| Feb. 14th, 2005 @ 08:26 pm Putting a lock on your own files. |
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My Mood:  worried
Now Playing: Yes - Owner Of A Lonely Heart (Max Graham Sidechain Remix)
This forum thread perfectly displays the core of my upcoming rant:
http://forums.designtechnica.com/showthread.php?t=5111
"Now what is the problem here?" you might ask. For the answer i first need to explain what DRM is. If you already know what it is, you can probably skip this post.
DRM is short for Digital Rights Management, and it is a name for the collection of tools and techniques used by the entertainment industry to make sure that their rights are secured. Yes, *their* rights, not yours. Although people have the right to make backups of their purchased CDs, DVDs and whatnot, the entertainment industry tries hard to make sure you can't.
To get back to the forum post i mentioned, it can be summed up as "after re-installing Sonic Stage, it won't play the old .omg files". .omg is the format used by Sony's SonicStage software to store the music that it retrieves from MiniDiscs to the pc. These files use DRM to prevent you from giving the omg files to your brother, your girlfriend, your mom, etc. Sony is not only a hardware manufacturer, they also publish songs. They would like you to buy it instead of copying it from other people. From their point of view, they probably think its the best thing to do.
But let's now get back to the consumer. The DRM software ties the omg files to the pc they were created on. So if you reinstall your PC, the DRM software thinks you're trying to play it on someone else's PC and block your access. I don't have an account on that forum, and i'm too lazy to get one, else i would've told him his files are gone. Next time he'll store his music, it probably won't be a Sony file-format anymore.
I have personal experience with NetMD as well, since i got an MD recorder and a friend of mine used to have a NetMD walkman. I was kinda happy when he bought it. In those days, i still didn't have a clue what DRM was, so i thought that would be a nice opportunity to transfer all my music from MD to the PC. I couldn't have been more wrong. The software is so strict in its DRM policy, it wouldn't even let me transfer my analog MD recordings to the PC. You can only transfer songs to the PC if they were transferred to the MD from a PC. Needless to say, i haven't bought MD discs ever since. Not even mentioning the fact that i've switched to Linux in the mean time, and they have *no* software at all for my platform.
But Sony is just an example. Just about any company making money on entertainment has similar tactics. Those online music stores sound like a great idea to some, but it's worse then the old model. In 'the old days' you would get a CD that plays everywhere with a case and a booklet and whatnot. When you 'buy' something in one of those online music stores, you get nothing more then the 'right' to play the song. You get a file, usually in Microsoft's WMA format (i won't get into details about how horrible those files sound compared to other formats, that's outside the scope of this post), or a proprietary format owned by the owner of the music store (like Real's RealAudio). That file will work, until you reinstall your pc, buy another pc or install another operating system.
At the moment, online music sales are one of the fastest growing online industries. Right now, they can get people to buy it. That will certainly stop when more and more people find out about the restrictions on those files. You can't listen to them in your car, in your friend's house, at work, and probably also not in your portable player. I said 'probably' because for some players there are exceptions. iPods will play AAC music from iTunes, some players support WMA with DRM, but those WMA players certainly won't play your iTunes music and iPods don't play WMA at all.
Even buying CDs isn't risk-free anymore. Most CDs have some form of copy protection built-in, and might not play on some of your devices, including a Windows-based computer. I mention a "Windows-based computer" instead of just a "computer" because those copy protections all rely on software that will only work on Windows. Holding down shift while loading a CD will disable autoplay, so the CD doesnt get a chance to load the DRM software to prevent you from doing what you was entitled to do when you paid for the CD: play it the way you want it. They can't ever prevent the audio from being played, since it has to be somewhat compatible with old CD players.
All in all, spending money on products with DRM is not a good idea. Maybe if you don't see the dangers now, you will one day regret it. Make sure your next portable audio player supports common DRM-free standards, like MP3 or Ogg Vorbis, and that you can transfer songs to it without using proprietary software like SonicStage, iTunes or Windows Media Player. |
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