What the hell was the point of having DRM if you can remove it by burning audio cd’s and making MP3′s from that. So what it the audio quality suffers. Most people can’t tell the difference, don’t care, and don’t have an audio system that could sound better with better quality audio source.

Antinous @47, if it were all just marketing, none of these problems would exist. We’d buy what the music companies told us to buy, and that would be that.

WeightedCompanionCube @62, there were so many good and sufficient reasons that Commodore failed that it seems unfair to single out one of them.

I think besides DRM, the download plans should be making money for artists not just labels and vendors to truly be considered a good karma move.

The video game industry is also busy sabotaging itself with DRM. SecuROM causes so many problems that it qualifies as malware, and EA has now started using activation schemes in their games.

Spore’s DRM proved to be so aggravating that people have been pirating it in record numbers: it’s still in the top 20 on Pirate Bay, and it has reportedly been downloaded over 500,000 times across different sites (supposedly it might become the most pirated game in history). It also has a score of 1.5/5.0 on Amazon just because of the DRM.

I’m scratching my head trying to figure out what EA thinks they’re gaining from doing this. Their DRM is actually increasing piracy.

One user has actually initiated a class action lawsuit against EA for the DRM in spore. I submitted the story to BoingBoing actually, but I suppose it didn’t pique the editors’ interest.

http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/5136.page

There’s a forum post about it on the official forum. However, be aware that the summary on the courthousenews website is inaccurate, you have to look at the actual grievances on the court papers to know what the case they’re making is.

Basically the beef is that a- nobody tells you on the box or in EA’s marketing or FAQs that secuROM is installed separately and cannot be removed b- they claim that it installs partially to Ring 0 and c- that it is capable of monitoring and acting upon the user’s computer without their consent, illegally so.

Sadly they are not held to scrutiny for first sale violations and false advertising (the status of the game as a limited-lifetime license violates the implied functionality warranty of the product as you see it when purchasing)

drm is a waste of time and money. period.

funny that wal-mart recommends we break the law to keep access to our music. not that i’ve ever bought any from them.

First of all, as for EA, they’ve already stated that if they ever stop supporting DRM or shutdown the DRM servers that they’ll release a patch to remove it.

Oh, sure they’ve said it. But ask them for it in writing and see how cooperative they are.

Oh hey, here’s a promise for you: if I ever accidentally bump into you, I’ll give you $50.

Do you think I’m going to comply with that if the conditional situation ever arises? Do I have to? Would you be able to make me do it in court?

Promises made by companies, promises which would cost them labor and money to fulfill, are absolutely baseless without a contractual obligation. Don’t be foolish enough to assume they are not lying to you, because they are unless they are forced to make good on the promise.

If they’re serious about that promise, they would be willing to agree to it in writing. They most certainly aren’t, and they have even inserted language into their EULA which specifically gives them the privilege of not having to do exactly that.

Neither. I ripped them from CD, or downloaded them from legal sites that pay the rights holder. Yes, DRM is lame, but so is not paying for those files.

I first learned to shoplift at MallWart…*after* they installed cameras. The I took my skill to Barnes and Noble. (sighs)

Let X=”people who pay for music”, Y=”people who risk losing their music to DRM shenanigans”.

Cory’s point is that Y is a subset of X, but you’ve interpreted it as X is a subset of Y (or perhaps X=Y).

And as for those commenting about the lossiness of transcoding: you’re right that transcoding from one lossy encoding to a different one introduces artifacts, but these almost surely* do not arise from the uncompressed, lossless WAV format on the intermediate audio CD. The issue of lossy transcoding is orthogonal to DRM: you could, in theory**, recompress the CD audio using the same codec and recover the original (unencrypted) stream. Similarly, the original codec could have been MP3, enabling the same process. Heck, you could even have lossless DRM’ed media.

*Caveat: this assumes that the DRM’ed streams were compressed from CD audio: 16 bit, 44.1KHz.

**Not only is the same program operating with the same input parameters required, but I suspect that most encoders are not idempotent, since they’re often finding only an approximate solution. So in practice, this probably wouldn’t work.

they’re basically telling you how to break DRM, which i find amusing.

You still didn’t answer the question. If you deauthenticate all and this doesn’t phone home, how do those others stop working? Why do the songs stop playing if you haven’t been online in 30 days if they don’t phone home?

MLB story on BoingBoing here

Fascinating that on a site with such opposition to mass-market products there’d be such attachment to mass-market music.
If you want music, listen to local musicians. Sing. Play an instrument. Download only DRM-free music if you must.
Really, what are you losing if you just don’t listen to anything that comes with DRM?

This makes no sense. People listen to Artist X specifically because they like it, so they can’t just go and replace it with Indie Artist Y. What if you told someone who likes, say, trance music, that there’s no reason to listen to it and that they should listen to free death metal on MySpace or just sing in the shower? They’d laugh themselves to death or call the men in white coats to take you away.

If I remember correctly, it is a DCMA violation (federal offense) to give someone details on how to circumvent DRM copy protection. This is exactly what Walmart has done in telling their customer’s to burn their DRM’d music to CDR.

If the activation servers for Spore are ever taken down, the content-hosting servers most certainly will be too. The backend of the actual game experience happens to be server-based, too… so one could just as easily argue against proprietary net-based backends in that specific example.

Regardless though, yes online activation schemes are really, really squicky. You know you’ll be screwed eventually. You’re just gambling on the hopes that they will last a long enough time to give you your money’s worth, which is an entirely subjective measurement.

Just to really screw with the new corporate thinking on what you buy when you buy an album, I might even buy the CD used, copyright rebel that I am! Sigh.

That’s irony, right? Or were you really brainwashed by the RIAA into believing that buying used CDs isn’t a perfectly legal and logical way of purchasing music?

And to all those posters claiming how easy it is to transcode to mp3 (all of which neglecting to mention the inevitable loss in quality, go figure): why should I bother? Because the corporations are too stupid to sell what I want to buy?

There’ll always be workarounds (just like with my darn Sony car radio) but why would want to be in a position of having to use them in the first place. What about convenience?

But I can’t.

I don’t want indie music, I want to be able to buy a song that I heard on the radio and liked. But I don’t want DRMed music, and being in a country that isn’t the USA (gasp! the horror!) I can’t buy any non-DRM music.

So what are my options? Download illegally, rip from youtube, or wait until eventually the CD comes out, and then pay a fortune for 8 or 9 tracks when I really only wanted the one.

Not quite. A better analogy is that the grocery writes down your address when you buy your apples, and at any time they can break into your home and repossess your produce. If you’ve planted the seeds or mulched the cores, they’ll be digging them up and taking them too.

There are safer ways to purchase music than from Wal-Mart, yes. When consumers get screwed, though, they’re going to generalize the experience. This hurts purchased music as a whole.

Provide a server at the DRM server address, that, when asked to verify DRM for a song bought from Wal-Mart, instead provides the replacement for that song in non-DRM format.

If they won’t do that, then they should be prosecuted for grand theft since they effectively stole property that you bought from them. How is that different from the used car dealer stealing back your 87 Yugo (bought in Verplank, NY) after you’ve paid it off?

For a company with as many IT resources as WalMart has, it shouldn’t be a problem to provide the server. They just need some (legal) motivation.

“i’ve only invested in 2 or 3 itunes albums.”

That’s a peculiar use of the verb “invest”.

Do you work in sales or something?