Posts by David Hamilton
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I personally think someone some where can come up with a completely incontinent and uncrackable way to deliver music. yes you could put a mic up to the speaker and re digitise it but that would be the same as a cam video on bit torrent.
Completely uncrackable could be possibly using current encryption methods, but redigitising with a decent setup would suffer almost no degradation in quality, not even close to the same category as a theatre capture vs dvd rip. Particularly since your device would presumably have a wire at some point carrying the analog signal to the speakers, in which case you just plug it straight in to the line in/preamp - no microphone necessary.
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Actually I'm not specifically anti DRM, but as a software developer and music enthusiast I can't see how it can ever work in a flexible enough way. Giving a song to a mate is legitimate use I think, beneficial to the artist. I could see having a problem with sharing up whole albums though.
The crux of my argument is that DRM is irrelevant, cumbersome, has failed in its purpose and will never be able to succeed. It's time to come up with something better, something that allows consumers their accustomed level of control over media while not shortchanging the artists. DRM ain't it.
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A quote from the conclusion (source above):
It's often said that it's hard to compete with free, and that may be true for some segments of the population. (Are college kids ever really going to cough up much cash?) But for most adults who don't get off on breaking the law or on stiffing artists, it's easy enough to compete with free. Make something that's faster, more reliable, with better metadata and album art, and a huge DRM-free selection. Throw in charts, some editorial staff, and some community features, and money is there to be made.
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apparently you do get to choose as with the example I gave you with logic audio and the DRM on their software. essentially uncrackable, dongle only or it doesn't work.
I've been pretty careful to say "digital media" in my posts, because you're absolutely right, there are some pretty robust (but not foolproof) DRM systems for software out there. But there is a difference between something that executes on a specific hardware platform and a piece of digital media that can be played on a huge number of devices with different hardware and operating systems.
So you'd be quite happy with DRM that allowed you to do all of that but stopped you from distributing digital media to your friends?
No way, I want to be able to say to my mate, hey check out this cool song, and put it on his iPod or whatever. I'm honestly not sure where this feeling of entitlement comes from, but any restriction that interferes with my common usage seems unreasonably draconean to me. I am happy to pay, happy to support and contribute to artists in response to their efforts. But I'm not happy to be restricted in the myriad of creative ways I can think of to enjoy that media. The exception is if I wanted to make money off someones IP, in which case I feel quite strongly about them being happy with the circumstances/remuneration.
And what you want and what you can have are different things...
No they aren't - I can already have what I want. For free. From the internet. You don't get to choose a technically illegal ISP that will give you all the freedom you want. I get to choose between DRM free and DRM bound media.
Sorry for the long post, to finish here is a good article from Arstechnica in to go with the herald one.
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This from the herald this morning
"Illegally downloaded tracks now outnumber legally bought music tracks by 20 to 1, the international trade body said today".
But the overall market is down only around 10%, so it seems like many of those 20 lead to a purchase.
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Why do you specifically want it to be rights management free?
don't you just ant it to be rights managed in a transparent way that doesn't infringe on you the rightful owners use of it? or do you specifically want to be able to pirate it if you chose?What I'm saying is that you don't get to choose. In this day and age, if it's any good your publicly available media *will* be available digitally, non DRM to anyone who wants to open the relevant app. Someone will do the work to make it happen. Therefore, selling your stuff has to be as easy as acquiring pirated versions and with about the same level of restriction.
Today I expect to be able to play a song I buy on my iPod, stereo, computer, off a USB stick in my car stereo. I want to format shift it however I need to accomplish this. I want to be in control of how I use the media, and the more restrictions placed on how I use it, the more disillusioned I will become and the less likely I am to experience it.
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Robbery, some of your arguments seem to ignore the fact that digital media is dead easy to share. So yes, you can make extracting the digital media difficult, so that it is easier for your average joe to buy it. That doesn't stop your average geek from creating a digital version and making it available for all and sundry.
it was a short sighted and massive mistake to share mediums with computer data in the first place. it all might have played out a lot differently if every computer didn't have a drive that also read CDs.
At least until file sharing became popular, then it wouldn't have mattered how shared the mediums were. DRM has failed and will always fail. I don't dispute that an artist deserves their rights managed in some fashion. But it's not going to happen with digital media.
I think the way forward is to make paying for and accessing very high quality, DRM free, ubiquitously playable media so blindingly easy that you'd be foolish to open your bittorrent client.
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FYI Russel that drug ad link has an extra " at the end. And the message looks to be that taking drugs will get you invited to the parties with the best looking people. Ah, if only that ad had been around when I was a teenager...
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I think the DRM or not has nothing to do with popularity. its promotion and hype. weather its easily stealable or not is beside the point. if your audience is people who routinely don't pay for the product then you better get another audience, or stop them taking it without payment. put a security guard on the door of the dairy, so to speak.
Your audience is already people who routinely don't pay for the product. Stopping them taking it without payment will just stop them taking it. Until someone gets a non DRM version and then they will go back to taking it. As many people have said, the chicken has long ago flown the coop. DRM is not the answer - you may as well stop at after the first word of the acronym, after "digital" the chances of effectively managing the rights in regards that piece of media are slim indeed.
I've been enjoying reading other possible approaches to rewarding artists and labels for their efforts. The licensing fee idea, where you treat it like a venue or radio station and people pay for it by virtue of having the internet is an interesting one. Although the metric you use for parceling out the $$ might be hard to agree on. Certainly you wont know the number of plays without lots of draconian big brother software. There is downloads and streamed plays like I believe APRA uses, but then there's P2P and leeching screwing that one up.
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Something I really like that Robert Louis Stevenson said:
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change - that monstrous, consuming EGO of ours being, for the nonce, struck out.
Which is a long winded way of saying that I completely agree with Jackie saying
Don't cringe away, ever, from your female perspective.
but for a different reason. I love reading things from all sorts of perspectives. I think when you read something, whether it is a fiction book or a blog post you are in a sense becoming the intended audience, which is often similar to the author themselves. Sometimes that involves an uncomfortable shift in how you think, or how you perceive certain issues. I think that this can't help but be a good thing. I really enjoy PA for the voices that aren't similar to my own.