They Just Don’t Get It

This quote from MPAA & RIAA lawyer Steven J Metalitz is why I get so worked up about DRM systems:

We reject the view, that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so.

To recognize the proposed exemption would surely discourage any content provider from entering the marketplace for online distribution… unless it was committed to do so… forever. This would not be good for consumers, who would find a marketplace with less innovation and fewer choices and options.

The quote is taken from a discussion about whether content providers who coat their wares with DRM should be required by law to ensure that purchased media continues to work for perpetuity. Their argument of course is that no piece of machinery can be expected to work forever, and so bully to the customer who purchased DRM’d music or video. However, with all of the major online music retailers selling DRM-free Mp3s, many honest people (read: people who didn’t say fuck it to DRM and pirate all of their music – the very people that allowed big content to continue to survive in the digital era) are left with a significant amount of media that cannot be unlocked due to anti-circumvention laws, and must now be replaced as the old DRM servers are slowly taken offline.

Even after all of this time, the big content owners still don’t understand the digital age. Back in the era of physical media, when formats changed, customers had to purchase their existing media in the new format if they wanted to be able to continue to use it. Because physical media costs money to research, manufacture, and distribute, this makes sense – the customer was simply paying the cost of the record companies developing and manufacturing a better sounding medium. However, where digital music is concerned, none of these costs exist. There was no research to develop Mp3, because it is ready to be licensed. There were no manufacturing costs, besides the few CPU cycles that it took to re-encode the existing media. Likewise, distribution is essentially free, because in most cases, it is third-party retailers who host and sell the content, not the rights holders themselves, and it costs exactly $0 to make a digital copy of a song file. So what exactly are consumers paying for when re-purchasing their previously DRM’d content? The luxury of not being limited in where and how they can use their purchased content? Oh thank you Mr. Rights Holder, thank you! thank you! thank you!

You know how this issue should be handled? Every song that was sold with DRM is now sold without, right? Then a tool should be written and distributed that allows customers to strip the DRM from every file in their collection. For free.

Edit: Comment from Slashdot:

Canadian Copyright Reform Consultations

This week, Arstechnica ran a piece detailing the history of copyright reform in Canada, and providing coverage on the government’s current efforts to revive the program. It seems that after the blowout surrounding Bill C-61, the government has decided to at least pretend to listen to citizens this time instead of simply bowing to the interests of foreign industry groups. To that end, the government has launched a website where Canadians can follow the process, and submit their own thoughts on the issues at hand. The new website is open until September 13, 2009, and puts five questions to participants:

1. How do Canada’s copyright laws affect you? How should existing laws be modernized?
2. Based on Canadian values and interests, how should copyright changes be made in order to withstand the test of time
3. What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster innovation and creativity in Canada?
4. What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster competition and investment in Canada?
5. What kinds of changes would best position Canada as a leader in the global, digital economy?

My answers to the survey went something like this:

1. Copyright laws effect every person with a desire to utilize physical or digital media in this country. While current laws are reasonably fair, they tend to be applicable primarily to physical medium, and lack use cases that address digital distribution, storage, and usage schemes. The changing landscape of media consumption calls for a modernization of copyright law that should be centered on preserving relics of our culture and society for future generations to freely enjoy.
2. The primary purpose of copyright law is to ensure that artists’ contributions to society stand the test of time, while allowing the artist to make a living from their works for a reasonable period of time. To that end, any media that has ceased to be distributed by rights holders should be released into the public domain. This includes music, television, video, and written word that is no longer producing a profit for it’s owners and may otherwise be lost to future generations. How bankrupt would our society be without access to the works of classical playwrights, composers, and painters? At the same time, rights holders should be prevented from charging exceptionally high fees for back-catalogue media, as the digital age ensures that the storage and distribution costs of aging content are minimal.
3. Innovation and creativity are largely driven by exposure to and inspiration from the works of others. To that end, Canadian copyright law should call for explicit bans on Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes, which serve only to hinder the availability of media and to frustrate honest users of such. It would be beneficial for lawmakers to remember that any lock can be broken given enough resources and time; and that the only purpose of a lock, be it on your front door or on your digital media, is to keep honest people honest. Those who want through the locks will accomplish as much in short order, while those who are unnecessarily prevented from using their media by poorly designed or no longer supported DRM systems are left frustrated and are given incentive to hang up their honesty all together.
4. It is unfortunate that most industry groups consider the fostering of innovation and creativity to be at odds with the increase of competition and investment in the marketplace when in truth, a healthy marketplace with reasonably short copyright durations can serve to directly increase the former. Current copyright schemes assign rights to their holders for a duration of life plus 50 years. In an age when immortal corporations own the majority of such rights, these laws actually serve to reduce competition in the marketplace. If companies knew that their works were to enter the public domain within a reasonable period of 10 to 20 years, they would be forced to continually develop better products to stay relevant in the marketplace. This would create an atmosphere of nimble companies that are forced to release new products on a regular basis that are not simply incremental updates to existing properties.
5. With a global digital economy in mind, changes to copyright law need to consider the vast power of the internet as a medium for communication and distribution. Current licensing laws prevent many internet properties that distribute media from working to their full potential over international borders. Many sites that stream video or audio, or allow visitors to purchase media, are vastly limited in countries other than that where the site is based. To this end, copyright reforms should concentrate on breaking down international boundaries and utilizing the internet to its full potential. Furthermore, reforms should focus on doing away with laws based on digital media, and look constantly toward the future with digital distribution schemes in mind.

I would urge any Canadians who stumble upon this to check out the survey and to submit their opinions to the government. We as citizens should encourage this kind of mass public consultation whenever applicable in an effort to force our politicians to represent our interests over those of foreign lobbyist groups.

Cheers,

Jon

The Return of MC Double Def DP

Just like Queen, the Who, Led Zeppelin, and countless others, MC Double Def DP is dusting off his mic and going on tour after an almost 20 year hiatus:

Remember the original? It’s been Digitally Remastered!

I for one will be buying tickets for every show along the tour.

Ups and Downs of Audio

Lately, all of my technology seems to by systematically failing on me as if a demon sent by some higher being of tech has decided that I am no longer worthy to own and operate any of my toys. It started with a flatscreen monitor, spread to my blackberry, took out my iPod along the way, and stopped in for tea at my parent’s house, where it made enough of a mess to call me away from my own problems for a couple of days trying to fix their computers.

My room mates insist that I have a “midas’ touch” that breaks all the technology that I fool about with. I prefer to consider myself unlucky.

Blackberry Media Player

Since I never leave home without my phone, I have recently tried to reduce the amount of crap that I carry around by using my Blackberry as a media player. It has a 4GB memory card in it, and Media Monkey (my jukebox software of choice) treats it just like a USB device that can be filled up with songs from my library.

Normally, after filling the card with music, I simply launch the media application and tell it to shuffle all songs. While it starts playing, the device scans for audio files in the background and fills up a database file of some sort with information gleaned from ID3 tags.

The problems started with a refurbished device that I picked up on a warranty replacement of my original (which mysteriously started to freeze up whenever I used the camera application) – now when I load the songs onto the device, the scanning process seems to find one or two of them, and just ignore the rest. Imagine my joy after leaving the house this morning for a day at work only to find that I had a grand total of two songs available for listening on my device.

My interim solution has been to tell Media Monkey to export an m3u of the playlist that it puts on the Berry to the device. Then I can just tell the device to shuffle that list instead of waiting for the scan that doesn’t work to complete before listening to some of my media. If that doesn’t work, I’ll likely source a different media player app for the device.

Windows Media Playback

Lately, whenever I play music files on my computer (regardless of format, bitrate, or player), they pop and click as if the volume is up too high and the machine is clipping it to compensate. Increasing the amount of buffer memory that Media Monkey keeps helped, as did turning down my levels to prevent clipping; but the noises are still present in the stream.

This one truly puzzles me, as it seems to have started out of the blue, and affects all audio on the system (but not video for some reason). Nothing at the driver or hardware level has changed in recent memory, and the problem spreads across all players, formats, and bitrates, so I don’t think it’s an issue with specific software or codecs.

I’ll keep banging my head against the wall until I figure it out and get back to head banging.

Last.FM Scrobbling

On a good note, I recently decided to try playing about with Last.fm after an official scrobbling plugin was released for Media Monkey. Wow. I cannot believe that I went for so long without using this incredible website, and as a music lover, suggest that anybody who collects music start using it immediately.

The plugin is seamlessly integrated with my player, and does all the heavy lifting in the background so that I don’t even have to worry about it or run a separate app, and the site itself is pretty much astounding.

Occasionally, my music collection feels stale – even though my standard playlist has about 2500 songs in it (as selected by rating), I sometimes get bored of it and go looking for something new. Previously, I accomplished this primarily by listening to Alan Cross, comparing notes with friends, and trolling amazon.ca and wikipedia pages for information about related bands and albums. Now, last.fm allows me to click the ‘related artists’ link from any artist page, or check out it’s suggestions for stuff that I should listen to.

Consider me a convert for life.