DRM and the Chains of Love
p2pnet.net News View:- Promising a standing order of £5 per month to Pledgebank if others would follow suit, NTK founder and EFF activist Danny O’Brien recently appealed to Britons to, support an organisation that will campaign for digital rights in the UK.
This seems right up your alley, Julian Bond emailed from the UK.
Read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The Times Online guest contributors Opinion
The Times has a policy of only allowing web access to UK visitors so you’ll excuse me if I copy the relevant text from today’s paper here.
Chains of love
A NEIGHBOUR of mine has just split up with her long-term boyfriend, and faces a modern dilemma. She is emancipated, but her iPod is not.
Like women who never learnt to drive a generation before her, she had never learnt to manage her own digital music collection. This meant that her boyfriend had always loaded her iPod with his favourite tunes; her headphones became a kind of musical chastity belt.
What was worse is that she found out that since her iPod had initially been registered on his computer (which he took with him), it would not dock on to her new one. Apple had made her iPod faithful to the last, even when she had moved on.
Beware also a sorry tale I heard of a separating couple who were plunged into a messy custody battle for the computer. It was technically hers, but he was the one who had wasted weeks of his life laboriously loading his albums on to it.
Help was at hand for my neighbour. On the grapevine we found the services of a feminist IT expert who specialises in such cases. This is the e-mail she got in response to her first call for help: ‘Don’t worry, your iPod will soon be a free and independent young woman with a strong sense of self.’
Back in the old days of physical distribution of music, this was easy. He took all the Barry Manilow records and the battered “Never mind the boll*cks” album, she took all the Celine Dion. But in this modern world of downloadable music and DRM it’s all rather harder. It’s his computer and he does all the downloading, ripping and sorting but it’s her iPod and she chose and listens to the music. So who owns it? But much more importantly, who gets to keep it?
Again, back in the old days, when a parent died and left you all their Opera you could just box it up and put it in the attic until you were old enough to appreciate it. But now and in the future, you’ll have a hard time listening to it. So can you leave your 60Gb of music to your heirs?
Unless we turn round and say NO loudly, this is only going to get worse. It’s now becoming apparent that Apple and Intel in future versions of the Mac are going to embed “Trusted Computing” in the processor and deep in the operating system. You can bet that this will be used to control access and use of the DVD drive, iTunes and probably the screen.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is working on PVP-OPM (Protected Video Path Output Protection Management) and again with Intel’s help trying to lock down the general purpose PC so that only approved content can be shown on approved hardware all the way out to the screen.
So what we have here is one cartel (Intel-Microsoft-Apple) aiding and abetting another cartel (The Media-Entertainment industries) to build systems and lobby for laws originating in the USA, but spreading thoughout the western world via secretive organisations like WIPO, to reduce your customer rights, to produce hobbled systems and all to prop up existing business models that no longer make sense.
This is a monopolistic, mercantilist, plutocrat political system at it’s most abhorrent, protecting itself by whatever means necessary and even going so far as to demanding money with menaces by suing it’s own customers.
Apart from “Just Say No To DRM” and trying to influence the market by refusing to buy their products, what can you do? Well the EFF tries to track and limit the damage in the USA, but there’s precious little in Europe. So perhaps you’d like to sign this pledge. “I will create a standing order of 5 pounds per month to support an organisation that will campaign for digital rights in the UK but only if 1000 other people will too.” We desperately need some counter balance to the current protectionist system. [from: JB Ecademy]
[Bond is cto of the ecademy business exchange. And you'll find his VoidStar blog here.]
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See:-
£5 per month – UK digital rights lobby group, p2pnet, July 26, 2005
August 2nd, 2005 at 2:52 pm
stupid people buy ipods and buy into the DRM and bluetooth scams.
they deserve what they get – or rather, what they don’t get.
August 2nd, 2005 at 2:58 pm
” We are many, many, many……………………”
…idiots? yes, i think that’s the word you’re searching for.
stupid people buy ipods and buy into the DRM scams.
they deserve what they get – or rather, what they don’t get.
August 2nd, 2005 at 3:54 pm
Don’t get me wrong. The Apple iPod is really quite a nice device. it’s just really irritating that Apple make it awkward to copy plain old MP3s on and off and damn difficult to copy iTunes bought songs from one machine to another.
But it’s the future that’s the real problem. The DRM we see today is puny compared with what Intel, Microsoft and Apple have in store for us. It can always be broken, but at what cost?
Time for a RIKO action I think. What really depresses me is the technology sector buying in to the same limited business model as the old media industries. Make no mistake, Microsoft and Apple are part of the content distribution market now. And so part of the problem.
August 2nd, 2005 at 10:54 pm
The content cartels are after two things. To do that they must control your computer. The first thing they are after is pay to play. Thats right if you play it they want paid, not just once but each and every time. The second thing they are after is an artifical setup that requires you to repurchase your favorites over and over. You know, the repeat buy.
There was at one time a steady flow of money through the repeat buy. A new format came out and you would run out and buy that new product so that you could take it with you. The containers that delievered the music were very durable so that ensured the repeat buy. Cds changed that. If you take care of them, they last a very long time. No repeat buy necessary. You could also change the container to whatever you wished without the help (and expense) of the cartel.
Repeat buys have dried up. After you own the original, why buy the Greatest Hits unless you don’t have all the albums. If you feel that there were too many fillers on the originals you could always burn your own Greatest Hits from the discography.
DRM ensures that you will buy again, again, and yet again as long as you remain faithful to the ever favorite choices you like. To position themselves into this place they have had to ensure that digital containers were treated differently than analogue. You will notice that you have no “first sale” with digital. You will notice that the usefulness of digital terminates far earlier than it should and does so by direct intervention to prevent you from enjoying the true life of the container. I won’t buy items with this sort of scam, nor will I downloan items that require reconnection to verify. Neither of these are owning an item, which is why you spend the money in the first place. Since the terms of owning are being changed by the content cartels, my spending habits have also changed. I don’t buy anymore.
August 3rd, 2005 at 2:43 am
I’m just waiting for the inevitable “Divorced person loads file sharing program on ex’s pc and then dobs them in to the authorities” stories to emerge.
Ooops. Did i just give a whole lot of angry ppl a very mean and nasty idea?
;o)
August 3rd, 2005 at 7:48 am
Hence the last para of the article:-
Help was at hand for my neighbour. On the grapevine we found the services of a feminist IT expert who specialises in such cases.
Presumably by breaking the Apple DRM and hence the law?