EMI and Apple yesterday announced the removal of DRM from
all EMI content on iTunes Music Store. Also bitrate bumped
up to 256K on DRM-free tracks.
As you may be aware, Digital Rights Management is the controversial technology, meant to halt piracy, which stops a user from copying the content he has bought to whatever devices he likes. Like Jobs and many others I believe that DRM creates many more problems than it solves, and this is a big step forward to solving this.
There's a Q&A transcript with Steve Jobs here.
... O, what an excellent strategy from Apple to let the user be able to select to buy only DRM-free songs if he likes. If many users do that (and I think they might) then the other big labels will follow suit very quickly.
Featured comment:
ttl said...
Microsoft innovates!
From Computerworld:
The EMI announcement on Monday was not exclusive to Apple,” said Katy Asher, a Microsoft spokeswoman on the Zune team, in an e-mail to the IDG News Service today. She said Microsoft has been talking with EMI and other record labels “for some time now” about offering unprotected music on its Zune players in an effort to meet the needs of its customers.
eolake said...
No, it can't be true! Microsoft is *married* to DRM!
... Of course if the masters are going another way now, the running dogs have to follow...
ttl said...
I know. Microsoft Vista is designed to have the most elaborate DRM architecture known to man. In fact, it is the first operating system to have DRM facilities inside the kernel.
In contrast, Unix die-hards maintain that not even file locking belongs in the kernel. It should be done in a user level process. Mention DRM to a Unix geek and he will piss in his pants from laughter. :-)
And rightly so. Building copyright protection technology into an operating system is an idea so distasteful to me...
Even if you don't believe that protectionism is the problem of the copyright owner and that "information should be free", then just on a technical level... there's lots of evidence that Vista is way slower and more complex for no good reason except DRM.
3 comments:
Microsoft innovates!
From Computerworld:
The EMI announcement on Monday was not exclusive to Apple,” said Katy Asher, a Microsoft spokeswoman on the Zune team, in an e-mail to the IDG News Service today. She said Microsoft has been talking with EMI and other record labels “for some time now” about offering unprotected music on its Zune players in an effort to meet the needs of its customers.
No, it can't be true! Microsoft is *married* to DRM!
... Of course if the masters are going another way now, the running dogs have to follow...
Eolake said: "Microsoft is *married* to DRM!"
I know. Microsoft Vista is designed to have the most elaborate DRM architecture known to man. In fact, it is the first operating system to have DRM facilities inside the kernel.
In contrast, Unix die-hards maintain that not even file locking belongs in the kernel. It should be done in a user level process. Mention DRM to a Unix geek and he will piss in his pants from laughter. :-)
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