Blackmoor Vituperative

Recent weeks have brought major changes in the music industry and a major victory in our battle against DRM. First Steve Jobs pledged to drop DRM if major labels would let him. We held his feet to the fire with over six thousand people signing an open letter to Jobs asking him to back his pledge! Apple and EMI then announced that the iTunes Music Store would sell EMI tracks without DRM, and this has been followed by similar announcements from other online music stores and retailers.

Other labels have publicly stated that they will maintain DRM and have criticized Apple and EMI, but this week brought news that Universal may be opening up some of their catalog to DRM free sales.

Warner Music, one of the Big Four labels, hasn’t budged in their opposition. After the EMI announcement they even suggested a hostile takeover of EMI to prevent the music from becoming available without DRM. Just this week Warner filed a lawsuit against AnywhereCD.com to stop them from distributing MP3s of Warner’s music to customers who buy the CD.

We think that Warner needs a wake up call.

(from DefectiveByDesign.org, Warner Music Wake Up Call)

Yep.

Apple and EMI have agreed to come out with a “premium” music service that permits downloads of songs without the intrusion of the Digital Rights Mafia. As part of the deal, the cost per song will increase by 30%.

So let me get this straight. The record distributor saves a ton of cash because they are no longer chasing the DRM windmill, Apple saves money because they no longer have to regularly patch their software to keep up with people who find ways around the obnoxious DRM entanglements… and they are going to charge more for it.

I suppose in the long run, it’s a good thing. Once DRM is dead and buried, the law of the market will kick in and competition will force prices down. At least in theory. Unfortunately, the American music industry is currently dominated by the Big Four cartel, so the market pressure will have a hard time pushing prices down.

eWeek reports that the Digital Rights Mafia is still bitching and moaning about how digital music is slowly replacing CDs, even though people still buy 10 times as many CDs as they download. The media robber barons blame so-called “pirates” — which is to say, their customers. They ought to look closer to home.

As long as the Big Four music labels and the Digital Rights Mafia insist on infecting their products with DRM, people aren’t going to buy it. Even Steve Jobs has finally realized what many of us knew back when he was pushing DRM in 2003 — that DRM is a colossal waste of time and money.

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

(from Apple.com, Thoughts On Music)

When the Digital Rights Mafia gives up on their jihad against their customers, maybe they’ll realize it, too. Then we’ll all win.

Don’t hold your breath.

A story over at InformationWeek raised our hackles a bit with the headline “Copyright Protection A Boom Business” followed by the summary saying, “Cracking down on piracy contributed to 6.6% of the U.S. gross domestic product in 2006, according to an industry lobbying group.” Just sounds like more typically inflated and ridiculous claims about piracy that regularly stream out from the content industry, which then get presented to legislators as reasons why we need more laws to bolster their aging business models. Just one problem, though: the facts of the story don’t support the headline at all.

(from Techdirt, Copy Protection A ‘Boom Business’, Except When It Isn’t)

Just more lies from the Digital Rights Mafia.

While Sony BMG already settled the class action lawsuit against it for their rootkit malware that opened up security holes on computers that were difficult to fix and hidden in a way that made them difficult to find, there was also an investigation to see if the rootkits violated federal law — and as I have been saying since Day 1, they did. The company has reached an agreement with the FTC, and unlike the typical agreement where a company “doesn’t admit guilt,” in this case Sony BMG clearly states that they violated federal law with the rootkits, and will reimburse people up to $150 if their computers were damaged by the software.

Why the hell aren’t these people in jail, barred from using computers for years, and so on, like any other hacker? Because most hackers don’t have millions to spend on their defense, that’s why. If you think the law is applied equally to everyone, this is your wake-up call. (Although if you really needed that wake-up call, you have other problems.)

I loved tonight’s Fantasmo. It was simply awesome to see The Abominable Dr. Phibes on the big screen.

I was looking for information on the music used in Dr. Phibes when I stumbled across this excellent article about it; check it out.

Interesting note: Somewhere Over The Rainbow was not the only anachronistic song in the movie (The Abominable Dr. Phibes is set in 1929). The song One For My Baby (And One More For The Road) was not released until 1947. I did not know that.

Ah, and here is another Dr. Phibes article worth reading.

I stumbled across this video on YouTube earlier today. I loved this song, and I loved this video, and I was really happy to find it again. It is from back in the 20th century, when MTV used to play music videos.

It’s too bad that some of the really great music videos from that era are, as far as I know, lost to history. For example, I’d pay a tidy sum to have a DVD-quality copy of this music video, not to mention the Kate Bush oeuvre. Ah, well. At least someone recorded this on VHS and uploaded it to YouTube. I just think it’s sad that we have lost some of our cultural history from before the advent of universal digitization and file-sharing.

Do not let the propaganda from the Digital Rights Mafia and the media robber barons fool you: digitization and file-sharing will preserve our cultural heritage for future generations. Our great-grand-children will lament the fact that much of the 20th century multimedia will be lost to them — if they are even aware of the loss. If the media robber barons have their way, the works of the 21st century will be lost, as well.

Anyway, enjoy the video. According to Ms. Martin’s husband, the video was inspired by The Hunger. I believe it.

A study by the Australian Institute of Criminology revealed that software and music industries couldn’t explain how they calculated piracy losses, even though this data was used for lobbying efforts and in court cases (The Australian reports).

According to The Australian, the Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) – a body responsible for “investigative and intellectual property rights enforcement related services to the Australian music industry” did not know how piracy estimates were calculated as data it collected was processed by the IFPI in London. The MIPI manager commented that: “The reason … [she] wasn’t personally aware of how they are prepared is because they are compiled by the IFPI… They have a group that has been doing this for some time.”

Also the report noted that often the following misleading assumption is used to estimate piracy losses: a person who acquired pirate goods would otherwise have paid full price for the legal product. Moreover, unverified extrapolations were used by lobbyists to present the problem to the government.

Finally the report suggests that if these statistics are not thoroughly explained by the purveyors they should be withdrawn.

This study is a draft so far and the institute plans to check it further (after the criticism voiced by the industry) before it is handed over to the Australian government as “senior researchers disagreed with its conclusions”.

Piracy stats don’t add up, The Australian
New music ‘piracy’ statistics, p2pnet
Piracy losses fabricated – Aussie study, The Register
Australian Agency Questions Piracy Damage Valuations, Digital Music News

There’s a good reason the music industry can’t explain how they are calculating piracy losses. To my knowledge, there’s only ever been one serious large-scale research project conducted to try to calculate the direct effects of “illegal” downloading. The researchers’ conclusion was that peer-to-peer downloading’s effect on CD sales was so minimal that it was indistinguishible from zero.

This is yet another indication that the entertainment industry’s global push to expand their stranglehold on intellectual property rights is not about protecting creativity; it’s about the desire of a handful of global oligarchs to claim ownership of all forms of human creativity.

You can download a copy of the full study at: www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf

(from AllOfMP3.com, Music industry fails to explain how the piracy losses are calculated)

I have been saying for years that the whole “losses from piracy” argument is based on fallacies and that it’s just smoke and mirrors so that the media robber barons can seize and retain control of our cultural future. In my opinion, this observation falls into the “water is wet and teen-agers are horny” category. But some people are so damned gullible that they’ll believe anything the Digital Rights Mafia says unless there’s an egghead study that tells them what anyone with eyes could see for themselves.

Monitor outside
for the people inside
a prevention of crime
a passing of time

The come and they go
it’s a passing of time
they come and they go
Whilst we sit in our homes

Sit back and enjoy
the real McCoy
our new air of authority
our sentinel of misery

His face was full of intent
and we shook excitement
then the victim stared up
looked strangely at the screen
as if her pain was our fault
but that’s entertainment
what we crave for inside
no more second rate movies
from those people outside

(from Siouxsie & The Banshees, Monitor (1981)

That song was released in 1981 on Siouxsie & The Banshees’ Juju album — before news crews carried mini-cams, before home video cameras, before reality TV, before the PATRIOT act, before our President told the NSA to spy on American citizens.

Juju is a spooky album. 🙂

This is neat: Music publisher/distributor ships Linux PMP.