictions. I did not say I was going to start stealing that content. My point is to patronize only those companies that treat their customers with some respect.
- I forgot to mention the looming disaster of HD video on disc. Both of the competing HD disc standards will come equipped with the most monstrous, invasive, and customer-hating DRM ever devised by engineers and lawyers. If you want something to boycott, that would be it.
- Finally, a further rant. How did this shit come to be called copy protection? It is clearly intended to be copy prevention.
famous music artist ,
You’re my favorite type of artist to meet, I’m they guys who shows up at your gig, says, hey i discovered you through winmx, now sign all these album’s I bought, I had to import these from italy.
**rolls**
With the huge amount of CRAP that is released by bands who are technically proficient with their instruments, but lacking in any substance or soul, I need some way to sort the wheat from the chaffe, As Jean-Luc De meyer of Front 242 said:
“About electronic artists, there are many great projects, albums, remixes etc out there, but passed the (almost) always impressive form, the contents tend to remain shallow, too often leaving the impression that, finally, little was said, and that the originality and depth have had to be sought…elsewhere (unfortunately). This is probably due to a distortion between the technology-easy, user-friendly, offering quick results – and the time, effort and originality that are needed to develop a personality, a concept. It’s clear to me that the future of the electronic scene is largely open to artists who will be able to achieve a higher level of personal/philosophical innovation, consistency & solidity that is absolutely vital to keep this scene afloat and credible – if not expanding, which I deeply hope.â€
Rev
I listen lot of netlabel stuff. There’s huge amount of music in netlabels, they usually are packed in 192 kbt/s rate or better and they’re usually licensed under creative commons license.
http://www.phlow.de/netlabels/index.php/Main_Page
That’s a catalog of many netlabels. And really recommend to check the links in some netlabels site, I’ve found tons of other great netlabels from link lists.
But I really do agree that DRM crap is really hurting the music business and the artists. It’s not wise thing to do
And luckily there’s alternative options to get some tunes to your life 
….)
(netlabels,music podcasts,vinyls [of course you have to rip them, but it's not so hard...]
Yay! About time, a person from upper management who still has some ties with reality.
> They can all take their DRM, and their broadcast flags, and their rootkits,
> and their Compact Discs that aren’t really compact discs and shove
> them up their bottom-lines.
Cheers!!!
Tell me how piracy has been averted with DRM?
The fatal flaw of DRM is that while DRM files are distributed to millions of users, it only takes 1 user to strip or create a file without the DRM, and then it no longer exists.
The truth is that DRM hasn’t served to prevent copying. The truth is that DRM has eliminated the ubiquity of filetypes such as mp3, and created artificial proprietary boundaries. The though is that these boundaries continue brand loyalty, and that seems to happen.
Imagine for a moment that DVD’s weren’t universal. Imagine that you could only play one studio’s movies on one piece of hardware. That would be outrageous, but because it’s “teenager punk hackers” that are perpetrating (um, no — RIAA sues gramps and teens, too), it’s somehow not as important.
The post is dead-on. The music labels are trying to take your money for selling you their product, but they want to tie a string on it and yank it back after you’ve paid. It doesn’t work that way. Compact Discs are not leased; they are sold. Studios and labels can’t change the rules.
In my opinion, the RIAA probably is justified to go after people that offer files that are illegally posted. However, those people are actually committing a small crime, known or not. Buying a CD and playing it on your computer is not a crime. Installing a virus in the hope of preventing a crime is every bit as criminal.
I’ll leave you with this. If a publisher sold a book that was made of pages that would smolder and burn under intense light such as a photocopier, what would be the consequense?
I with you also on this! In fact, better yet, make you own music and distribute it to the very edge of the Oort Cloud! I’ll listen to your stuff if you listen to mine! It takes a village with music too, yo!
“I’m not about to pay one penny for lossy compression, much less a dollar.”
By definition, any recording is a lossy compression:
As a three dimensional sound space is pulled in to a microphone, detail is lost.
As multiple tracks are mixed down together, detail is lost.
As a wave form is converted to an undulating surface of cheap vinyl or 44,100 finite numeric values a second, detail is lost.
When you play it through a stereo with a limited frequency response, detail is lost.
When you play it in pretty much any room, the accoustics affect it, layering reflected sound over reflected sound and detail is lost.
Detail is lost in every single step of the process of recording a whole set of complex sounds and converting them to a format you can listen to. By definition, every format is lossy.
CDs compensate somewhat by only reducing down to roughly 1.33 Mbit/s of an inefficient storage mechanism. Their advantage is they’re big enough they can store about an hour’s worth of music in a single package. But it’s still a lossy form of storage.
With MP3s, the pressing factor is what can be downloaded at a sensible speed – and stored in a large enough quantity to make portable players attractive. 128-192kbit/s with a better format than “we’ll just convert the wave in to steps, even if it’s perfectly flat for repetitive for a while” seems to be about the sweet spot.
Is that lossy? Absolutely. But then so are your CDs. So is your vinyl. So is your stereo. And so, sadly, are your ears (though I hear v2.0 will greatly improve them).
128-192kbit/s isn’t perfect, it’s not as good as CD, but it is “good enough” for most purposes and has to balance against the other group who’d argue, “I’m not going to pay $2.50 a track to cover download costs and then tie up my DSL for twenty minutes just to get a single track that really should have been compressed before sending.”
> They can all take their DRM, and their broadcast flags,
> and their rootkits, and their Compact Discs that aren’t
> really compact discs and shove them up their bottom-
> lines.
I’m not buying a PS3 to help send a message to sony about how I feel about this DRM bs they have gotten themselves involved in. It’ll be the first console I’ve NOT purchased that Nin/S/MS/Sega distributed since the 80s. Kinda a sad thing for me, I really have for the most part enjoyed the PS/PS2. I figure my few thousand I spend during the life of a system is a drop in the bucket for Sony but if enough people feel like me, they’ll feel it.
DRM is terrible. Of course. But let’s not miss a glaring problem here. The music insdustry is a joke. For musicians to make the amount of money they make is a joke. People would still be playing music even if you didn’t make a cent off of it. I love seeing musicians whine about getting money and downloading music is keeping them from feeding their kids. Hey I got an idea…Get an education! GO TO COLLEGE! To be playing music for a living is a luxury. Sure the biggest offenders here are the slime that runs the music labels and the filth at the RIAA. Label execs are slime simply for getting rich off someone else’s talent, apart from the people that somehow brainwashed part of the American youth into believing that Ashlee Simpson and Britney Spears are CD’s you should go out and buy, their miracle workers. But the bottom line here is I’m not feeling bad for some clown that spent his life doing drugs and still in fact may do drugs. Sure you make good music, but your a complete moron. In the meantime can we really be surprised by companies doing what they do to turn a bigger profit? We’re pissing and moaning saying, “We bought this music we should be able to put it on our iPod.” Who cares! There are companies like Wal-mart that are killing people with their business practices. Really in the larger picture who gives a hoot about DRM.
I’d encourage you to use RIAA radar to avoid the “bad” albums.
http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/
Well here is the REAL kicker of the problem of a boycott of purchasing music or movies. The RIAA and/or MPAA will simply say, “Its because the pirates that our sales are down.” And you know what, there will be a bunch of Senators and Representitives that actually believe them (and or “always” believe them). The RIAA and MPAA have set themselves up as such that their business models “always work”, and that people still listen to their products even when sales are down. So what this means is that if sales are down, its not because people don’t want your product, its because they are getting it someother way, thus they are “pirating” it.
What a racket…
Let’s look at this from an ojective perspective. The debate over DRM is fundamental to how artists control the music/video they produce. This could very well apply to any circumstance where there is a dispute over an idea or concept.
1. An artist owns all rights over the control of the work.
2. A consumer buys an instance of that work in a medium [physical or digital].
3. The consumer listens/watches the work as per the right surrendered by the artist.
Going back to basics, if you want to copy an LP to mp3 and the artist objects, then you do not have that right to convert, subject to fair use exceptions, etc., because they own the RIGHTS TO THE WORK. The consumer OWNS THE INSTANCE of the work where rights were SURRENDERED for a specific purpose [to listen/watch, not copy/distribute].
So why did the issue of LP to mp3 conversions not raise it’s ugly head? Because you can’t control it effectively and it’s not a prevalent. MP3s are avilable everywhere and can be replicated a thousand times for a penny. But, hey! This cool new digital medium, where you can control the work through DRM, allows the artist to do something that they couldn’t do previously – give the instance of the work a lifespan and limit access to an individual. Cable TV’s been doing it for years, ever hear of pay-per-view?
So when the artist uses DRM, the consumers who were used to taking advantage of the lack in physical control start howling.
When you argue that the work should move with the consumer and not the media, you are assuming that you actually bought that right from the artist. Think again. You got what you paid for – the chance to listen/watch in that particular format. Media-independant rights are wholely different from those rights that have come with the purchase of a CD or cassette [and should in fact cost more since you now can do something you otherwise couldn't].
There is only four possible outcomes to this debate:
1. the price of content rises as the artist surrenders more rights to the consumer and consumers vote with their wallets
2. the access to content is further restricted as artists use DRM to lock out rights infringers
3. the concept of an artist’s rights are fundamentally altered to provide less protection for content providers
or 4. artists find a better business model than charging for access to a work, making this whole debate moot
By boycotting, you don’t effect substantial change in the log run since the majority of content consumers are willing to pay for content. Instead, we need a framework for ensuring the consumer knows just what their rights are to a particular instance of a work and facilitate the fair compenstation of the artist/label for whatever are rights surrendered.
There’s greed on both sides of the debate and we need cooler heads to prevail.
Yes. Yes! YES!
The big record companies treat us like garbage AND they serve us (mostly) garbage. I had given up on music years ago because of this, but I’ve recently discovered lots of great music (from independent artists) on PODCASTS. Podcasting is still developing, but it looks very promising. My two favorite music podcasts are The Tartanpodcast (http://www.tartanpodcast.com) and Robert Smoove Music (http://robbysmoovemusic.blogspot.com). (Full disclosure: I produce the latter.)
There is so much great music out there (that is not controlled by the big guys), and podcasting (along with other trends) is making it accessible.
RS
There will be a day of digital rights management, with no limitations. You will play your legal music and video (and holograms?) on every system that will support a worldwide protocol for managing digital rights. Maybe something will also control if you have vegetables everyday.
If we will buy something when we’ll really like it (not just because Justin Timberlake said so) maybe that will be far from now.
But remember: record companies make money with cheap music. Stupid people buy stupid music. I don’t know if we can actually make a good move. If clever people stop buying this crap, there will be a lot of idiots available to feed record companies.
That’s so sad.
I stopped buying CD’s a few years ago, and honestly never want to support the FAT CATS in the music industry. I found this aswome (and a bit older) underground scene in my city. The best part of the scene, is that all the DJ’s mixers and artists sell thier CD’s direct. Some give them away, others sell them. I’d rather support these guys because they shake my hand and thank me for buying thier CD and I thank them for giving me something good to listen to.
And for the Record: Rave – Trance – Break Beat
If you are angry about DRM, you may want to take a look at http://www.cdresale.com. Very interesting model. No DRM on their MP#s. And they are adding new music everyday.