DRM and copyright
Blimey, another year’s nearly gone
As ever, magazines are doing their review of the year thing and I feel inspired to follow suit. Rather than a “what a year that was, eh?” thing, though, here’s a quick list of things I’ve really liked or been let down by this year.
Books: Mr Biffo, David Quantick and Charlie Brooker made me laugh so hard I probably damaged internal organs, and judging by the way Mrs Bigmouth has been laughing like a drain “Mommies Who Drink” is a hoot too. As always I read about 200,000 crime novels, of which the latest Ian Rankin was the most reliably entertaining, and I loved Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace. Although by “loved” I really mean “was utterly freaked out by”. Which also applies to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Music: Obligatory Radiohead joy aside (Reckoner is jaw-dropping), the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss collaboration was wonderful despite my hatred of Robert Plant’s voice and my loathing of music that sounds vaguely country. I bought all the Talk Talk records I’d already bought several times already, rediscovered the joys of The Big Dish, was let down by a rather anodyne Sugababes album (what a great first single, though!), discovered Regina Spector about a decade after everybody else and danced very badly to pretty much everything Timbaland has had a hand in this year.
Springsteen’s Magic was an unexpected old-school delight, Mark Ronson’s version of Valerie is one of the most joyous things I’ve heard for ages, Girls Aloud’s Tangled Up was worth buying for Call The Shots alone, and the reissued Joshua Tree reminded me why I used to really love U2.
Tech: Both Vista and Leopard fell into the “glad I have ‘em, could live without ‘em” category, DRM didn’t quite die - although the signs are encouraging - and I had to eat my words about the iPhone, which I thought would be a pile of crap but which I - rather shame-facedly - love dearly despite the lack of 3G. I was also wrong about the Apple TV, which I was very excited about pre-release: it seems as if Apple lost interest in it by the time it actually came out, and it’s become a technological footnote rather than anything more exciting.
FARK, Flickr and PopJustice remained brilliant, Facebook walks the line between fun and being really, really annoying, Newsgator/NetNewsWire/iPhone Integration is better than sliced bread and Logic Pro is God’s own music software. Of the big stuff, the scariest stuff happened (and will continue to happen) in the world of privacy.
Games: Halo 3, too short. Timeshift, predictable but fun enough. Bioshock, flawed but great. Still sod-all decent stuff for the Wii. Orange Box is great value for money, but Half-Life 2 Episode 2 frequently feels like Space Invaders (the antlions in the tunnels, the striders attacking). And not in a good way. Crackdown was a hoot and is well worth tracking down second-hand on eBay. On the PC I loved the Minerva mods for Half-Life 2, but the much-hyped STALKER bored me to tears when it wasn’t crashing.
A major annoyance for me was the increasing focus on online gaming, which means the single player bit of any console game can be completed in about six hours by an inept gamer like me. That probably translates as three seconds for anybody that’s any good. At 40-odd-quid per game, that’s hardly value for money.
The interesting/depressing thing about gaming this year was its increasing resemblance to the film industry: blockbuster-driven with months and months of hype and overly excited previews, with reviewers being outflanked so their words don’t appear in print or online until a terrible game’s hit the top of the charts. Never mind the quality, just look at the first-week sales. A lot of very bad games made a great deal of money this year.
Also depressing was the repeat of last year’s Wii bundle bastardy, where retailers took advantage of Nintendo’s inability to make enough consoles by forcing desperate punters to buy big bundles of crap. They’re doing it again this year.
On a happier note, Eurogamer’s featuring some excellent games writing and the new Rock, Paper, Shotgun blog has quickly become a favourite bookmark.
Magazines that I don’t write for: EDGE and The Word were ace as ever, although the latter is teetering on the very edge of the abyss where Uncut and Mojo live. Empire seems to have found its mojo again, Q’s better than before - less list-y, with proper writing again - although I’m now old enough not to care about 99% of the music it covers, and Car magazine remains a work of art with superb writing to boot.
What about you, ladies and gentlemen?
Amazon launches its MP3 site
I’ve been thinking about buying Amy Winehouse’s album, but it was £12 at HMV (sod that) and it’s not in iTunes Plus on the iTMS, which means a lousy 128kbps file. But lo, at Amazon it’s a 256kbps, non-DRM MP3! And the whole album is like $9!
Another one bites the dust: Virgin’s DRM download shop
Blah blah blah shutting up shop blah blah blah DRM protection blah blah blah downloads will stop working blah blah blah copy to CD and re-rip or lose them forever blah blah blah more proof that DRM sucks blah blah blah.
As ever, this is a kick in the nads for anyone who bought legal music instead of pirating it.
Anatomy of a music business failure
Michael Robertson of MP3.com fame has posted an interesting explanation of why his latest venture, AnywhereCD, failed. Worth a read if you’re interested in the business side of digital music.
I met with all of the major labels (Universal, EMI, Sony, and Warner Music) and they seemed open minded to new ideas. One had a cautious ‘wait and see’ type of attitude. Another wanted millions of dollars up front. One insanely asked me if I would embed the purchaser’s credit card number in the song files they bought.
Yaydiohead! Radiohead do digital, don’t do DRM
Radiohead have finally joined the digital music party, albeit in their own way: they’re selling albums, not songs (£6.99 apiece, so that’s about 50p per track), they’re going through 7Digital.com, not iTunes, and the files are 320Kbps MP3s - which means no DRM or compatibility issues.
MTV’s song shop: from frying pan to fire
MTV’s Urge download shop is moving from Microsoft’s DRM-hobbled, won’t work on iPods technology to, er, Real Networks’ DRM-hobbled, won’t work on iPods technology.
The Inquirer makes an excellent point:
The Urge store - supposed to be the Volish play to head off iTunes - was announced, to great fanfare, at CES last year, with Microsoft rolling out Justin Timberlake to say how awesome the new store was going to be. [Then] Microsoft screwed most of its partners - launching its Zune player and its own-brand Zune music store, and ditching Plays For Sure compatibility - and Urge instantly went from Microsoft’s flagship platform to an also-ran. And being an also-ran to an also-ran to iTunes is not a good position to be in.
So DRM isn’t just bad for punters, but bad for providers too. Although it’s still bad for punters.
the company would stay on Windows Media Player 11 for a while and that discussions about phasing out the service were ongoing. Customers who bought music from the store will face a fun time - although Microsoft could transition their accounts to the Zune store, the DRM is incompatible and so will break their portable players.
As if you needed another reason to avoid DRM’d music your favourite music service deciding to hop camps seems to be one.
I hate to say I told you so: DRM strikes again
Google Video is shutting its download shop. Thanks to DRM, anyone who’s bought downloads from it will soon discover that their videos have ceased to be, are ex-videos, etc etc etc.
Apple’s DRM-free downloads contain user information. So what?
There’s a minor kerfuffle happening in blogland over iTunes Plus, the new bit of iTunes that offers DRM-free downloads. Apparently the metadata contains user information including your email address, which of course means that if you share files via P2P or turn an album into a torrent then the copyright cops will come a-knocking.
Which sounds fair enough to me.
Hating DRM is (in most cases) not the same as wanting to be able to share your purchases with the entire planet; it’s about having the right to use your legally purchased content on the hardware and/or software of your choice. DRM-free downloads enable you to do just that, and personally I don’t care what metadata is stuffed in there because I won’t be sharing it.
Am I missing something?
Baby, this DVD is driving me crazy
Mrs Bigmouth and I headed off to hospital yesterday for a 20-week pregnancy scan (everything’s fine, thanks) and on departure, the doctor gave us a shiny disc. Excellent, I thought. We’ve had one of these before. It’s a CD with some screenshots of the scan.
It turns out it was even better than that. It was a DVD containing about ten minutes of video footage. If you’ve done the parent thing and watched an ultrasound scan you’ll appreciate just how mind-blowing it is to actually own a video of your unborn baby; if you haven’t, you’ll have to take my word for it.
So we came home, watched the DVD about 100 times, and then decided to make a backup of it. And we figured our respective mothers would appreciate a copy too. So I stuck the DVD into my DVD recorder, hit One Button Copy - a brilliant invention, I reckon; it copies the disc to the hard disk and then wallops it on to a blank DVD - and nothing happened.
Hello, DRM!
It wasn’t deliberate DRM, but it was DRM nonetheless. Because the doctor used a Sony DVD recorder, and Sony’s a big fan of DRM, the disc he burned was copy protected automatically. Which means that if you have mainstream copying hardware or software it can’t be backed up, and it can’t be copied.
Incidentally, this was a private scan (this year, the NHS in Scotland doesn’t fund 20-week scans) that cost a pretty large sum of money, so the DVD in question is probably the most expensive disc I’ve ever owned.
There are, of course, ways around DRM, so I duly downloaded a dodgy DVD ripper, cracked the copy protection, backed up the disc and ripped the video to my Mac, so I can use iDVD to make as many backups or copies as I want. But how many people in the same situation would know to do that, or know where to look?
We all know that DRM doesn’t work, and that if you’re determined to get a dodgy copy of something you can do so fairly easily. And yet the content owners’ DRM obsession means that while I can easily download a movie torrent, I can’t easily copy the video of my own unborn baby.
In defence of DRM
As I posted yesterday, I think EMI’s plan to drop DRM is a brilliant one, and I think come May iTunes shoppers can send the rest of the industry a very clear message by avoiding all DRMed tracks and going for the better quality, DRM-free ones instead. And don’t forget, EMI’s announcement applies to all digital downloads on all platforms; iTunes is just the first shop to sign up. However, that doesn’t mean DRM deserves to die everywhere - or at least, not yet.
Don’t get me wrong. DRM on songs or albums you’ve bought is stupid, evil, anti-consumer and all the rest of it, especially when CDs are often cheaper and don’t have the same restrictions. But without DRM, subscription services can’t work. I don’t use them, but a lot of people do - and without DRM, they’d lose those services overnight.
Take Napster, for example. Ten quid per month gives you pretty much unlimited music, and if you want you can change your tunes all day every day. Without DRM, that won’t work. Let’s be conservative and say that Napster users would download just 100 DRM-free songs per month. At a tenner per month that means Napster’s revenue per song would be 10p per song, but it’d be paying the music business 60, 70p per track (because DRM-free means Napster would get the same terms as iTunes). Bye-bye Napster.
I still think digital music is massively overpriced - in many cases a digital album is still more expensive than a physical copy, despite the absence of packaging, manufacturing, transport costs and so on, and the flat rate system makes back catalogue stuff even more overpriced - but realistically iTunes’ 99p per track is where the market’s currently at. If that falls to 1p per track then DRM-free subscription services may well become viable, but for now you have two choices: if you’re willing to pay per track you don’t shouldn’t have to deal with DRM (and come May, you won’t have to), but if you’d rather rent than buy DRM is the only way to do it.