DRM News

From the EFF:

This document collects reported cases where the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA have been invoked not against pirates, but against consumers, scientists, and legitimate competitors. It will be updated from time to time as additional cases come to light. The latest version can always be obtained at EFF.org.

Many thanks to PCWorld for this article.

Microsoft last week told former MSN Music customers that it would no longer support the DRM licenses for tracks bought through the failed music sales portal. The news meant customers would lose the ability to play the music they own once their existing computers ceased to function.

The EFF is demanding Microsoft issue and apology and a refund to its customers. It also insists the company should "Ensure that all MSN Music buyers have (or have permanent access to) receipts identifying dates, amounts, and titles purchased, so they have proofs of purchase,: in case of any future problems proving they own their tracks. EFF also wants Microsoft to work to eliminate DRM from the Zune music catalogue in order to ensure customers don't have to suffer such inconvenience and loss again.

Much thanks to ZeroPaid for interviewing Russell McOrmond. In the last installment of this interview, McOrmond gives a poignant summary of how the mess of DRM came about. In addition to the history lesson, McOrmond points out a flaw in how most people think of digital rights management and how this shortsightedness allows device DRM (rather than content DRM) to harm consumers.

In my opinion the key to the discussion isn't how much content is encoded in formats that tie people to specific access technology, but how many people are using technology that is locked down by the vendor where the owner is not allowed (legally and technologically) to unlock it.

To see where we are in this battle, we only need to look at the cell phone market. More and more people are moving more of their computing off of desktops and onto mobile platforms. These platforms are locked down to disallow their owners to be in control of them. If anything, I see this harm on the rise, not on the decline.

The more people look at "DRM" as something that is only applied to content, rather than primarily something applied to our devices, the more they will simply miss the debate entirely.

Most of the presidential candidates have taken a middle-of-the-road stance about DRM, which leaves me with little confidence that digital rights management issues will be on anyone's platform. The only candidate that stood out with any marked pro-consumer leanings was Edwards, who specifically stated a preference for full disclosure of DRM terms for customers. Clinton expressed support for reviewing the DMCA, but without a distinction for which way she leaned.

In interviews with computer and technology weblog CNet, candidates were asked about digital rights management (DRM), technology-based solutions for preventing copyright infringement of digital content. Democrats largely took the stance that a balance must be struck between protecting the copyright of content owners and protecting the fair use rights of consumers.

Clinton stated that she would support a “review of a range of issues related to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act insofar as it did not concern degrading copyright protections or encourage copyright infringements.”

Edwards said that “intellectual property laws and regulations should better balance the industry’s legitimate concerns over piracy with common-sense consumer freedoms,” and called for government to encourage full disclosure of freedoms and restrictions on digital content, so that consumers might be better informed before making a purchase.

My thanks to Intellectual Property Watch for the summary. Link.

Press Release Link

Amazon.com today announced that in 2008 the company will begin an international rollout of Amazon MP3, Amazon's DRM-free MP3 digital music store where every song is playable on virtually any digital music-capable device...

Launched on Amazon.com in September 2007, Amazon MP3 offers Earth's Biggest Selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads, which now includes over 3.3 million songs from more than 270,000 artists. Every song and album in the Amazon MP3 music download store is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software and is encoded at 256 kbps to deliver high audio quality.

Our original content website, www.DRMBlog.com, has received a long-overdue update, It Has Been a While.

But here we are, quickly coming up on the three year anniversary of DRM Blog, and it seems appropriate to take a look back at what has happened in that time. Since starting this site lots of things have changed in the DRM world so I thought I would give you my perspective on the state of things.

Link

Copyright law was conceived when only a few people had the ability to mass-produce intellectual property. Computers and the Internet, however, have opened a whole new can of worms, allowing almost anyone to copy almost anything and distribute it widely. Instead of relying on the enforcement of copyright laws, more and more industries are relying on such technologies as encryption to protect their content.

In his first book, "Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture" (MIT Press), Tarleton Gillespie, Cornell assistant professor of communication and information science, explores the profound political, economic and cultural implications of using "technical copy protection" to do the work that copyright laws did before the digital age.

In his first chapter, which serves as an introduction to the book and is available online in full, Gillespie writes that his book looks beyond standard legal critiques of copyright by exploring recent theories of technology, communication and culture to consider broader ramifications. Digital copyright, he says, is the perfect place to look at how we use the mechanisms of law, technology and the marketplace to structure cultural expression, and how the outcomes of today's controversies concerning digital copyright will largely shape the future of digital culture.

A victory! We have been saying for a long time that we would be more than willing to pay a little extra for DRM-free music and/or higher quality music. Thank you, EMI. Just, thank you.Link.

Record label EMI and Apple have reached an agreement that allows Apple's iTunes store to carry a significant portion of EMI's music catalog without Digital Rights Management [DRM] restrictions. The new DRM-free AAC files will sell for a premium price, $1.29 a song, allowing that music to be played on many third-party music players, not just iPods. For those who don't want to pay for the higher quality or lack of DRM, the same songs will be available including Apple's Fairplay DRM for $0.99. Buyers who purchase albums will automatically get the higher quality versions without DRM.

Link.

Following the Norwegian consumer ombudsman's ruling last week that Apple iTune's lack of inter­operability with devices other than its own iPod is illegal, Germany's federal consumer protection association, the VZBV, and the Dutch consumer protection agency, along with Finland and France, have joined a continent-wide move to get Apple to change its coding restrictions.

In France, Que Choisir, the consumer association, advocates an even more radical approach to that of Norway, arguing that any use of digital rights management was against consumers' interests.

The French group is in the middle of a court case against Apple, after scoring a legal victory this month against Sony France, which operates a similar closed system tying music downloads to its own players.

Digital rights management and the lack of inter-operability has been blamed for slowing growth in legal digital downloads. Independent record labels sell their music in unprotected MP3 format, while EMI has started to experiment, recently releasing a Norah Jones single without DRM.

Link.

The copy protection technology used by Blu-ray discs has been cracked by the same hacker who broke the DRM technology of rival HD DVD discs last month. The coder known as muslix64 used much the same plain text attack in both cases. By reading a key held in memory by a player playing a HD DVD disc he was able to decrypt the movie been played and render it as an MPEG 2 file.

The hack sidesteps, rather than defeats, the AACS encryption used as part of the content protection technology used by both next-generation DVD formats. The approach relies on obtaining a particular movie's unique "key" and can't therefore be trivially replicated to rip content across all titles encoded via a particular format, as tools like DVD Decryptor make easy with standard DVD titles.

BD+, the second type of content protection on Blu-ray, is yet to fall by crackers but this is something of a moot point today as the technology is yet to be widely applied on discs.

Link.

In addition to accessing Youtube content, the device also allows users to play digital music files, including music purchased from the iTunes store and that is protected by Apple's Fairplay digital rights management (DRM) technology. Streaming iTunes content is available only for legally acquired content on computers running Windows.

The Apple Fairplay option is remarkable because Apple doesn't support its DRM on third party appliances. The company claimed that proprietary technology allows it to transfer the music, but declined to provide any details. One possible scenario to transfer the music would be to stream the actual audio signal from iTunes directly to the media adapter, thereby evading the DRM.

Link.

Sony has come to the digital TV party, finally combining a DVD recorder, hard drive and digital tuner in one device.

Sony's RDRHXD760 HDD/DVD recorder sports a standard definition TV tuner, a dual-layer DVD burner and a 160GB hard drive holding up to 249 hours of recordings, which equates to 67 hours in Standard Play mode.

That's the half-glass-full view of this recorder but, when reviewing these kinds of devices, I find the glass-half-empty approach to be far more telling. Firstly, the RDRHXD760 has only one tuner and it's only standard definition. Two tuners would let you watch one channel while recording another, or even record two programs at once. Sony sells a twin HD tuner digital recorder, but it doesn't have a DVD burner so you can't archive your recordings. Some HDD/DVD recorders have one analogue and one digital tuner - like Philips' Cineos DVDR9000H - but frustratingly it won't let you watch one tuner while recording from the other, or record two programs at once.

Link.

A fresh crop of lawsuits filed on behalf of individuals argue that it's the big companies that are ripping off the consumer.

Tucker's suit comes on the heels of a March, 2006 class action filed by Scott Ruth against music industry players including Sony BMG Music Entertainment (owned by Sony (SNE) and Bertelsmann Media), Universal Music Group, Time Warner Music Group (TWX), and EMI (EMI). Ruth, an Arizona resident, argues that the labels are violating antitrust agreements by using DRM to prevent music from being sold by a variety of retailers, thereby stifling competition that could keep prices down. Both Ruth and Tucker's suits seek compensation for music download customers as well as a change in the restrictions...

What's more, eMusic has seen steady growth. It is now the No. 2 music service after iTunes, based on volume of songs sold (Apple sells about 1.8 million songs a day). On average, eMusic customers buy 20 songs a month, spending about $168 a year on songs, says Pakman. The average iPod owner buys fewer than 15 songs a year per owned iPod (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/21/06, "Online Music's Elusive Bottom Line").

Pakman sees the number of songs his customers buy as evidence that songs can be progressively priced in a way that reflects demand for particular songs and discourages piracy. Elliott Breece, co-founder and CEO of Amie Street, concurs.

Songs at Amie Street start free and then become gradually more expensive as they start to sell. Prices are capped at 98 cents, a penny less than the price for each iTunes song. Amie Street has sold more than 70,000 songs since its October launch. Breece says that Amie Street wouldn't be able to compete if users couldn't download songs and play them wherever they wanted. "People want to buy and own stuff," says Breece. "In a lot of ways DRM isn't really natural."

Link.

Version 3 of the General Public License has proposed a Digital Rights Management provision and other optional restrictions that some open source developers don't like.

MySQL AG is changing its approach to GPL licensing so that the company isn't required to upgrade its popular open-source database to GPL 3 when it becomes available later this year.

Kaj Arno, MySQL's VP of community relations, said in a posting on his blog in late December that the copyright notice in the MySQL source code will change from stating the code is covered by "either GPL Version 2 or later" licenses to "GPL Version 2 only."

The move reflects the hesitation in the open-source community to embrace the next version of the General Public License, being drafted by the Free Software Foundation's Eben Moglen.

Link.

Not only are Vista and associated new business products bound to raise hackles on DRM and other fronts, it would appear Microsoft was not really all that well prepared even to help customers buy the software.

One reader buying Office 2007 Pro Plus under his company's volume license agreement was left empty-handed after paying his money...Ultimately the reader did discover the download procedure, but only after talking to what seemed like half the people in Redmond. "It appears that since we have a corporate Select level A agreement with Microsoft, and that our CIO is in charge of our program, I needed to go to licensing.microsoft.com and request access to my agreement, which then sends an e-mail to my CIO, who happened to be out for two weeks, requesting the access. Then, after he granted my access, I could see the agreements, but still could not download anything. I called Microsoft and found someone who knows what is going on who walked me through getting the download access. What sucks is that over several days I had about five hours total time lost trying to get this software because Microsoft was clueless."