Tag Archives: zune

Is there an acceptable level of DRM?

Posted by

0

I have been giving DRM some consideration lately, specifically with deals such as the Zune Marketplace free pass to millions of songs at 14.95$ a month with 10 free keepers a month would there exist and implementation of DRM I would accept as a requirement for access. While I generally hate DRM and think it punishes paying customers, could one envision an implementation that would be fair?

E.g could one envision a business build on free streaming of DRMed files and DRM free files for purchase so that they allow reasonable access to listen and learn new music but if you want to access the files and do with them what you wish – say use them offline, use excerpts of for a review or a composite video (adding a touch of music to a video project, like a review YouTube show or as a music interlude in a podcast). Would it work and what problems would there be with such a model?

Well first up the technological problems inherent to DRM won’t go away, if the DRM server is down or is removed as has been the case with a number of services already. Then your content stops working, however this would only affect the streaming service as songs you bought and own would be DRM free. Free services disappear all the time for many reasons so I don’t see this as specifically a DRM problem but a consumer support problem, if we don’t back the model then the service will go away. Magnatune runs a streaming service for all their music and the only price you pay for this wonderful access is listening to a little blurb at the end of each song, this works well for independent artists. However I don’t see e.g. Parlophone being ready as a corporation to grant the same level of access to their catalog with the only protection from being ripped off being “trust the customers not to abuse the service and save streams, remove ads and building a full copy without giving us a dime”. That is just not the way they have grown use to doing working and expecting them to attain enlightenment overnight is more than dangerously naive.

I think Magnatune deserves a lot of credit for taking that risk and I am hopefully that it is paying off for them. I think a lot of such a success can be traced back to their stated mission of not being evil, I think customers respect that and having it be highly visible and transparent, such as can be seen in their simple profit sharing that your money actually goes to the artists. As such Magnatune’s “pay what you want” system often is above the minimum of 5$, in other words people aren’t cheap when they feel they are being treated fairly. I have to admit that while there are no limits on the files and I get them in the format I desire even lossless I am still amazed when they encourage me to share my new music with 3 friends. They could have politely asked me not to do that to protect their business as well as their artists and I would respect it because of the beyond fair treatment they give me otherwise and instead send friends to their streaming service to sample my amazing new finds.

Another problem with any technology designed to limit your use of content is that what you will accept now isn’t always what you will accept in the future. E.g. a user might go an buy an iPhone today and not think twice about the limits Apple ensure using lawyers and technology to lock out 3rd parties, if that user some time later elects to move to Linux or just move away from iTunes the consequences of that acceptance hits. Nor did I when the DVD player came out give much thought to the protection schemes built in and how they affected me and I started building what has now become a huge collection of movies and TV shows on DVDs. Not for a second did I consider that the region coding meant that taking my DVDs with me out of Europe would render them unplayable. After all I thought I would live in Denmark all my life and it didn’t limit me then outside of buying DVDs from the US that weren’t available in Denmark and here all players are basically region code free so it was a non-problem. As my situation now might call for a move to Brazil or where ever my fiancée finds the perfect Ph.D. project this might come back to bite me in the nether regions.

Another problem relating to the DVDs is that the CSS protection, is being heavily protected by lawyers, limits my OS of choice from shipping support, I can’t view the content I paid for on my desktop out of the box. While the laws in Denmark would seemingly allow me to break the protection, making such code available could land one in serious trouble of the lose your house flavor. This also means that while he rest of the software stack in Linux is very advanced, DVD support is lacking since no company will risk helping out as it would make them a target, no distro can ship the code leading to the feature being under maintained and under tested. I might legally be able to install such support but frankly it’s in a poor state and close to uselessly broken in some cases for no good technical reason, all of which makes me a sad panda.

Why is this a problem? Well I would like to do to my DVDs what I did to my CDs. Keep the originals safe in a box and access my content the way I please on the devices I please. I would love a way to easily and quickly put my movies on a NAS and let them be transcoded for use on my portable devices, viewable on the TV and other such things. I might even want to use little snippets easily in other projects, like this blog. When I started building my collection a DVD was probably so large that the idea of fitting hundreds of movies onto a harddrive seemed a bit far fetched, not today though. The hardware is cheap and available anywhere, now it’s a good time to do something like this and I can’t easily.

The point is you will agree to some limitation now that might come back to haunt you years from now, if it is enforced by DRM then your only choice is to violate the law to access and enjoy the content you bought the way you want. There are risks involved with this and you cannot be sure that software to do such alternation will be available as companies like to sue those who enable you to do these things.

I honestly though don’t think I can find a single major thing to object about with a scheme which sole purpose is to prevent saving a stream, there will always be people for whom this isn’t enough or people who will be break the protection to keep the content they get free access to. I have no problem going after these people, I really don’t, they have the option of using the entirely free access (perhaps with ads, lower resolution than would be available to buy DRM free), I see no moral argument one could present for doing such a thing. Well there is one, provided the access isn’t equal, then they would deprive users of say Linux from using the free option thus forcing them to buy without trying.

Even an truly dogmatic FSF supporter wouldn’t really be able to argue this is directly evil, while the specific component that unlocks the DRM is very likely to be proprietary (giving you the content, the means to unlock it and the key – that is free access which is unlikely to happen) you would still have the option of playing the content using nothing by ideologically blessed software, provided you buy the content.

Assuming the blob is well written as well as supported on any platfrom and some entity such as the Linux Foundation has access to the code under NDA so we can get an opinion as whether or not unlocking the DRM is all it does. I wouldn’t feel bad about installing such a thing by default on users desktops (again, if you don’t like it, remove it and live with buying your content). We could even restrict the binary with things such as AppArmor or SELinux to ensure it’s not given all out access to reduce the security concerns.

Lots of maybes and assumptions but I think such a scheme would work and hopefully as time progresses, with the support of customers it could be shown that customers can be trusted to not abuse such restriction-less privileges. As for the realism inherent to such an idea, I doubt you’ll get record companies and movie studios to agree to this but on the other hand what Spotify is doing today if I understand it correctly (sadly there is no Spotify in Denmark yet) in the countries where they have gotten the licenses isn’t that dissimilar to the streaming part of the idea, adding a DRM free store wouldn’t be a far stretch.

I think when it comes to DRM free content customers also need to realize that they are asking companies to run a risk of losing revenue, something that is very scary to them, it’s a big shift in the way they have grown used to working and they need to be convinced by the bottom line. They give you an awful lot of power which can be abused and we need to show that the limits they put on content is harmful to paying customers, it holds back creativity and new business models but in return we have to reward them for trusting us by not abusing that trust once they put it in us. Even if we are justifiably angry over past transgressions, the way to settle that anger is not to rip them off when they change for the better.

DRM Free, to paraphrase that cliché from Spider-Man, comes with great responsibility.

On portable music players

Posted by

0

I love music, podcasts, audiobooks and all the little wonders of the modern audio age. I also love it to be portable, so currently I have a 5.5 Generation iPod with 80GB of storage. A decent piece of hardware was it not for the frequent lock ups, the lack of support for free formats and naturally also the lack of wifi capabilities which I must be honest after getting used to the Bluetooth between my cellphone and laptop I would rather never again hook my player up via USB, cables are just so messy and I tend to loose them which is a pain with the proprietary plugs the iPod uses.

Now here’s my problem, I’m running out of space, I’d like to upgrade to something with more storage soon but my options are limited by my requirements. If I elect to prioritize Ogg Vorbis support then I can wave goodbye to storage as nobody makes a portable player that holds a reasonable amount of music and plays a decent format. An exception here would be putting Rockbox on an iPod but having attempted again and again to make Rockbox work on my iPod I’ve always found it a subpar experience to the shipped firmware as a user, not to mention I still haven’t make it sync with banshee using Ogg Vorbis. Another issue here is that the goal in picking a player with Ogg Vorbis support would be to show the vendor support for adding this feature not rewarding them for not doing so and then replacing the firmware with something the Free Software community spend time and money developing. That seems counter-productive.

The whole point of having a portable media player for me is that I can take all my music with me, and I mean all of it, I don’t know what mood I might be in during the day. Be it for an audiobook, a podcast or any of the number of genres of music I own. Limiting my storage forces me to sync more often and it assumes I know what kind of day I expect to have. That’s just not how things work, let me access my entire library on the go or perish.

So if I have to live with just having mp3 support, and I want storage then the options seem to be the Archos Generation 5 605/705 models which go to 160GB. My first harddrive based player was a 10 GB Archos Recorder 10, it’s a nice piece of hardware and was it not for the fact that it’s bulky and the isd200 driver seems broken in Fedora for the past many releases (#229190 rh-bz) it would still work to this day. Calling 605/705 models sexy would be mildly put.. a lie. I hate to make looks an issue but it looks dinky and very unprofessional. It’s user interface looks to be very unprofessional and overly complex. Finally it’s big, my iPod fits nicely in a pocket, I’m very happy with that form factor. I think the issue with the Archos is that it is trying to do to much, I don’t want to watch movies on a small screen in the bus, I want to listen to music, audiobooks and podcasts. Trying to add movie playing to a pocket device is about as senseless as adding video calling to my cellphone (which mine actually has, but I’ve never used it).

Then we have the iPod, their new 160GB classic model works pretty much the same as what I have.. which frankly is a problem, same exact set of issues and a company that will abuse their monopoly just to make it hard to work with the device for 3rd party software.. such as adding a crypto hash around the entire database for no apparent reason. I’d rather not buy an iPod and stimulate a bit of competition. Additionally the Classic has no wifi option which I admittedly really want. On the plus side the iPod being widely used is well supported under Linux (using Podsleuth and Banshee works very well e.g.) and despite the issues I have with mine it is a fairly well functioning device as a whole. I wouldn’t call the iPod sexy, but it is well designed even if the interface can be cumbersome at times. I just feel limited in what I can do with my device when Apple keep making it hard to use from anything except iTunes.

This leaves the Microsoft Zune as the last option, their second generation is very slick with a big screen, the little Zune pad control system, wifi and lots of nice little features. And boy is it sexy looking, packaging to interface the Zune is hands down my current favorite in terms of look and feel of the players. It does only come in a 80GB version now but as I’m not in the market for a player right now I am hoping this will change soon. Microsoft started selling TV shows and such on their web store so the rumours that they are releasing a new rev with a bigger drive are likely to be true. I do feel odd supporting a product that runs Windows and is produced by Microsoft but considerably less odd than I do supporting the Apple monopoly. The one snag is that one cannot actually get a Zune in Denmark so far as I know also I don’t know if the Zune syncronizes with Banshee which absolutely is a must for me.

In a perfect world we would have a device as sexy as the black 2nd Generation Zune running free firmware and supporting free formats out of the box while retaining big storage. As things stand that is a market niche that is yet to be filled. I wish someone would do a device like that, we have plenty of smaller players that do all this.

*sigh*