Defective by Design

Koh Choon Lin writes:

I am very frustrated by my local media provider, MOBTV, who provides video-on-demand service. It is a subscription-based service that provides viewers with immediate access to their favorite programmes.

Jonathan Wilson writes to us to suggest the PS3, because...

The RIAA has changed its tactic. No longer will they sue random people for file sharing. Now they're going after the ISPs. While many of the large media company ISPs such as AOL, Comcast, etc., will almost certainly comply, what will the smaller, independent ISPs do? How will large telcos like Verizon react?

Internet News reports:

Early on the campaign, we began an open letter to Bono, asking him to stand with us in calling for the elimination of DRM. Seven thousand people signed that petition and wrote messages asking him to support the cause. We have been in contact with Bono and his "people" at various points in the past, and have been told that he will not respond, and that we should accept this as a rejection of our appeal.

Who should your computer take its orders from? Most people think their computers should obey them, not obey someone else. With a plan they call "trusted computing", large media corporations (including the movie companies and record companies), together with computer companies such as Microsoft and Intel, are planning to make your computer obey them instead of you.

Continue reading 'Can you trust your computer?' by Richard Stallman

The notion that music does not deserve the same protection as software, film, video games or other intellectual property, simply because there is an unprotected legacy product in the physical world, is completely without logic or merit.

Nothing like a crazy quotation to open an article...

This at a time when even Apple had publicly declared their distaste for DRM on music. Of course, that took them about two years to realistically implement, but they weren't the only ones saying it.

A recent tactic, in an effort to stop people downloading movies from the Internet, is the "Digital Copy" -- an extra disk containing an iTunes or Windows Media DRM copy of the movie, which can be copied to a supported DRM-player, such as the iPod or Zune.

We've had a few people write in and tell us more about the Digital Copy...

The Windows Media version allows for playback on exactly ONE computer and can only be transferred to said computer ONCE. In one case I accidentally deleted the video in question. Now it is gone for good.

DRM refers to technologies typically used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, and copyright holders to attempt to control how consumers access and use media and entertainment content. Among other issues, the workshop will address the need to improve disclosures to consumers about DRM limitations. Interested parties may submit written comments or original research on this topic.

If you're in the USA, please submit your own response.

As you've no doubt heard, Apple, the last major retailer of DRM-encumbered music announced, live at MacWorld, that all iTunes music will be going DRM-free. Today, some 8 million songs and music videos are already available DRM-free, via iTunes Plus.

Not content with producing a DRM-laden operating system in Vista, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have been hard at work, producing the Zune -- yet another piece of Redmond junk you wouldn't want in a million years. Not only do they seemingly fail to get it, repeatedly, but Microsoft under their leadership continues to produce overly fascist products, such as the Windows Media Center -- implementing the Broadcast Flag at the whim of NBC, one of their media partners.

ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is a proposed enforcement treaty between United States, the European Community, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand and Mexico, with Canada set to join any day now.

Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont -- paid puppet for the media industry, sponsored the controversial S.3325 bill, aka the "PRO IP" bill.

We've covered the bill in some detail already:-

SDMI, the Secure Digital Music Initiative was one of the first modern DRM schemes came about ten years ago -- a direct response to the widespread success of the DRM-free MP3 file format.

SDMI would use a watermarking feature and wanted to ensure this could not be detected. As such, they announced a challenge, inviting hackers and crypto experts to remove the watermarking.

The man who took over from Ashley Highfield had a tough job -- it wouldn't be easy filling his shoes. Afterall, Highfield's baby, the iPlayer, was already a failure by the time he arrived, it really had no chance of succeeding, especially for a Microsoft player like Huggers.

As it stands now, Highfield is at Microsoft, presumably working hard to combat all 600 of the GNU/Linux users in the UK, and as such as offer this hastily-drawn and poorly-concieved look into Erik Huggers' first day at the BBC.

When we told you about the iPhone, one of the problems we listed was that iPhone implements what we refer to as 'tivoization' -- that is, refusing to run software that has not been deemed appropriate by the ruling body, even if the software is permitted to be changed, legally, by its developers.

Oh nine! F nine! One one Zero. 29D! 74E! Thirty Five! Bee Dee! Eight Four Thousand, One Hundred and Fifty Six. The Sinclair C5. When I'm 63. Oh, to be 56. Two Fat Ladies. Sea? Zero.

Confused holiday ramblings from Defective by Design or the key to something bigger? It's all part of something called the AACS encryption key controversy -- way back in April 2007, the MPAA and its cronies sent takedown notices to websites which dared to feature the magic number.

Here at DefectiveByDesign we have been working towards the goal of making Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) a socially unacceptable technology practice. That message is spreading.

By highlighting the threat DRM posses not just to consumer rights but to our freedom to be in control of our computers and electronic devices, we have been able to gain widespread political support.

As we mentioned briefly yesterday -- we should never forget that Adobe used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to have a Russian programmer, Dmitry Sklyarov, arrested and imprisoned. His "crime"? Distributing a product designed to remove locks from eBooks so that they could be fully used like regular books.

Ah yes, Adobe, bastions of the creative world, and pain in the neck to all. Currently, as always, Adobe are up to some pretty dirty tricks. We're already seeing millions of users stuck with their deliberately crippled software -- Adobe Acrobat, Flash Player. Now comes Adobe AIR hand in hand with another sad story about the BBC:

The Amazon kindle provides convenience, but at the cost of freedom. When you purchase a kindle, you must agree to use the Digital Restriction Management (DRM) system. Since all of the Kindle ebooks you purchase from Amazon are in their proprietary DRM format, you are also promising to not share them with friends. And, because you promise to not circumvent the DRM, there is no way to move them to another device or a computer. You are locked into the Kindle and you are locked into Amazon.

He's not ill, he's resting. On his laurels, that is.

"If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own." -- Steve Jobs, May 2002

And yet, here we are, over 6 years later, and Steve Jobs's Apple is the only major vendor of digital music that is actively preventing this.

Today, the Wall Street Journal

Confessions of a HDTV Shop Employee

HDTV is a countdown to obsolete hardware, with the unintended (or maybe just unpublicized) side effect being that viewers have fewer options, since all-digital technology can be more easily restricted. Today, we present an anonymous tale from a shop employee of some of the problems around digital TV -- how consumers are being sold on the idea of HDTV, what that means for censorship and DRM.

Thanks to everyone who's sent in details of PC games. We've already covered Spore and SecuROM -- today we're touching on GTA IV, and offering some free software alternatives.

Act 1 -- Grand Fail Auto

One of the most anticipated games of 2008 has finally been released -- defectively -- by Rockstar Games. Yes, GTA IV is laden with the same DRM that has plagued gamers so much this year -- SecuROM.

On the subject, Rockstar announced:

You may have heard this week, that iTunes was going DRM-free. Of course, it didn't happen. Apple's iTunes, under Steve Jobs, is still stubbornly the only major distributor of DRM-encumbered music at a time when Amazon, Rhapsody, Napster, eMusic, Magnatune, 7 Digital and more are all selling music without restriction.

Mason writes...

Thanks for all your great submissions so far.

Thanks to:

Mike McCarty sends in his horror story of being a Prince fan, as a reminder of some of the tricks being pulled on music fans in this DRM age. Mike wins one of our T-shirts and a DRM-free album from Magnatune.

We begin with the demise of Prince's DRM-music service, New Power Generation.

Act One. Prince's music service: Defective by Design

Luckily I only purchased one of MANY DRM-laden album from Prince's now defunct New Power Generation website, Xpectation. It came in the DRM-encumbered Windows Media format, but this was before I was ever aware of the horrors of DRM. Ironically, I EXPECTED the files to work pretty much forever, maybe not forever but at least a few good years. However, I guess the joke was on me as I misplaced the files on an external harddrive a year or so ago and recently located them only to find out there's absolutely nothing I can do with them.

This is pretty common with digital files, but many of the DRM-free providers such as Magnatune and eMusic allow you to redownload your purchases directly from them.

Act Two: Prince's war on the Internet

Prince's war with all things internet has left me with quite the sour taste in my mouth. Pointing my browser to the website I purchased the album from confirms that the address cannot be found. No surprise. I think it's been gone for at least a year or two now. A while back I had heard the site went under and that Prince had begun using his MySpace page. This has since been shut down as well.

As The Register noted last September:

Teaming up with Web Sheriff, the firm currently known as "Europe's leading internet policing specialist," the Minnesota-born pop star has already ordered YouTube and eBay to remove hundreds of supposedly Prince-infringing web items, and he's intent on filing suit against the two web behemoths - not to mention Swedish BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay.

Mike continues his story:

Searching Prince fan sites such as Housequake, prince.org and a few others have led me to the fact that there pretty much is no way to contact Prince OR his camp in ANY form whatsoever. Also, there was never any mention to his fanclub (which I DID pay $25 to join) that they would no longer be supporting the DRM-laden files when the NPG Music Club went under. No other fans, or what Prince likes to call "Friends", knew what to do about the files either. The only suggestion I was given, which isn't possible now that the files cannot be played, was to burn the files to a cd and rip them back to mp3 if I want to put them on the ol' mp3 player. Well... the files won't play, so how am I supposed to burn them? It's just not possible.

Ah yes, the burn-to-a-CD-defense. This is a pretty common reaction to the problem that DRM causes. Of course, buying DRMed media, burning to a CD, and ripping the CD, all takes time and effort and means losing quality. Often DRMed music makes it hard for you to burn it to a CD -- you have to use specific proprietary software to do a job that is much better done elsewhere.

Act Three: You wouldn't treat your friends like this...

I used to be a massive Prince fan -- I won't say friend since I certanly wouldn't treat a friend the way he's treating his fans, but his adamancy about people stealing or sharing his work has alienated me and I'm sure quite a few others. Sure he gave away Musicology when you saw him in concert a few years back, but I still PAID for the Xpectation album and feel that I should be able to listen to it as long as I keep the files handy. I WILL NOT purchase another DRM-laden file ever.

Thanks Prince, for absolutely nothing except a good old-fashioned lesson in what not to do in future.

If you put Microsoft at the center of your home entertainment system, be prepared to hand them the remote control, literally.