That’s the problem with technology geeks today – sometimes they get so carried away by the possibilities that they fail to see the utter stupidity of doing everything just because it can be done. And then they wonder why nobody takes them seriously anymore. So unless Michael suddenly claims that his article was some kind of satire (it doesn’t sound like one and given the enthusiastic comments by his readers, I doubt they thought it was – and I worry a little bit about the world I live in…), his future articles, no matter how good, will mean a lot less to me. Good thing TechCrunch has a few authors who appear to be more in touch with the real world…

This is all coming waaaay later than I would have expected, but at least it is finally happening. I have been critical of DRM for years and at least in the music sector, we now finally seem to get rid of it. That of course doesn’t help people who already bought songs on iTunes before – Apple charge a hefty 30 Cents per song to “upgrade” them to a non-DRM format. Which is probably all going to the labels, who seem to have found a great way to charge twice for music people have already bought. Techcrunch even calls it a “$1.8 Billion music tax”, which is not all that far from the truth.

Unfortunately, now that it has taken the music industry a decade to come to its senses, it’s safe to assume that it will take the rest of the media industry another 5 years at least until they also finally come to the conclusion that DRM is a failed concept that will not help them sell more copies of their digital goods. But I’m convinced that it will happen eventually. Until then, the only thing we can do is give as much support to the small niche-providers of DRM-free media as possible. And keep complaining… and breaking DRM schemes to prove that any media that can still be played back can and will be broken (just to clarify: I do not support piracy, but I do support the right of the individual who purchased a movie to format shift and play it on whichever device they choose).

Update: Finally… it took longer than expected, but today (Jan. 7th) at 1:29pm I finally got my first spam email. Well actually it was caught by the spam filter, but it was the first time the address was used.

At the time EMI started experimenting with DRM-free downloads, many music industry executives were still thinking of such a move as suicidal. It seems they have pretty much all come around by now. Amazon now has (at least in the U.S.) a huge selection of music in MP3 format and they are planning on expanding that to other countries later this year, which means I will finally get to download all that music that so far I had to buy on CDs and rip.

So what happened? Did the music industry cave in to consumer pressure? Did they finally realize that DRM isn’t going to help them in the long run? One might be tempted to think so, but I think the truth is that they have started to see DRM-free music as a business opportunity. iTunes Music Store was in a position to pretty much dictate how much the music industry could charge for a download and they “stubbornly” refused to sell music for more than 99 Cents. But the industry wanted tiered pricing. The only way to make that possible was to provide an alternative that would still play on the majority of devices – and Apple’s iPod is the market’s leading portable music player, but it only supports Apple’s DRM, which they won’t license to third party music stores. But of course it plays DRM-free MP3 files. So in order to enable other downloadable music stores and break Apple’s quasi-monopoly in the downloadable-music market, the music industry had to bite the bullet and do away with DRM. They didn’t like it (although they may start to notice that it’s not hurting them the way they feared it would), but once the first two major labels had started, there really was no turning back. And you can see that it’s working the way the music industry wants by looking at the pricing at Amazon – there it is, the tiered pricing model the music industry wanted, where they can charge more for their “top tracks” and less for old archive material. It’s not a generous move by the music industry and they were thinking more of themselves than of the consumers – but still we benefit from it and have no reason to complain.

In the long run, the price for downloadable music may go down towards zero – advertising based business models are starting to emerge already. The music industry certainly can’t sit back and relax just yet – actually, their time may be over pretty soon, as the internet enables artists to take distribution into their own hands and already even some major artists have opted for non-traditional ways of distribution. If they go out of business, they will have to blame themselves – for too long they tried to keep up a way of doing business that was contrary to what customers were expecting. You can’t treat your customers that way for very long or they will find the solutions they were looking for from somebody else. If the music industry hadn’t focused on “going to war” with their customers instead of producing the solutions they were looking for, the situation would look very differently today.

Technorati : Amazon, Apple, DRM, EMI, digital music, iTunes, major labels, music industry

This is exciting news indeed – regular readers know that I have explained more than once why DRM is not a good idea and will hurt our cultural heritage as well as the music industry’s bottom line in the long run. Let’s hope that this is the beginning of the end of DRM – EMI is only the third largest label, but if this is a success (and my prediction is that it will be), the others will have to follow suit. And there is hope that what works in the music industry might work in the movie download business as well.

Why is this a good idea for EMI and won’t it hurt their sales figures? I believe that it’s a good idea because finally consumers are given a choice. So far, illegal downloads have provided a better user experience than legal downloads – it was always possible to freely copy illegally downloaded music, burn it to as many CDs as the user wanted, use it on many different digital devices etc., whereas DRM prevented a lot of legitimate uses. I resorted to buying CDs, others may have just downloaded DRM-free tracks from illegal sources. Now, for the first time, will I even consider buying downloadable music – and chances are that EMI will have most of what I’m looking for because many bands I like are with christian labels that are part of EMI’s christian music group. I personally wish EMI a lot of success with their smart move, which many in the industry may see as bold and some even as suicidal.

Technorati : Apple, DRM, EMI, iTunes, legal downloads

I’ve written a few times about the pitfalls of DRM in general and especially the dangers to our cultural heritage. If the major labels do see the kind of success they are hoping for with this and we will see more DRM-free releases in the future, there is still some hope. After all, MP3 is a pretty well documented standard and we’ll always be able to write players for that, even on hardware that hasn’t even been invented yet. So let’s hope and give every encouragement we can to trials like this.

Technorati : DRM, EMI, MP3, dowload, music

There is one noticeable problem with the service at the moment – it only displays the URL and a screenshot of a suspected site. If I want to look at the sites and determine which are genuine and which are phishing sites, it would be much more helpful to have the email that the URL came in available as well. Voting can be difficult if there is only a screenshot to look at – the whole point of running phishing sites is to make it look genuine, the email might be the thing that tips the scales when I need to make the distinction between a legitimate and a fraudulent site. So hopefully at some point, there will be an option to see the email together with the URL before voting on it.

But I like the idea of a reputation based service and the way it’s been implemented makes a good first impression. This could really become yet another way of combating phishing – now what’s needed is a simple way to get the results of this service to those end-users who are unlikely to even worry much about phishing. If it gains enough momentum to be included in browsers or used by ISPs, it could become a really useful tool.

Technorati : email, internet, opendns, phishing, phishtank, security

The full text of the decision is now available here for those of you that can read German and it is an interesting read. The court clarifies that licensing source code under the GPL does not mean the author of the code is waiving all his rights under copyright law. §4 of the GPL, that specifically prohibits distribution of the software in violation of the conditions set forth by the GPL, is fully valid under german law and D-Link thus had no right to distribute the device in question. D-Link had argued that the provisions of the GPL violate competition laws and cannot be enforced. The court stated that even if that was true (and it didn’t have to decide on that claim), then D-Link would have had no right at all to use the source code because an invalid license would also have voided the right to use it under its terms.

D-Link, in a statement that I find rather funny, said they are not going to appeal the ruling and praised themselves for not settling the case, so that now the GPL has been properly tested in court and can be relied on. They are certainly putting a good spin on their stubbornness .

Technorati : D-Link, GPL, Germany, copyright, court, license