If I owned a tape deck, when CDs came out, should I have forced them to not sell CDs and only sell tapes? No.
Could I buy a CD, and record it onto a tape? Yes. Would it be the same? No. I'd lose quality. Or, I could... go buy it on tape. Or, I could... go buy a CD player.
Substitute DRM/AAC for CD, and MP3 for tape.
DRM is the new substitute for physical medium. Nothing new to see here, people. Jeez.
DRM is the new substitute for physical medium. Nothing new to see here, people.
The parallel here is a poor one.
The difference between cassette and CD is technically vast. One couldn't possibly reasonably expect to advance technology very far or very well if innovators were held back by enforced compatibility between such different technologies. Consumers are far better off given the choice of purchasing new technologies like CD even if they are incompatible with old technologies like cassettes and LPs.
With DRM, the barriers to compatibility are completely artificial, easily surmounted, and offer no consumer benefit whatsoever. In fact, these artificial barriers serve no other purpose than to insulate business models from competition and to try to create customer lock-in.
Now, let's say that businesses have the right to play whatever little games they want to play to squeeze the consumer for a few extra bucks. (To an extent I can buy that, although I think in exchange for the socially-carried burden of risk protection afforded by incorporation, a measure of public responsibility is a fair thing to demand in return.) What they don't then have a right to expect is that mechanisms like copyright law are going to be twisted and abused to help protect them from competition.
Imagine oil companies teamed up with auto companies to try to form exclusive distribution arrangements. Exxon had one style of filling station nozzle, Sunoco and BP another, Mobile and Texaco yet another. Toyota's could only fill up at Exxon, Chevies only and Mobile and Texaco, etc., because all cars would be built to match one and only one style of nozzle.
If this situation were like DRM is today:
When you buy a car, you'd have sign agree to a EUFA (Engine Users Fueling Agreement) to only buy gasoline from authorized compatible filling stations. If you violate this agreement, anything from having your warranty cancelled to losing your car entirely is possible.
Manufacturing or importing a vehicle with a universal fuel receptacle would be illegal.
Using fueling adapters, or trying to get around fueling restrictions by using hoses and siphoning, would also be illegal, and punishable by up to five years in prison for any one violation.
Fanboys for different auto makers would scoff at people who tried to get around these fueling restrictions, saying things like, "Hey, you agreed to this when you bought your car!", "It's not like there aren't plenty of the right gas stations for you to go to!", etc.
If I owned a tape deck, when CDs came out, should I have forced them to not sell CDs and only sell tapes? No.
Could I buy a CD, and record it onto a tape? Yes. Would it be the same? No. I'd lose quality. Or, I could... go buy it on tape. Or, I could... go buy a CD player.
Substitute DRM/AAC for CD, and MP3 for tape.
DRM is the new substitute for physical medium. Nothing new to see here, people. Jeez.
That analogy sucks, and you know it. The CD brought advantages for everyone (except for certain people who, for whatever asinine reason, think digital audio is inherently worse quality than analog audio). DRM does not.
That analogy sucks, and you know it. The CD brought advantages for everyone (except for certain people who, for whatever asinine reason, think digital audio is inherently worse quality than analog audio). DRM does not.
File formats are the new advances, the DRM is the new physical media barrier.
Think about it for a minute, seriously.
Previously, advances came in new... what? Formats. Not packaging, but the data formats, and the reliability of the medium on which they were held.
Inherently, the fact that these formats came in new physical *packaging*, with new physical *requirements* kept them from being interchangeable.
Now, we have a) an expectation of perfect reliability, and b) data formats that are advancing with new features.
What's the new analog of the physical barrier? None. Nothing prevents any computer from using the new formats - write a new codec, and voila. Done. It all goes into one big interoperable pool.
Companies don't like this. Companies like the good old days of new technologies requiring new packaging... so they came up with one. DRM.
File formats are the new advances, the DRM is the new physical media barrier.
Think about it for a minute, seriously.
I've thought about this seriously for well more than a minute already.
There had to be a physical barrier between cassette playback and CD playback. The nature of the different technologies ensured that. The barrier was not gratuitously created. Apple's AAC doesn't need DRM -- it works fine without it, as can be seen when you rip your own CDs to AAC. DRM is an artificial added barrier, not an intrinsically existing barrier.
Since there have been real physical barriers in the past, do you imagine that we somehow "owe it" to creators of new digital formats that if they artificially add rough equivalent to olde-time barriers, previously enforced by the laws of physics, that these artificial barriers must be respected and enforced by the police?
We as consumers don't owe businesses any guarantees that business models which worked in the past will continue to work and be available in the future. Maybe it was a happy thing for Sony and Philips that CDs couldn't be played in cassette decks, but that was still a problem to be surmounted, not an entitlement that was owed to them by the world.
Imagine that some clever inventor had figured out a cheap adapter that would have allowed CDs to play in cassette decks, having reverse-engineered the system and without needing to step on any legitimate patents. He'd probably have become rich. He'd have been hailed as a great innovator in his own right.
Of course, Sony and Philips would have been hurt. And so f*cking what!
Those are the risks of doing business. There are no guarantees that hard work and capital investment will pay off. Isn't that what the rough and tumble world of capitalism is supposed to be? Aren't we so often told that those who become rich deserve it for being such bold, daring risk takers?
To be against breaking down some of the excesses of DRM and against major reform of laws like the DMCA is like saying that what my hypothetical CD/cassette adapter inventor did should have been illegal and instead of becoming rich he should have been thrown in jail. How dare he do something so... so... competitive! Yeah, how dare he compete in a free market, save consumers lots of money, and hurt everything Sony and Philips worked so hard for!
Fat cats need sweetheart laws, the best laws money can by, to avert awful tragedies like that!
DRM is supposed to be about CONTENT protection. Content protection is the justification behind the legal framework supporting DRM. If you've got a DRM-protected, AAC-encoded Britney Spears song (there's no accounting for taste) the ostensible purpose of the DRM is to make sure that Ms. Spears and her records company are properly (over-)compensated for their hard work bringing you such fine entertainment, and to provide incentive to Spears and company to keep making more and more of the same for all of us to consume.
DRM is NOT there to protect the AAC encoding process, and it's not there to protect iPod sales. If breaking DRM is even to be considered illegal at all, the only good argument for illegality is that it puts the CONTENT of a DRM-protected song at risk for piracy, not that it threatens the business model of the DRM-provider.
"1. Shouldn't they also send a letter to every music download store in Norway that uses DRM, since those stores also do not allow consumers to freely use their legally purchased music "
They are looking into it. Apple is the first to feel the legal heat because they are the biggest player.
Quote:
Well, it's not healthy for any one company (MS) to have such dominant share in the computer market. I don't see Norway saying that MS should opt for interoperability.
" "We think that the contract we've had with Microsoft has in reality given them a monopoly in a field where we're better off getting competition." So the position is that Norway has opened up the field for competition to Microsoft, rather than kicking Microsoft out as such."
shetline... in no way am I saying that this is necessarily a *good* thing, just that DRM is the new barrier between systems that the physical format used to be.
We all took that for granted, and didn't see any big deal about it, and worked around it. Companies didn't *like* but didn't pursue teens recording CDs onto tape, or making mix tapes because it was obvious that the quality degraded... if you wanted a good copy, you bought it. That was that extra incentive to buying it - quality.
Now we have DRM AAC, and if you want to break the DRM by making a lower quality copy, you can. In fact, it's specifically left as a loophole around the DRM in iTunes. Again, it comes down to the incentive for buying is quality.
I wasn't making a value judgment on the situation, just observing something that I hadn't thought of before - we used to have physical barriers in media formats, and the corporations are trying to replicate that with DRM. That's all.
Comments
If I owned a tape deck, when CDs came out, should I have forced them to not sell CDs and only sell tapes? No.
Could I buy a CD, and record it onto a tape? Yes. Would it be the same? No. I'd lose quality. Or, I could... go buy it on tape. Or, I could... go buy a CD player.
Substitute DRM/AAC for CD, and MP3 for tape.
DRM is the new substitute for physical medium. Nothing new to see here, people. Jeez.
Originally posted by Kickaha
DRM is the new substitute for physical medium. Nothing new to see here, people.
The parallel here is a poor one.
The difference between cassette and CD is technically vast. One couldn't possibly reasonably expect to advance technology very far or very well if innovators were held back by enforced compatibility between such different technologies. Consumers are far better off given the choice of purchasing new technologies like CD even if they are incompatible with old technologies like cassettes and LPs.
With DRM, the barriers to compatibility are completely artificial, easily surmounted, and offer no consumer benefit whatsoever. In fact, these artificial barriers serve no other purpose than to insulate business models from competition and to try to create customer lock-in.
Now, let's say that businesses have the right to play whatever little games they want to play to squeeze the consumer for a few extra bucks. (To an extent I can buy that, although I think in exchange for the socially-carried burden of risk protection afforded by incorporation, a measure of public responsibility is a fair thing to demand in return.) What they don't then have a right to expect is that mechanisms like copyright law are going to be twisted and abused to help protect them from competition.
Imagine oil companies teamed up with auto companies to try to form exclusive distribution arrangements. Exxon had one style of filling station nozzle, Sunoco and BP another, Mobile and Texaco yet another. Toyota's could only fill up at Exxon, Chevies only and Mobile and Texaco, etc., because all cars would be built to match one and only one style of nozzle.
If this situation were like DRM is today:
When you buy a car, you'd have sign agree to a EUFA (Engine Users Fueling Agreement) to only buy gasoline from authorized compatible filling stations. If you violate this agreement, anything from having your warranty cancelled to losing your car entirely is possible.
Manufacturing or importing a vehicle with a universal fuel receptacle would be illegal.
Using fueling adapters, or trying to get around fueling restrictions by using hoses and siphoning, would also be illegal, and punishable by up to five years in prison for any one violation.
Fanboys for different auto makers would scoff at people who tried to get around these fueling restrictions, saying things like, "Hey, you agreed to this when you bought your car!", "It's not like there aren't plenty of the right gas stations for you to go to!", etc.
Originally posted by Kickaha
This is getting silly.
If I owned a tape deck, when CDs came out, should I have forced them to not sell CDs and only sell tapes? No.
Could I buy a CD, and record it onto a tape? Yes. Would it be the same? No. I'd lose quality. Or, I could... go buy it on tape. Or, I could... go buy a CD player.
Substitute DRM/AAC for CD, and MP3 for tape.
DRM is the new substitute for physical medium. Nothing new to see here, people. Jeez.
That analogy sucks, and you know it. The CD brought advantages for everyone (except for certain people who, for whatever asinine reason, think digital audio is inherently worse quality than analog audio). DRM does not.
Originally posted by Chucker
That analogy sucks, and you know it. The CD brought advantages for everyone (except for certain people who, for whatever asinine reason, think digital audio is inherently worse quality than analog audio). DRM does not.
File formats are the new advances, the DRM is the new physical media barrier.
Think about it for a minute, seriously.
Previously, advances came in new... what? Formats. Not packaging, but the data formats, and the reliability of the medium on which they were held.
Inherently, the fact that these formats came in new physical *packaging*, with new physical *requirements* kept them from being interchangeable.
Now, we have a) an expectation of perfect reliability, and b) data formats that are advancing with new features.
What's the new analog of the physical barrier? None. Nothing prevents any computer from using the new formats - write a new codec, and voila. Done. It all goes into one big interoperable pool.
Companies don't like this. Companies like the good old days of new technologies requiring new packaging... so they came up with one. DRM.
DRM is the new packaging.
Originally posted by bikertwin
Silly boy, consumers/voters who lie down and play dead are the ones who get, well, you know.
You can write congress all day, it will not do a fuck worth of good unless your check is bigger than the RIAAs...and it clears...
Originally posted by Kickaha
File formats are the new advances, the DRM is the new physical media barrier.
Think about it for a minute, seriously.
I've thought about this seriously for well more than a minute already.
There had to be a physical barrier between cassette playback and CD playback. The nature of the different technologies ensured that. The barrier was not gratuitously created. Apple's AAC doesn't need DRM -- it works fine without it, as can be seen when you rip your own CDs to AAC. DRM is an artificial added barrier, not an intrinsically existing barrier.
Since there have been real physical barriers in the past, do you imagine that we somehow "owe it" to creators of new digital formats that if they artificially add rough equivalent to olde-time barriers, previously enforced by the laws of physics, that these artificial barriers must be respected and enforced by the police?
We as consumers don't owe businesses any guarantees that business models which worked in the past will continue to work and be available in the future. Maybe it was a happy thing for Sony and Philips that CDs couldn't be played in cassette decks, but that was still a problem to be surmounted, not an entitlement that was owed to them by the world.
Imagine that some clever inventor had figured out a cheap adapter that would have allowed CDs to play in cassette decks, having reverse-engineered the system and without needing to step on any legitimate patents. He'd probably have become rich. He'd have been hailed as a great innovator in his own right.
Of course, Sony and Philips would have been hurt. And so f*cking what!
Those are the risks of doing business. There are no guarantees that hard work and capital investment will pay off. Isn't that what the rough and tumble world of capitalism is supposed to be? Aren't we so often told that those who become rich deserve it for being such bold, daring risk takers?
To be against breaking down some of the excesses of DRM and against major reform of laws like the DMCA is like saying that what my hypothetical CD/cassette adapter inventor did should have been illegal and instead of becoming rich he should have been thrown in jail. How dare he do something so... so... competitive! Yeah, how dare he compete in a free market, save consumers lots of money, and hurt everything Sony and Philips worked so hard for!
Fat cats need sweetheart laws, the best laws money can by, to avert awful tragedies like that!
DRM is supposed to be about CONTENT protection. Content protection is the justification behind the legal framework supporting DRM. If you've got a DRM-protected, AAC-encoded Britney Spears song (there's no accounting for taste) the ostensible purpose of the DRM is to make sure that Ms. Spears and her records company are properly (over-)compensated for their hard work bringing you such fine entertainment, and to provide incentive to Spears and company to keep making more and more of the same for all of us to consume.
DRM is NOT there to protect the AAC encoding process, and it's not there to protect iPod sales. If breaking DRM is even to be considered illegal at all, the only good argument for illegality is that it puts the CONTENT of a DRM-protected song at risk for piracy, not that it threatens the business model of the DRM-provider.
Originally posted by mark2005
I just read the letter.
"1. Shouldn't they also send a letter to every music download store in Norway that uses DRM, since those stores also do not allow consumers to freely use their legally purchased music "
They are looking into it. Apple is the first to feel the legal heat because they are the biggest player.
Well, it's not healthy for any one company (MS) to have such dominant share in the computer market. I don't see Norway saying that MS should opt for interoperability.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/07...ches_contract/
" "We think that the contract we've had with Microsoft has in reality given them a monopoly in a field where we're better off getting competition." So the position is that Norway has opened up the field for competition to Microsoft, rather than kicking Microsoft out as such."
We all took that for granted, and didn't see any big deal about it, and worked around it. Companies didn't *like* but didn't pursue teens recording CDs onto tape, or making mix tapes because it was obvious that the quality degraded... if you wanted a good copy, you bought it. That was that extra incentive to buying it - quality.
Now we have DRM AAC, and if you want to break the DRM by making a lower quality copy, you can. In fact, it's specifically left as a loophole around the DRM in iTunes. Again, it comes down to the incentive for buying is quality.
I wasn't making a value judgment on the situation, just observing something that I hadn't thought of before - we used to have physical barriers in media formats, and the corporations are trying to replicate that with DRM. That's all.