I'll never understand why people think DRM can ever work. It's really very, very simple. It should not be easier for me to pirate something than it is to get it legitimately. If it is, the people distributing it legitimately have failed. Try something else. Also, it doesn't, and has no hope of ever working.
This is terrible.
A single mother who took a stand against America’s biggest record companies over music piracy was fined $220,000 (£108,000) yesterday.
Jammie Thomas, a Native American from Minnesota, is one of 26,000 people whom the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sued over the past four years for alleged use of music “file-sharing” software.
The 30-year-old made legal history after refusing to pay an out-of-court settlement, as all others challenged over their behaviour before her had done, but her failure to carry the case is likely further to embolden the music industry in its attempts to protect copyright.
A federal jury sitting in Duluth, Minnesota, ordered Ms Thomas, who has two children aged 11 and 13, to pay the six record companies that sued her $9,250 for each of 24 songs they focused on in the case.
The sum is equivalent to about five times her annual salary.
Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, which co-ordinates the lawsuits, said after the verdict: “We think we’re in for a long haul in terms of establishing that music has value, that music is property, and that property has to be respected.Nobody doubts that music has value, but these lawsuits, coupled with ridiculous ineffective DRM, only alienate customers and make more people want to stick it to the man. Ruining a woman's life for sharing a few songs just proves that the people running the RIAA are heartless, greedy, evil bastards.
As some of you know, I got a Zune for Christmas. In short, the software blows, the very high potential of this device is unrealized by baffling decisions by Microsoft, but it's a very good music and video player nonetheless. So I've been watching a lot of tv shows on it at the gym, and I have my whole music library on it, with much room to spare.
I've been thinking for a while that I really want to try to find new music, but I don't have lots of time and money to invest. So I checked out the Zune Marketplace. Their music catalog seems to be pretty thorough, not quite up to iTunes level, but not too far off. I decided to try their $14.99 monthly all-you-can-eat plan, figuring that would be a good way to try stuff without paying a bunch of money. I'm not into subscription plans as a final solution. I want to have full control over my music, and I don't want to worry that I can't listen anymore if I don't pay an ongoing fee. But as a means to try new stuff, it seems ideal.
First up, I decide to try Kid Rock's Devil Without a Cause, based on Toast's opinion of it as the second best album ever. I locate it and open it up and there are a total of two songs available for download. WTF? What do these record company dumbasses think - that because I can't listen to them and see if I like them that I'm going to buy them outright? Fuck that, faced with the fact that they've blocked them from my subscription, I'll probably either a)never hear them at all b)listen to a friend's copy, and probably just copy theirs, or c)download it from Sharezaa just to stick it to the greedy bastards. In no case will they get money from me now. However, if I had listened to the album and decided I liked it, it's highly likely I would have ordered the CD off Amazon (DRM free, of course).
Second, I look to see what Beastie Boys they have, because I lost my copy of Licensed to Ill. I find it and now look, not only can't I download anything from the album, I can't even buy the crippled DRM versions they sell through the marketplace. Now, I already know I like this album, but treating me like this does not make me want to buy the album (again). I was able to download Solid Gold Hits but not the more comprehensive The Sounds of Silence.
Finally, I decide to see what they've got for Sarah Brightman. I already own all her albums but I was interested in seeing what they had. I noticed they had a CD single with a new song released this month. Of course, it's the only one of all her songs that's not available for download. So now, I can't see if I like it, which means I'll never spring for the single. I may get it someday if it's on a future album.
The marketplace does have a pretty good catalog, and there are a lot of songs you can access through their subscription service, but there's enough shit like the examples above to make it more annoying than satisfying. Who are these morons running the record companies? Between their unfathomable support of a technology that doesn't work and actually alienates their own consumers and their reactionary stance on the availability of digital music, it's amazing that these guys are still in business. Hopefully, the recent softening of EMI toward DRM will become a trend. I think there are a lot of people like me out here, who are willing and able to pay for our music, but on our own terms.
I haven't talked much here about DRM, since it really seems pretty simple to me (i.e. it doesn't work and never will), and would ulimately just turn into a rant. But with someone like Steve Jobs weighing in, I thought I should mention it. It's good that someone who may actually have some influence seems to recognize that it doesn't work.
In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.emphaiss mine
So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.
Some have argued that once a consumer purchases a body of music from one of the proprietary music stores, they are forever locked into only using music players from that one company.
[snip]
Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.
Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.
