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Legal Music equals Prison
By DivineOmega | August 1, 2006
It’s approximately too early on the 1st of August, and I feel like a moan. DRM or Digital Rights Management - I hate it. Seems I’m not the only one either.
DRM, for those not in the know, is the technology which manages access to your music and video, enabling it to be securely played. Now doesn’t it sound nice, well-intentioned and friendly that manufacturers put it such a useful feature?
Wrong!
This “annoying as fuck” technology apparently manages access to your media. It “manages access” in the same way a high-security prison “manages freedom”. So when choosing to get music online, you have two choices: legal or illegal.
Illegal: You download some kind of file sharing tool, either a P2P network search tool such as Bearshare, or the infamous Bittorrent. You get your favoruite artists latest album or a new cinema hit and it plays, admitedly at a slightly lower quality.
Legal: You go a website… MSN Music, Tiscali Music for examples. You then register with their website, providing all credit/debit card details, and sometimes download another client for their service, as with Napster. You pay for your music and it arrives, full of high-quality goodness. Unfortunately, your file is contaminated. Yes, it is infected with a vicious, spying evil. This is the DRM License. Not only does it hate your guts, and spits on your rights of freedom like an evil dictator, but it also breaks your file.
“Breaks my file? No company would do that!”
Okay okay, it doesn’t break the file, but it breaks your ability to do anything with it. Say you want to move you file to your brand new computer. Now, here is where Mr Anti-piracy pops up his annoying little head… “Oh, you want to move your file? In that case, you must want to tell us you’ve done that. Oh, and we’ll only let you do it 2 or 3 times…. I mean, moving files… Dear God, you must be a copyright infringer!” … Of course, if you want to copy that to your new mp3 player, the annoying bastard rears his head once again. With legal music, you have no freedom.
Obviously, I do not want to promote the illegal downloading of copyrighted music - I really don’t need to, it’s more popular already than the legal alternative. I run Linux most of the time, so I’m really restricted - DRM-infested music just doesn’t play.
Tags: Internet, Law, Linux, Microsoft, MSN, Music, Tiscali |