An anonymous reader writes "'The initial results of DRM-free music are good' says Lauren Berkowitz, a senior vice president of EMI, at a music industry conference in New York. Berkowitz went on to say that the early results from iTunes indicate that DRM-free offerings may boost revenue from digital albums as well as individual songs."
How is watermarking the files DRM? It doesn't prevent you from doing anything you want to with the file. Now, if you do something illegal with the file, like distribute it on a P2P network, then this could help them track you down. Unless you are saying the only reason you are against DRM is it prevents you from breaking the law.
Oh geeze, please stop spreading FUD about having the e-mail address in the song. It's a fricken *TAG*. It'd be like if they sold MP3s and put "Purchased on iTunes by yourname@domain.com" in the ID3 tag. Stop whining already!
Let's not forget, they still encode e-mail addresses and names in these 'DRM free' tracks. I still consider that DRM.
You may not like it, but please don't confuse the issue by calling it DRM. It's metadata, even potentially useful metadata, that discourages copyright infringement while not in any way restricting fair use. You can copy those files to any device, or even transcode them into any other format, easily stripping all metadata in the process. Totally different than DRM, where you have to actually break encryption or suffer quality loss in order to do that.
If we're gonna love someone for providing DRM free tracks, remember Amazon is providing actual unencoded MP3s.
Except that they haven't opened their store yet. So don't go lauding them when you don't even know that they're not going to include the user id of the person who downloaded the song in the metadata.
Watermarking is not DRM. It's watermarking. DRM controls when and how you are allowed to use the content, and watermarking does not. It only provides a [potential] trail of culpability. If you are modded down, it will be at least half because you are simply wrong - although I have been hit hard by fanboys as well, Apple and otherwise. Right now it's the OSI fanboys modding me down for pointing out that Perens' claim to invent the idea of "open" source is false and that "open" meant something before he opened his mouth on the subject. I suspect you suffer for the same reason I do; some people mod me down any chance they get to make a plausible-looking negative moderation, simply because they recognize me and disapprove of that for which I stand.
Er, anyway, back on topic: Watermarking is, by definition, not DRM.
> Er, anyway, back on topic: Watermarking is, by definition, not DRM.
And this isn't watermarking. Digital watermarking changes content to encode some kind of message. When you buy DRM-free tunes from iTunes, the actual content, the AAC stream, contains no watermark. If you buy the same DRM-free song from five different accounts, all the AAC streams will be bit-for-bit identical. All that's included is a tag, in plaintext, which contains your info. You can read it, you can edit it, you can remove it. Not DRM, not a watermark.
> For example, you can mark a gif file by inserting information in unused portions of the color table and leaving the image data
> completely untouched. Is this a watermark by pour definition? Or is it one only if used color entries or pixel entries are altered?
> Or is it a watermark of the container, but not the data (even though it is potential data...)?
The defining feature of a digital watermark is that it cannot be removed given only the watermarked data. That is its point. A digital photograph emblazoned with a watermark cannot readily be transformed into the original. A digital video file with an invisible-to-the-human-eye-digiatl-watermark inserted to allow the owners of the video's copyright to see who has leaked a copy if it to p2p is useful only because the altered bits cannot be reset to their original state.
So you see, the idea of calling this a watermark isn't just fudging the concept slightly. It's nonsense. It is completely trivial to remove the identifying information, so it is innapropriate to call it a watermark because it neither performs the function nor attempts to perform the function of a watermark.
And obfuscating it further will help what exactly? I agree with the grandparent that tag info is/not/ a watermark. If it is, is including your email in the filename a watermark too? Is placing a (separate) file with your email on a CD with aac files a watermark? Is just printing your name on the CD? Is printing it on a jewel case? All we're doing is playing around (deliberately to the absurd in my example) with what we consider the black box we wish to consider "the content in question". Is it the jewelcase
That does not imply a unique value per file the way the term "Watermarking" does automatically.
Watermarking means no such thing.
Watermarks were used in drafts, demos, and other such things, partly to identify them as such and partly to prevent someone from stealing it. e.g. if you hired a design firm to create a poster for you they might send you a watermarked draft so that you could see the finished result, but if you decided not to pay for it, the poster was still useless because it had a giant watermark through the middle that said 'draft copy - property of design company'. Once you'd approved and paid, they'd send you an un-watermarked version for you to reproduce.
Watermwarks were also used in coporate letterhead, cheques, and other docuements to help prevent forgery and authenticate that they were genuine. For the most part this was just used to help foil attacks. The same way most banks.
Never to uniquely identify individual documents.
but I would still argue in the shift to the digital domain the meaning is more of uniqueness than ability to remove
Again not true. With the digital transition, the primary motivation for watermarks was, as before, to 'damage' files so that people could see images but not steal them due to the watermark. (or more precisely, they could steal the watermarked image, but because the mark was hard to remove it wasn't worth it, and you couldn't leave the mark on for obvious reasons.)
Watermarks have been used for a long time on sites hosting high res photos or other digital art to prevent people from just downloading the image and using it. In order to get an image with the WATERMARK removed, you had to pay for the picture. Because the watermarks were translucent and applied over of the picture they are relatively difficult to simply remove.
Only very recently has watermarking technology been applied like a serial number, to uniquely identifying documents or files.
** Quite Simply there is no 'automatic' association with unique identifiers and watermarks. **
Aha, but that is external to the device, visible and alterable (potentially) by the user. The iTunes mark is not.
The itunes meta tag is not part of the song data, although it is in the same file.
It is visible in the sense that *any* program that can view the meta tags can see it -- and iTunes software itself will show you this information if you tell it to show info about the song. And the itunes tag is EASILY removed and or altered which is the antithesis of a watermark.
The iTunes tag is as much a 'watermark', as putting your email address in the filename.
And a watermark is just as identifiable if a record of which marks were sent to who is kept.
This whole 'invisible digital watermark serial number thats hard to remove' thing is pretty new, and really isn't entirely in keeping with the historical meaning or use of watermarks. Moreover, the apple meta tag is really none of those things. Its not invisible, not hard to remove.
If you didn't like the analagy of the laptop serial number because it was visible and alterable. Consider that at least half a dozen parts inside the laptop are also serialized. And that even if you scratch off the laptop serial number, if someone found the laptop they could not only infer what that number was, but potentially also who bought it.
Point is: laptops aren't 'watermarked' despite having serial numbers. And neither are iTunes files.
And it's a good thing we don't come to you to give the final say on such matters. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Your rights are not being managed--at all. You can do what you wish with the file. Another point: technically, when you strip DRM from normal iTunes songs, because it relies on an encryption mechanism, you're in theory, violating the DMCA. There's no encryption with the files being tagged as they are in the non-DRM version. Go to the console
...but you do come across as the sort of whiny twat who will always find something to complain about when it comes to distribution of payed content, thereby 'justifying' your piracy habit.
Hate to play the part of Captain Obvious, but if you'd read my post, I'd made it pretty clear that I have NO intention of redistributing music. Let me rephrase my issue with the tagging, and I'll use your example:
Why would I need a metatag to tell me something's mine? I know it's mine. I was there when I bought it. Does Apple sticker your name and email address inside your iPod when you buy it? What about any of their computers? Any indication that the iPhone will have the user's information stored a
Mod parent idiot. Adding a metadata atom, in the format published in the standard and easily removable, to give a receipt is not DRM. It does not restrict any legal use, and it doesn't serve much impediment to illegal use either.
The tags added by the iTunes store make it easy for you to prove that you purchased the tracks, should you need to. If you don't need to, and you think having your name stored on your hard drive is somehow an infringement of your civil liberties, then just remove them. They're stored in standard MPEG-4 atoms, and there are a number of tools for editing them.
> The tags added by the iTunes store make it easy for you to prove that you purchased the tracks
No! They allow you to prove precisely one thing, and that is the tracks contain a completable editable and non-authoratative item of metadata that describes certain data about you. They don't prove who owns the tracks, who bought the tracks, where the tracks have been, who's done what with them - they're a post-it note on a car saying "Dave bought this car". Anyone can put on a new post-it note saying something different, or remove the post-it note altogether.
The amount of FUD on this topic has been unbelievable.
Actually, they didn't raise the prices unless you are buying individual tracks. I *RARELY* buy individual tracks unless I am evaluating a single and want to see if I want to buy the next one. In which case, I have like 6 months to buy the rest of the album at the cost of said album minus the cost of the tracks I've already bought.
If you want singles, feel free to get hosed. Singles have ALWAYS been the way the industry made money until recently (in which time they decided albums were pretty much going to b
This depends on how much the economies of scale affects your industry. With software distributed electronically, this is especially true. The first one may cost $10M to develop, but every copy after that is effectively free, thus reducing price to encourage sales can make a huge difference in profits.
If you make a one-off embedded controller for a particular purpose and you expect to sell 10 annually, reducing your price will definitely reduce your profits.
that with 2 earlier articles - making DVD copying even more illegal (if that were at all possible), and a "desire" for a Canadian DMCA, that we "now just find out" people are willing to pay for DRM-free content. I did my part and paid for a couple of tracks that I bought with DRM and "upgraded" to the DRM-free version, and will continue to do so as more become available, and as content I want becomes available DRM-free. Let's really show them where we willing to spend our $. Seems to be the only thing they listen to...
But to vote with your wallet, you need someone to know what you're voting for. Have you ever wondered how sales predictions are made up? It's a wild assed guess. So if album A is released with DRM and flops and album B without DRM and is a chartbuster, it might have something to do with DRM. Or a million other things. Never mind the "not voting". This isn't the national election, they've no idea how many considered the album in the first place so you not buying go into a huge black box of "people that didn'
No, all we need is an iTMS web store that doesn't require iTunes, which would be platform-agnostic and probably require very little work on Apple's part. It would only allow you to download unprotected music (if you don't have iTunes, then the DRM is ineffective) but that's what most of us would want anyway.
I don't know if eMusic is carrying the new EMI content, but I imagine they will in time.
I respect the fact that you're sticking to your guns and avoiding a commercial operating system. That said, I don't think anyone is going to look down on you for, at the very least, virtualizing XP. Is the ideological battle really worth a hundred-something bucks and countless compatibility headaches?
Wow, you mean I can put music the same music on my laptop, desktop, MP3 player, and burn a CD to listen to in my car with out having buy the same song 4 times???
Hmmm....this sounds a whole lot like Napster back in the day. Sheesh, it's only taken them six years to come up with a business model that works. Charging us for what we were doing on Napster anyway.
I had bought about 200 songs off iTMS in the 2 years i have been using it. Not a single song was from EMI. I don't know what that is important to this discussion, but if felt like sharing.
I have a soft spot for artists getting screwed by technology. Every technological advance seems to fall on artists particularly hard, so, while I really do hate the RIAA and the music industry and movie industry, I still think there might be a place so someone could show pictures of their work on the internet without having them stolen.
My wife used to use Napster (pre-lawsuit), and Kazaa, but she switched to iTunes because iTunes was more convenient and not choked full of ads, and paying a $1 a song is not so bad. If you add the threat of RIAA letters, then, iTunes seems like a pretty good deal indeed. She also feels a need to support the artists.
But really, the value of iTunes is the convenience and cleanliness, and there's no reason someone could not make a similar, ad-free thing but for file sharing writ large. Really, DRM free on iTunes is predicated on the fact that the recording industry must feel like it is getting some sort of handle on musical file sharing - that is, RIAA lawsuits to music downloaders must actually be working. Were there REALLY no DMCA or copyright controls on music, though, someone would eventually make something with a really cool user interface, like iTunes, but where music would be genuinely free.
I still think there might be a place so someone could show pictures of their work on the internet without having them stolen.
The internet is a system that allows you to download content to your computer. Assuming by "stolen" you mean "put on someones computer and used as they see fit without the copyright holders permission," well, the whole internet is kind of designed to facilitate stealing. Sorry, but that's the nature of the beast.
Were there REALLY no DMCA or copyright controls on music, though, someone would eventually make something with a really cool user interface, like iTunes, but where music would be genuinely free.
Sounds like bittorrent, limewire or any open source file sharing system. The reason that iTunes works is because people often want to do the right thing; it has nothing to do with the DMCA or copy
What would prevent them from making live shows? Like, you know, all musicians during the whole human history always did? Have they all starved, per any chance? Or what you actually mean is that current musicians would lose the ability (that their predecessors never had) to work once and, if lucky, profit forever? Because this is not what "work" is supposed to be, and it surely doesn't apply to most of humanity.
Give me a way to do my work once, doesn't matter what it is, and live
Not true. Copying CDs has been pretty easy for a long time now... but musicians haven't starved.
Copying copyrighted music has always been illegal... the DMCA didn't make it "more illegal" or whatever.
Some (I would argue most) people really do like to follow the law, even when it's easy not too... those people will always continue to buy the music they want to hear. Not too mention that some of us feel _good_ about buying cds because we like to support artists that we enjoy (even if most of the money doesn't
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday June 21 2007, @01:03PM (#19597669)
I know I'm in the minority here, but I actually prefer DRM music. DRM adds a certain ineffable flavor to otherwise bland music. It's like a sprinkle of cinammon on hot chocolate. The bass sounds more meaty and the singers sound just a little more angelic and bird-like.
I know, I know, I'm a bit of an audiophiliac. I don't want to sound too pretentious. But give it a try! You'll see. Music just sounds better with DRM.
The more significant figures would be whether the amount of EMI music being passed on peer to peer services has changed. I highly doubt it has increased more than its usual variance (it may even have decreased), and I hope the other RIAA companies notice this. I'm of the opinion that there's roughly a fixed number of people who would pirate regardless, and distributing music without DRM won't change this. However making music harder to listen due to DRM might actually drive piracy numbers up.
Somehow, I think EMI knew that selling DRM-free tracks would make a profit all along.
1. Release DRM-laden, horrific quality tracks 2. Watch consumers buy tracks 3. Wait for consumers to grow angry and realize the restrictions placed on their media 4. Release DRM-free, slightly better tracks 5. Wait for the consumers to REBUY or 'upgrade' all their tracks 6. ??? 7. Profit!!
THEN the second round
8. Release slightly better quality tracks... 9. Wait for the consumers to REBUY or 'upgrade' all their tracks...
which is much different from physical CD's where you have the album, the Greatest Hits CD, the Live CD..
Or for Films where you have the DVD, the Unrated Edition DVD, the Directors Cut DVD, The "the microphone guy didn't like the way this scene looked so here is another copy of the DVD for you to buy" DVD, etc
Or even software for example.. Buy Vista home basic, Upgrade it online to Vista Home premium, then upgrade to Ultimate Edition (with a whole other path for business users to do the same!)
Because it means they can charge 'extra' for the new-improved version. It costs them nothing more to produce.
They can charge extra because it is different. Who ever said that retail price was based on the cost to produce? A $20 widget doesn't cost $10 more to produce than a $10 widget with fewer features.
By now introducing DRM-less tracks, EMI have now made an extra £18 by providing something I should have got in the first place.
EMI doesn't make any more money unless you choose to buy. Why did you b
Heh, click the link in my sig - it is all there as MP3's.
But the problem I have with giving it away is that I never find out if anyone actually likes it! Sure, they can say it's great, but then if they don't think it's worth paying 10 bucks for I've got to wonder how sincere they're being!
This is the single biggest, highest profile way we can get the message to the industry that DRM doesn't pay.
So please, find a Mac or Windows box if you have to, but go buy something from the iTunes music store. Even if it's just one album and you then shunt the AAC files back to Linux to listen to.
Personally, I recommend something from the Mute back-catalog.
(And yes, I've bought 2 albums so far, I plan to keep buying preferentially from iTMS at least until the other labels get the message.)
Sell the songs in CD (or better) lossless format, with no DRM, and then I'll be a customer!!!
This first step, is a baby step...a good one but, a small one. Sell me online what I can buy in a store (quality) without DRM, and then, you've got it right. I'll be buying pretty much all my music online.
in addition, i'd like them to ship me the liner notes, along with a physical copy of the music on some sort of portable media that's compatibile with my car stereo. and some kind of case to put the media in.
Keep in mind you're in the majority. Most people don't mind that their music isn't super-high-bitrate/lossy compression. You don't have to get all the money in the market to be the biggest player, just the majority. Example: MySpace. Sure, it looks like ass, and it's code is half-broken. But millions upon millions of people use it. And the ad money flows in.
Sell the songs in CD (or better) lossless format, with no DRM, and then I'll be a customer!!!
AFAIK, even the best lossless codecs don't do better than ~55% compression. Not to mention that the decoding process for most of them is a bit power hungry.
My main point is that a compressed CD will end up well over 300MB and that's a much bigger bandwidth & storage bill for iTunes
AFAIK, even the best lossless codecs don't do better than ~55% compression. Not to mention that the decoding process for most of them is a bit power hungry.
FLAC takes less CPU to decode than MP3, AAC, WavePak, or Vorbis.
Sell the songs in CD (or better) lossless format, with no DRM, and then I'll be a customer!!!
Have you actually given yourself a blind listening test? 256 kbps AAC is very, very good. I have never seen a study where anyone could tell the difference between 256 kbps files and uncompressed files a significant fraction of the time. Many people claim that they don't like the sound of MP3 or AAC compression, even at such a high bitrate, but they don't back it up with a real test to prove it.
I agree with you Dominic that 256 kbps AAC may sound fine. But what if you want to play it on a device that doesn't support AAC? If you re-encode a lossy format it may not sound so good anymore. I rip my cds to FLAC so that I have a choice later in what format I want to listen to the music in. A simple shell script is all that is needed to convert a directory full of flac files to MP3 or Ogg. Disk space and bandwidth are cheap, but rebuying music in another format is not.
Well, unlike FairPlay-music, AAC is a standard supported by a huge range of devices. Probably doubly so as non-iPod owners can buy AACs now. Yes, if you have a non-AAC player now which is very important to you this might be an issue, but honestly... this will be a complete non-issue unless you go far out of your way to buy an AAC-incapable player.
"Have you actually given yourself a blind listening test? 256 kbps AAC is very, very good. I have never seen a study where anyone could tell the difference between 256 kbps files and uncompressed files a significant fraction of the time. Many people claim that they don't like the sound of MP3 or AAC compression, even at such a high bitrate, but they don't back it up with a real test to prove it."
I've got a pretty decent home system. I can hear the difference of good vs bad recording on it...even with ears
Sell the songs in CD (or better) lossless format, with no DRM, and then I'll be a customer!!!
You really think you can tell the difference between CD-quality and 256kbps AAC? Doubtful. I call BS. And even if you can tell the difference, and the difference is obvious enough to you that you care, you're one in a billion. For pretty much everyone, 256kbps is near enough to lossless that you could treat it as lossless (even transcode it to another format) and never be able to tell the difference.
And for that miniscule nearly-undetectable drop in quality, you're cutting your download time, increasing the amount of songs you can hold on your mp3 player, and maybe even increasing battery time.
Shock! (Score:5, Funny)
Amazing!
Re:Shock! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Shock! (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever encoding e-mail addresses should be called, DRM it is not. It doesn't limit you in any way.
Let's not confuse the meaning of terms like this, that's not helpful.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Shock! (Score:5, Informative)
You may not like it, but please don't confuse the issue by calling it DRM. It's metadata, even potentially useful metadata, that discourages copyright infringement while not in any way restricting fair use. You can copy those files to any device, or even transcode them into any other format, easily stripping all metadata in the process. Totally different than DRM, where you have to actually break encryption or suffer quality loss in order to do that.
If we're gonna love someone for providing DRM free tracks, remember Amazon is providing actual unencoded MP3s.
Except that they haven't opened their store yet. So don't go lauding them when you don't even know that they're not going to include the user id of the person who downloaded the song in the metadata.
Parent
Re:Shock! (Score:5, Informative)
Watermarking is not DRM. It's watermarking. DRM controls when and how you are allowed to use the content, and watermarking does not. It only provides a [potential] trail of culpability. If you are modded down, it will be at least half because you are simply wrong - although I have been hit hard by fanboys as well, Apple and otherwise. Right now it's the OSI fanboys modding me down for pointing out that Perens' claim to invent the idea of "open" source is false and that "open" meant something before he opened his mouth on the subject. I suspect you suffer for the same reason I do; some people mod me down any chance they get to make a plausible-looking negative moderation, simply because they recognize me and disapprove of that for which I stand.
Er, anyway, back on topic: Watermarking is, by definition, not DRM.
Parent
Re:Shock! (Score:5, Informative)
And this isn't watermarking. Digital watermarking changes content to encode some kind of message. When you buy DRM-free tunes from iTunes, the actual content, the AAC stream, contains no watermark. If you buy the same DRM-free song from five different accounts, all the AAC streams will be bit-for-bit identical. All that's included is a tag, in plaintext, which contains your info. You can read it, you can edit it, you can remove it. Not DRM, not a watermark.
Parent
Re:No, no splitting hairs (Score:5, Insightful)
The defining feature of a digital watermark is that it cannot be removed given only the watermarked data. That is its point. A digital photograph emblazoned with a watermark cannot readily be transformed into the original. A digital video file with an invisible-to-the-human-eye-digiatl-watermark inserted to allow the owners of the video's copyright to see who has leaked a copy if it to p2p is useful only because the altered bits cannot be reset to their original state.
So you see, the idea of calling this a watermark isn't just fudging the concept slightly. It's nonsense. It is completely trivial to remove the identifying information, so it is innapropriate to call it a watermark because it neither performs the function nor attempts to perform the function of a watermark.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with the grandparent that tag info is
If it is, is including your email in the filename a watermark too? Is placing a (separate) file with your email on a CD with aac files a watermark? Is just printing your name on the CD? Is printing it on a jewel case? All we're doing is playing around (deliberately to the absurd in my example) with what we consider the black box we wish to consider "the content in question". Is it the jewelcase
Re:Spiltting hairs (Score:4, Informative)
Watermarking means no such thing.
Watermarks were used in drafts, demos, and other such things, partly to identify them as such and partly to prevent someone from stealing it. e.g. if you hired a design firm to create a poster for you they might send you a watermarked draft so that you could see the finished result, but if you decided not to pay for it, the poster was still useless because it had a giant watermark through the middle that said 'draft copy - property of design company'. Once you'd approved and paid, they'd send you an un-watermarked version for you to reproduce.
Watermwarks were also used in coporate letterhead, cheques, and other docuements to help prevent forgery and authenticate that they were genuine. For the most part this was just used to help foil attacks. The same way most banks.
Never to uniquely identify individual documents.
but I would still argue in the shift to the digital domain the meaning is more of uniqueness than ability to remove
Again not true. With the digital transition, the primary motivation for watermarks was, as before, to 'damage' files so that people could see images but not steal them due to the watermark. (or more precisely, they could steal the watermarked image, but because the mark was hard to remove it wasn't worth it, and you couldn't leave the mark on for obvious reasons.)
Watermarks have been used for a long time on sites hosting high res photos or other digital art to prevent people from just downloading the image and using it. In order to get an image with the WATERMARK removed, you had to pay for the picture. Because the watermarks were translucent and applied over of the picture they are relatively difficult to simply remove.
Only very recently has watermarking technology been applied like a serial number, to uniquely identifying documents or files.
** Quite Simply there is no 'automatic' association with unique identifiers and watermarks. **
Aha, but that is external to the device, visible and alterable (potentially) by the user. The iTunes mark is not.
The itunes meta tag is not part of the song data, although it is in the same file.
It is visible in the sense that *any* program that can view the meta tags can see it -- and iTunes software itself will show you this information if you tell it to show info about the song. And the itunes tag is EASILY removed and or altered which is the antithesis of a watermark.
The iTunes tag is as much a 'watermark', as putting your email address in the filename.
And a watermark is just as identifiable if a record of which marks were sent to who is kept.
This whole 'invisible digital watermark serial number thats hard to remove' thing is pretty new, and really isn't entirely in keeping with the historical meaning or use of watermarks. Moreover, the apple meta tag is really none of those things. Its not invisible, not hard to remove.
If you didn't like the analagy of the laptop serial number because it was visible and alterable. Consider that at least half a dozen parts inside the laptop are also serialized. And that even if you scratch off the laptop serial number, if someone found the laptop they could not only infer what that number was, but potentially also who bought it.
Point is: laptops aren't 'watermarked' despite having serial numbers. And neither are iTunes files.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And it's a good thing we don't come to you to give the final say on such matters. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Your rights are not being managed--at all. You can do what you wish with the file. Another point: technically, when you strip DRM from normal iTunes songs, because it relies on an encryption mechanism, you're in theory, violating the DMCA. There's no encryption with the files being tagged as they are in the non-DRM version. Go to the console
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
...but you do come across as the sort of whiny twat who will always find something to complain about when it comes to distribution of payed content, thereby 'justifying' your piracy habit.
Hate to play the part of Captain Obvious, but if you'd read my post, I'd made it pretty clear that I have NO intention of redistributing music. Let me rephrase my issue with the tagging, and I'll use your example:
Why would I need a metatag to tell me something's mine? I know it's mine. I was there when I bought it. Does Apple sticker your name and email address inside your iPod when you buy it? What about any of their computers? Any indication that the iPhone will have the user's information stored a
Re:Shock! (Score:4, Informative)
The tags added by the iTunes store make it easy for you to prove that you purchased the tracks, should you need to. If you don't need to, and you think having your name stored on your hard drive is somehow an infringement of your civil liberties, then just remove them. They're stored in standard MPEG-4 atoms, and there are a number of tools for editing them.
Parent
Re:Shock! (Score:5, Insightful)
No! They allow you to prove precisely one thing, and that is the tracks contain a completable editable and non-authoratative item of metadata that describes certain data about you. They don't prove who owns the tracks, who bought the tracks, where the tracks have been, who's done what with them - they're a post-it note on a car saying "Dave bought this car". Anyone can put on a new post-it note saying something different, or remove the post-it note altogether.
The amount of FUD on this topic has been unbelievable.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I *RARELY* buy individual tracks unless I am evaluating a single and want to see if I want to buy the next one. In which case, I have like 6 months to buy the rest of the album at the cost of said album minus the cost of the tracks I've already bought.
If you want singles, feel free to get hosed. Singles have ALWAYS been the way the industry made money until recently (in which time they decided albums were pretty much going to b
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you make a one-off embedded controller for a particular purpose and you expect to sell 10 annually, reducing your price will definitely reduce your profits.
Isn't it ironic ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's because everything else is bullshit. If you don't care enough to alter your spending habits, then you don't care.
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how about 'nix (Score:2, Insightful)
to buy their 'tunes if you are NOT running M$.
We need an itunes for Linux.
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No, all we need is an iTMS web store that doesn't require iTunes, which would be platform-agnostic and probably require very little work on Apple's part. It would only allow you to download unprotected music (if you don't have iTunes, then the DRM is ineffective) but that's what most of us would want anyway.
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I respect the fact that you're sticking to your guns and avoiding a commercial operating system. That said, I don't think anyone is going to look down on you for, at the very least, virtualizing XP. Is the ideological battle really worth a hundred-something bucks and countless compatibility headaches?
Of Course It Is..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmmm....this sounds a whole lot like Napster back in the day. Sheesh, it's only taken them six years to come up with a business model that works. Charging us for what we were doing on Napster anyway.
QueenB.
Sad (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know what that is important to this discussion, but if felt like sharing.
DMCA is only reason DRM-Free is not music suicide (Score:4, Interesting)
My wife used to use Napster (pre-lawsuit), and Kazaa, but she switched to iTunes because iTunes was more convenient and not choked full of ads, and paying a $1 a song is not so bad. If you add the threat of RIAA letters, then, iTunes seems like a pretty good deal indeed. She also feels a need to support the artists.
But really, the value of iTunes is the convenience and cleanliness, and there's no reason someone could not make a similar, ad-free thing but for file sharing writ large. Really, DRM free on iTunes is predicated on the fact that the recording industry must feel like it is getting some sort of handle on musical file sharing - that is, RIAA lawsuits to music downloaders must actually be working. Were there REALLY no DMCA or copyright controls on music, though, someone would eventually make something with a really cool user interface, like iTunes, but where music would be genuinely free.
Then, musicians would starve.
Re:DMCA is only reason DRM-Free is not music suici (Score:3, Insightful)
I still think there might be a place so someone could show pictures of their work on the internet without having them stolen.
The internet is a system that allows you to download content to your computer. Assuming by "stolen" you mean "put on someones computer and used as they see fit without the copyright holders permission," well, the whole internet is kind of designed to facilitate stealing. Sorry, but that's the nature of the beast.
Were there REALLY no DMCA or copyright controls on music, though, someone would eventually make something with a really cool user interface, like iTunes, but where music would be genuinely free.
Sounds like bittorrent, limewire or any open source file sharing system. The reason that iTunes works is because people often want to do the right thing; it has nothing to do with the DMCA or copy
Re:DMCA is only reason DRM-Free is not music suici (Score:3, Insightful)
What would prevent them from making live shows? Like, you know, all musicians during the whole human history always did? Have they all starved, per any chance? Or what you actually mean is that current musicians would lose the ability (that their predecessors never had) to work once and, if lucky, profit forever? Because this is not what "work" is supposed to be, and it surely doesn't apply to most of humanity.
Give me a way to do my work once, doesn't matter what it is, and live
Re:DMCA is only reason DRM-Free is not music suici (Score:3, Insightful)
Copying CDs has been pretty easy for a long time now... but musicians haven't starved.
Copying copyrighted music has always been illegal... the DMCA didn't make it "more illegal" or whatever.
Some (I would argue most) people really do like to follow the law, even when it's easy not too... those people will always continue to buy the music they want to hear. Not too mention that some of us feel _good_ about buying cds because we like to support artists that we enjoy (even if most of the money doesn't
This is a mistake (Score:3, Funny)
I know, I know, I'm a bit of an audiophiliac. I don't want to sound too pretentious. But give it a try! You'll see. Music just sounds better with DRM.
yours truly,
David Massey
More Interesting Numbers Would Be... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Release DRM-laden, horrific quality tracks
2. Watch consumers buy tracks
3. Wait for consumers to grow angry and realize the restrictions placed on their media
4. Release DRM-free, slightly better tracks
5. Wait for the consumers to REBUY or 'upgrade' all their tracks
6. ???
7. Profit!!
THEN the second round
8. Release slightly better quality tracks...
9. Wait for the consumers to REBUY or 'upgrade' all their tracks...
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Or for Films where you have the DVD, the Unrated Edition DVD, the Directors Cut DVD, The "the microphone guy didn't like the way this scene looked so here is another copy of the DVD for you to buy" DVD, etc
Or even software for example.. Buy Vista home basic, Upgrade it online to Vista Home premium, then upgrade to Ultimate Edition (with a whole other path for business users to do the same!)
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It costs them nothing more to produce.
They can charge extra because it is different. Who ever said that retail price was based on the cost to produce? A $20 widget doesn't cost $10 more to produce than a $10 widget with fewer features.
By now introducing DRM-less tracks, EMI have now made an extra £18 by providing something I should have got in the first place.
EMI doesn't make any more money unless you choose to buy. Why did you b
I wish (Score:4, Insightful)
(strictly speaking they'd have to offer it to the the aggregators like tunecore that people like me use)
They will (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't have any songs that were DRM free at launch of iTunes+, but just recently two came up as upgradeable.
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But the problem I have with giving it away is that I never find out if anyone actually likes it! Sure, they can say it's great, but then if they don't think it's worth paying 10 bucks for I've got to wonder how sincere they're being!
Slashdotters, please go buy something (Score:4, Insightful)
So please, find a Mac or Windows box if you have to, but go buy something from the iTunes music store. Even if it's just one album and you then shunt the AAC files back to Linux to listen to.
Personally, I recommend something from the Mute back-catalog.
(And yes, I've bought 2 albums so far, I plan to keep buying preferentially from iTMS at least until the other labels get the message.)
Re:With sales tax it's a buck-fifty !! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sell the songs in CD (or better) lossless format, with no DRM, and then I'll be a customer!!!
This first step, is a baby step...a good one but, a small one. Sell me online what I can buy in a store (quality) without DRM, and then, you've got it right. I'll be buying pretty much all my music online.
Parent
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in addition, i'd like them to ship me the liner notes, along with a physical copy of the music on some sort of portable media that's compatibile with my car stereo. and some kind of case to put the media in.
yeah, that'll never happen.
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My main point is that a compressed CD will end up well over 300MB and that's a much bigger bandwidth & storage bill for iTunes
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FLAC takes less CPU to decode than MP3, AAC, WavePak, or Vorbis.
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Have you actually given yourself a blind listening test? 256 kbps AAC is very, very good. I have never seen a study where anyone could tell the difference between 256 kbps files and uncompressed files a significant fraction of the time. Many people claim that they don't like the sound of MP3 or AAC compression, even at such a high bitrate, but they don't back it up with a real test to prove it.
Do you think that p
Re:With sales tax it's a buck-fifty !! (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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I've got a pretty decent home system. I can hear the difference of good vs bad recording on it...even with ears
Re:With sales tax it's a buck-fifty !! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sell the songs in CD (or better) lossless format, with no DRM, and then I'll be a customer!!!
You really think you can tell the difference between CD-quality and 256kbps AAC? Doubtful. I call BS. And even if you can tell the difference, and the difference is obvious enough to you that you care, you're one in a billion. For pretty much everyone, 256kbps is near enough to lossless that you could treat it as lossless (even transcode it to another format) and never be able to tell the difference.
And for that miniscule nearly-undetectable drop in quality, you're cutting your download time, increasing the amount of songs you can hold on your mp3 player, and maybe even increasing battery time.
Parent