Ars reports that Universal Music is pondering a leap onto the no-DRM bandwagon:
Doug Morris, UMG’s chairman and CEO, said in a statement that the company began internally considering the DRM-free waters earlier this year, and the company is expanding its plans into a nationwide test to “provide valuable insights into the implications of selling our music in an open format.”
The test will see UMG offering a portion of its catalog—primarily its most popular content—sold without DRM between August 21 and January 31 of next year. The format will be MP3, and songs will sell for 99¢ each, with the bitrate to be determined by the stores in question. According to Universal, Amazon, RealNetworks, and retailers such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart will have first crack at selling the music. RealNetwork’s Rhapsody service will offer 256kbps tracks, the company said in a separate statement.
Universal has apparently snubbed Apple, choosing to make DRM-free music available on other music services first.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the slow-motion train wreck that was Movielink has finally come screeching to a halt:
Movie-rental chain Blockbuster Inc. secured a foothold in the small but potentially significant online movie downloading business by acquiring Movielink LLC, a downloading service owned by the major Hollywood studios.
After several months of talks, first reported in March, Blockbuster said late yesterday it had acquired Movielink from the studios for undisclosed terms. The Wall Street Journal had reported in March that the price was said to be less than $50 million, although the final deal was less than $20 million, said a person familiar with the situation.
This looks even worse for the studios when you consider that, according to Ars, the studios have sunk more than $100 million into the company over the last five years.
I can’t say I’m surprised. As I’ve argued here before, the service was over-priced, low quality, and so crippled with DRM that they were dramatically less useful than DVDs. Is it any wonder few consumers jumped on board?
I really hope Blockbuster is buying MovieLink for the customers or the relationship with the studios. Because they certainly can live without MovieLink’s technology.
Today, the Well Connected Project of the Center for Public Integrity is excited to launch an issue portal jointly with Congresspedia. This issue portal is a wiki, like Wikipedia, creating a collection of articles on telecom, media and technology policy, in a single location. Anyone can read, write and edit these articles.
This issue portal builds on the great telecom and technology reporting done by the members of the Well Connected Project staff. This venture into collaborative journalism is a first for our project. It adds a new element to our investigative journalism endeavor. First of all, we have the Media Tracker, a free database of more than five million records that tells you who owns the media where you live by typing in you ZIP code. If we win our lawsuit against the FCC, we’ll also include company-specific broadband information in the Media Tracker.
Second, our blog features dozens of quick-turnaround stories on the hottest topics in telecom and media policy. Recent stories have broken news on the battle over 700 Megahertz, on the lobbying over the proposed XM-Sirius satellite radio merger, and also over copyright controls on electronic devices. We also do investigative reports – like this one about Sam Zell, the new owner of Tribune Co. – that build on the data that is freely available in Media Tracker.
Now, with the addition of this Congresspedia wiki, our project aims to incorporate citizen-journalism on key public policy issues near and dear to the blogosphere. These are issues like Broadband availability, Digital copyright, Digital television, Regulating media content, and Spectrum are at the core of what techies care about in Washington. We hope you will add others articles, too. In fact, I’ve already started my own wish list: articles about Patent overhaul legislation, Media ownership, the Universal Service Fund, and Video franchising. Our reporters can summarize these issues and debates, but so can you.
Take a crack at them!
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Longtime TLF readers may recall the Great Shopping Cart Debate of 2006, in which Jim Delong, Jim Harper, myself, and others made increasingly strained analogies between DRM and those wheel locks you find on shopping carts.
At the time, the debate was entirely theoretical, since the shopping cart cartel had succeeded in keeping a tight rein on the supply of shopping cart circumvention devices. Well no longer. Slashdot reports that some troublemakers have reverse-engineered those shopping cart wheel locks:
The two major shopping cart theft prevention systems are called CAPS and the GS2. From our escapades, we have found the GS2 system is far more effective at actually stopping carts on smooth ground. It also has a longer range (!) and a more sophisticated locking and unlocking signal. Best of all, it can be reset remotely, meaning double the fun as you play “red light/green light” with unsuspecting customers.
The picture below is of the GS2 wheel, found only at your finer supermarkets.
Discussion topic for the day: it appears that such a device could be used to steal shopping carts, at least the type of cart that can be reset remotely. If that’s true, should these “circumvention devices” be illegal? Should information about them be illegal? If someone wrote software that could be installed onto software-defined radio to perform the same function, should that software be illegal?
Slashdot has a story about how the ESRB has given Manhunt 2 an AO rating, which means that they won’t be allowed to release it for the major console platforms.
A Slashdot reader asks why they couldn’t just release the game without Nintendo, Sony, and Microsofts’ permission. After all, the Accolade decision held that reverse-engineering a video game console to produce compatible games was fair use under copyright law. So in the 1990s, competitors had the option of producing games for a console without the console manufacturer’s permission.
But this comment puts his finger on what has changed:
Legally they can’t stop you. You’re welcome to release your game. The trick is, it will only run on modded hardware, same as any other homebrew game. They’re not preventing you from *releasing* it, it just won’t run on most hardware without the magical cryptographic signature that licensed games get.
So, they can’t sue you to stop you from releasing it. But they don’t need to, because it won’t work anyway. And if you manage to break the cryptographic signature and release it in a manner that actually works, well, that’s where the DMCA comes into play. Nintendo/Sony/et al. have all their bases covered.
It’s a basic tenet of libertarian theory that limitations on speech by private party isn’t censorship; the Wall Street Journal isn’t censoring me by refusing to run my letter to the editor. But I think it becomes less clear-cut if the law gives a company the legal power to prohibit consumers from playing the games of their choice on a console even after they purchased it. That’s obviously not at problematic as having a government agency make the decision for all consoles simultaneously. But if we’re concerned with liberty, I think we should be trying to maximize consumers freedom to do as they please with their lawfully acquired property in the privacy of their own homes. Reverse-engineering can be an important safety valve for free speech if the companies that control our media devices impose too many unreasonable restrictions. Nintendo should never be forced to sell, support, or endorse any video game. But if consumers want to go to the trouble of acquiring a game without Nintendo’s help or approval, I don’t see what possible rationale there is for the law to stand in his way.
Hugh D’Andrade points out that Sony is rumored to be on the verge of ditching its proprietary, DRM-encumbered Connect service. As he points out, it’s a cautionary tale for consumers considering the purchase of DRM-infected content:
Sony Connect customers could strip out DRM from their music, or tech creators could reverse engineer the DRM to create compatible devices. But sadly, these solutions are illegal under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The truth is, these dangers exist whenever you buy DRMed music from any vendor. You’re locked into the limited array of players that the DRM is compatible with, and, if that DRM some day is entirely unsupported, you’re out of luck.
The continuing appeal of vinyl records shows how wrong-headed this approach is.
LPs continue to play just fine, decades after the makers of the first record players have gone out of business, thanks to the kind of interoperability that DRM lacks. That’s not just good value for customers who bought LPs, it’s also good value for a society that values archives and the ability to access its cultural history long after the companies that distributed it have died off.
This isn’t the first time this has happened. Users who bought music infected with Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM faced a similar dilemma when Microsoft announced its introduction of the incompatible Zune format. Buying DRM-encumbered content always means that you’re dependent on the company that created the DRM scheme.
You’ll occasionally hear the argument that critics of the DMCA are exaggerating its anticompetitive effects. Sometimes, DMCA supporters will demand examples of technologies that have been stifled. This is, of course, an unfair question because it’s impossible to identify the technologies that weren’t developed due to a bad legal regime.
But today Ars has a textbook example of the way the DMCA is being used not to control piracy, but to strangle a new technology that Hollywood doesn’t like:
The proposed amendment was revealed by Kaleidescape CEO Michael Malcolm, whose company triumphed in a legal battle against the DVD CCA earlier this year. Kaleidescape manufactures pricey home media servers (starting at $10,000) that rip and store all of a customer’s media for DRMed playback throughout the home. The DVD CCA said that Kaleidescape was opening the door to piracy and interpreted the license to say that a DVD must be physically present in a drive in order for a movie to be played.
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Apparently using elaborate licensing terms to extend the rights granted under copyright and patent law are not a new idea, nor are they limited to the software industry. From a record manufactered before 1909:
This record which is registered on our books in accordance with the number hereon, is licensed by us for sale and use only when sold to the public at a price not less than one dollar each. No license is granted to use this record when sold at a less price. This record is leased solely for the purpose of producing sound directly from the record and for no other purpose; all other rights under the licensor’s patents under which this record is made are expressly reserved to the licensor. Any attempt at copying or counterfeiting this record will be construed as a violation of these conditions. Any sale or use of this record in violation of any of these conditions will be considered as an infrinement of our United States patents, Nos. 524543, dated February 19, 1895, and 548623, dated October 29, 1895, issued to EMILE BERLINER, and No. 739,318, dated September 22, 1903, and No. 778,976, dated January 3, 1905, and of our other U.S. patents covering this record, and all parties so selling or using the record, or any copy thereof, contrary to the terms of this license, will be treated as infringers of said patents, and will render themselves liable for suit.
I don’t know enough about copyright history to be sure, but my guess is that the reason they talk so much about patent law is that I believe “mechanical reproductions” of music were not covered by copyright law until the 1909 Copyright Act. So record companies apparently attempted to use patent law plus some creative contract terms to create the contractual equivalent of copyright.
Recently we learned that Apple has begun embedding information in MP3s sold by the iTunes Store that identifies the purchaser of the song. Randy Picker speculated that one motivation for this could be a form of “mistrust-based” DRM: that people would be worried about getting in trouble if a song with their name on it was released into the wild, and so fewer people would share their files.
Ed Felten suggests some reasons that this strategy might not work so well:
Fred von Lohmann responded, suggesting that Apple should have encrypted the information, to protect privacy while still allowing Apple to identify the original buyer if necessary. Randy responded that there was a benefit to letting third parties do enforcement.
More interesting than the lack of encryption is the apparent lack of integrity checks on the data. This makes it pretty easy to change the name in a file. Fred predicts that somebody will make a tool for changing the name to “Steve Jobs” or something. Worse yet, it would be easy to change the data in a file to frame an innocent person – which makes the name information pretty much useless for enforcement.
If you’re not a crypto person, you may not realize that there are different tools for keeping information secret than for detecting tampering – in the lingo, different tools for ensuring confidentiality than for ensuring integrity. Apple could have used crypto to protect the integrity of the data. Done right, this would let Apple detect whether the name information in a file was accurate. (You might worry that somebody could transplant the name header from one file to another, but proper crypto will detect that.) Whether to use this kind of integrity check is a separate question from whether to encrypt the information — you can do either, or both, or neither.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.