Comments on: Spine of broadband adoption

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 01:58:46 +0000

“Even Apple, the most successful of the music services, makes no money off of music. Steve Jobs once hinted that almost ninety-nine cents of every dollar goes directly back to the music industry. iTunes is essentially a massive iPod ad campaign.”

You sure? I heard they keep about 35% of each sale.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 12:59:46 +0000

One value that a service like Yahoo’s would provide to a consumer/downloader would be that subscribing to such a service creates a defensable legal arguement that the payment for your subscription grants you rights to the music that the RIAA might then sue you for downloading somewhere else. Certainly this would not work with un-released works that get ‘pre-released’ in a Torrent.

Perhaps the most important aspect is that it puts an actual market value on the copyright holder’s alleged ‘loss’ because you downloaded the work from a source from which royalties to the copyright holder were not forthcoming.

If you ripped it from an internet radio station covered by the ’small webcaster’ royalty agreement, the webcaster has already paid royalties for you to listen/rip as the royalty unit of measure is “cents per listener-hour”. (1 person listening for 1 hour or 5 people listening for 12 minutes each = 2 streamrippers running for 30 minutes = 1 ‘listener-hour’) I think the current rate is $.007 per listener-hour. That’s “seven tenths of one cent”. Makes the ’statutory’ damages seem “unreasonable and disproportionate” to any infraction committed.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 05:51:19 +0000

This guy still takes the stance that drm just needs to “mature” in order to work.

I call bs. the arms race between crackers and DRM is not “new” nor is it just going to “go away” because a so called “mature” DRM system has come out.

Contrary to popular belief of entertainment sicophants, hardware secured DRM systems won’t solve the hacking problem.

New Flash: It’s already been tried. They have hardware based DRM in dvd drives to enforce region codes. the majority of users don’t even notice it because a vast majority of open source players already circumvent it. It’s also in xbox. How do you get by it? simple: go to http://www.divineo.com and order your own completely solder free and hassle free modchip for $40-$70 depending on the features you want, get your bios and new xbox os for free, the end.

So much for the amazing glory of hardware based DRM.